Borgo Morgiano @morgiano@mastodon.morgiano.it

Here in Tuscany is passing the storm "Ciaran" and the temperatures dropped: Today was time to turn on the new centralized wood burner! It can burn entire wood logs half a meter long.

This is the 30kW model called SH30 by the company ETA: https://www.eta.co.at/produkte/produktuebersicht/stueckholz/eta-sh-20-bis-60-kw/

Green energy!

We isolated the roof for welcoming you in the winter season.

Clear night in Valdarno.

#stars

They say that dogs wink only to their friends... Finally we've got him on camera today! 😄

Despite this is one of the nicest periods to do vacation here in Tuscany, we are heavily under booked.

We offer therefore a special deal:

Whoever quotes this toot, can book our room "Pipistrello" for only 30 Eur per night, or the apartment "Uccellino" for 60 Eur per night!

Book now: https://morgiano.it/Book.html

This offer is valid for June 2022 and it does not affect the cleaning fee.

Last week it was so warm that it felt like summer. Today it is snowing!!

rejoice, the days are growing again! 🌞

#solstice

Although the #garden is now almost empty, today's lunch was entirely home-grown: salad, celery root, chard, lemon and even the olive oil. How satisfying!

In the afternoon and evening we will be back #hacking with a friend on two free software projects sponsored by #NLnet (https://nlnet.nl/).

Our guests have the garden at their disposal too, but now is not the best season for that.

Happening right now...

Today we cleaned up the vegetable garden and planted field beans to enrich the soil with #nitrogen.

These beans, called "favini" in Italian, are sacrificial: Next spring, during flowering, the plants will be cut and left on the earth (#mulching). The roots, rich of nitrogen, will remain in the ground.

This is an old technique which has been used in this region to fertilize olive trees, but we will try it for tomatoes.

#permaculture
green #manure

Today we harvested the last tomatoes and made the Italian tomato-sauce "pomarola".

The tomatoes are cut in half and cooked for 10 minutes. Fried onions, celery and carrots are added. The skin is separated from the pulp with a special machine -nearly every family has one in our region. Finally the jars are filled and sterilized in boiling water.

Few days ago we harvested the olives under a beautiful sun.

Because of the dry summer, this year we had just 87 kg of olives giving 15.5 litres of oil. Last year was exceptional with 350 kg olives and 47 litres of oil.

Do you want to harvest with us next year? Fun assured and oil tasting included!!

#organic #olive #oil

Thanks for all the great comments so far!

Few thoughts:
* fairbnb.coop is quite expensive too (15% fee) and is very small, but the idea is nice and we are preparing a profile there
* using unethical platforms to advertise ethical ones sounds like a nice hack
* there is more work to be done until a healthy system can sustain itself. Until then compromising may be necessary.

Btw, all of our guests (9 families so far), never heard of Mastodon nor of OSM, but they very fascinated by them!

As the fall begins, the morning view is spectacular, with fog in the Arno valley (Valdarno), crisp air, and a blue sky.

This is one of the best times to be here... treat yourself to a vacation!

Dilemma: we wanted to avoid monopolistic platforms like #Booking, #Airbnb or #Google, but since two weeks we are empty.
We even offered 30% discount to Mastodon users. Sill, every day like this is another day at loss, despite this is one of the nicest seasons to be here.

We are tempted to advertise our smallest room on Airbnb.
Would you find this choice ethically acceptable?