Nature garden and orchard

Relaxation and education meet in the nature garden and orchard – this is an experience you can only get with us. The garden already had trees two decades old, when Centre Veronica took over the place, and after that there have been over fifty young trees planted, and the garden is gradually renewed, substituted and maintained. The garden is built in a natural way, with the use of features such as raised beds, herbaceous borders, a sun trap, pond and other things.

Gradually, we created a sample orchard and garden, nature trails for playful activities and have involved the public in the process of natural gardening, rescuing old varieties of fruit and restoration of ecological extensive orchards in the countryside. The garden has a number of features to support biodiversity - boxes for nesting birds, insect houses, houses for earwigs, and a boxhouse for bats, just to mention a few. In the back of the garden, we started to breed bees. The garden, which surrounds our center, was certified in 2013 as "Sample nature garden".

Orchard and garden, and nature trail gets visitors acquainted with the principles of natural gardens. For children we have prepared a willow maze, a yurt with willow tunnels, a stream to build dams and water mills, bean tee-pee. In 2013, we built a mole burrow and a wooden jungle gym.

The nature garden as an educational center in Hostětín attracts over 6,000 people annually, not only from the White Carpathians, but in the whole Czech Republic.
Contact and admission:

Contact Person - responsible manager garden: Marie Křiváková.

Guide garden: Marie Křiváková 
Visiting hours: weekdays from 9-15 hours, weekends by appointment - please always reach an agreement in advance on tel. 724 132 772 Marie Křiváková
Admission with a guide:

•             Admission with guided tour 50 CZK, children 6 to 15 years and senior citizens 25 CZK, children under 6 years, ZTP cards holders and club members Veronica friends for free
•             Admission free guide on a tour of CZK 20, children 6 to 15 years and senior citizens 10 CZK, children under 6 years, ZTP cards holders and club members Veronica friends for free

Organic Apple Juice and Juicing Plant

There as been a juicing plant producing unfiltered juices from the regional fruit species in Hostětín since the autumn of 2000. It has a production capacity of about 300 tons of apples per year. 

Most of the juice production supplied to shops and supermarkets across the Czech Republic from here is of organic quality („BIO – product of ecological farming”), and they also offer interesting blends (beetroot, mint, green tea), and syrups (elderberry, mint, cannabis, rooibos). The Hostětín apple juice differs from other juices on the market because of the traditional manufacturing process consisting of juice preservation by pasteurization without dilution, filtration, and sugar addition. Another difference is a regional origin of raw materials: the apples come from the White Carpathian area.

The construction was made possible thanks to financial and technical support from Luxembourg partners – Hëllef fir d’Natur Foundation and the Luxembourg Ministry of Environment. The juicing plant is owned by the Veronica Foundation and run by the Moštárna Hostětín, Ltd. Veronica Foundation enhanced the capacity of the juicing plant by investing into a new pressing plant, juice pasteurization technology and storage in 2007.

Hostětín has been one of the locations for the Traditions of the White Carpathians association of NGOs since 1995. The association has been focussing on the preservation and exploitation of old regional fruit species and promotion of traditional fruit growing. In the autumn of 1998, an old wooden fruit drying kiln was restored in the garden of the farmstead purchased by the Veronica Foundation (this is the last drying kiln that remains of the 10 kilns that once existed in the village). Residents of the village dry about 4.5 tons of fruit in the kiln per season.