Zeliščno posestvo Cvetka is an organical farm which produces organic products, mostly cosmetics and herbal supplements. You probably understand Slovene better than me, so you can read everything on Cvetka’s webpage https://zelisca-cvetka.si. It’s located in Čeče, near Hrastnik and belongs to Kovačič family.
Katarina, the heart and soul of Cvetka, invited the three of us, EVS volunteers, Josephine, Darija and me to help in the garden but we didn’t expect that we would be actually introduced to the whole production process which occured to be really interesting.
At first you feel there like at the school excursion. Everything starts with garden where all the herbs come from: peper mint and oregano, lavender and chamomile, ehinacea and even more items that you’ve probably heard from TV Shampoo commercials or from school Biology lessons if you hadn’t skipped them all. Katarina obviously didn’t, so she told us all about them from the beginning. Practical part came quickly and we grubbed the whole field removing weeds and later planted some ehinaceas. If you still don’t know how it looks like and what it is used for, google it, it’s beautiful.
The most interesting part starts in laboratory where the actual Chemistry happens. It appears that all that difficult words from shower gel etiquette are actually real and serve for the concrete functions. »This is Coco Glucocide. It’s emulgator and surves to mix unmixable liquids like water and oil.« – says Katarina who’s Master of Biotechnoligy. And you nod your head humbly like you’ve known it some time ago but forgot, pretending you’re not stupid. (But you’re stupid, but it’s ok).
That day in this small room we’ve made the cream with 5 kinds of oils that we brought home being very proud of ourselves because we’ve done something that actually works (and smells very good also). Katarina does this every day and her boyfriend Sašo makes the promotion, deals with customers, delivery and everything that every big enterprise deals with. The difference is they do it all by themselves. This is very interesting to watch and learn how the business works from the inside, and I must admit that this is a really usefull experience and also the example on how to deal with what do you have, making the profit of this and evolving constantly in this field.
– Ekaterina Shiyanova
