The time has come for our EVS at Messzelátó to finish. We’ve had a great year learning loads of new skills and meeting loads of new people. We just wanted to use our final blog post to share some photos of what we’ve been up to over the last year - cheese and soap workshops, paper jewellery making, workshops with kids, working with a local community supported food supply chain, entering competitions, improving our homebaking skills and gardening.

It’s been a really fun and interesting year for us all! Thanks so much to Tünde, Kati, Judit, Sari, Zsuzsi, Csaba and everyone in the wider Messzelátó community.

Keep following the blog though ‘cause hopefully there will be some new volunteers from September who’ll keep adding info about their own activities and interesting things other people are getting up to too. 

BYE!

Magda, Fafa & Lauren 

We have a worm compost bin in our office!

First of all we constructed a worm compost bin similar to this one, but we recycled old plastic paint containers instead of buying new plastic tubs. Once our paper, leaves, soil and food scraps had started rotting for a couple of weeks we got our red wrigglers (worms that are perfect for compost) and let them get to work.

It’s now been almost two months since we started and things have really started to develop. We’ve had to adjust the bin a couple of times as at one point the worms were getting a bit oxygen starved as we didn’t have enough holes and they went a bit hungry for a while too (sorry worms!), but now they seem to be doing okay and we’ve also gained a few other tiny creatures in our bin.

We feed our worms with food scraps from cooking in the office and at home. Most organic waste can go to feed your new pets but be sure to consulte a list like this one before you start.

Composting is a great way to put your organic waste to good use, it takes very little space, time and effort once you’ve set up your bin and, by removing the stuff that can rot from your normal garbage, will stop your normal trash bin from smelling. Even if you don’t have a garden yourself there’s likely to be a gardener out there somewhere who’d be grateful for it.

If you want to start your own compost at home there are loads of resources out there - http://www.compostinstructions.com/ , http://www.composting101.com/ , http://vegweb.com/composting/

Here we are, our garden is on his way! This summer, we want to cook and eat our own homegrown veggies. So we started to sow seeds of several vegetables : tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, paprika, celery, onions, spinach, chives, and also herbs : basil, oregano and coriander. Talking about that makes me salivate!

Now, little plants started to come out from the soil, but we keep them inside, as the weather in Budapest wasn’t so hot until now.

In a few weeks, it will be the good moment to plant them outside in bigger pots. Of course, we made those pots ourselves from unused items.

Our master piece : pots made from old plastic baskets and customized with pieces of old t-shirt. The result looks very good!

You don’t know what to use plastic bags for and you would like to find an easier way to sort your trash for recycling? I have a solution for you!

All  you need is a lot of plastic bags (colored ones are the best), an iron, greaseproof paper, and then a sewing machine.  You have to decide how many pockets you need (one for the paper, one for the plastic and one for the common trash is a good deal).

The first step is to iron the plastic bags together to create a thick material. You can iron 4-5 layers together. So you need 5 pieces to create one pocket : 4 sides of the bag + the bottom. Be careful to respect the same size for each side (and a smaller one for the bottom).

Then repeat the process 3 times for 3 bags. For mine, I made a smaller one for the common trash, it’s easier to carry and it needs to be thrown more often than the others (because of the smell!).

You can also sew handles on the bags to carry them easily!

Now you don’t have any excuse for not sorting your trash ;)

On How About Orange you can find nice manual how to make your own bows for original wrapping. For it you can use old magazines or even unnecessary maps.