In this village it begins when you start building a house. The builders here started giving their empties to Anica, who collects bottles to supplement what I'm sure is a very meager income (she's 80, lives in an ancient stone house and has one goat). With our builders - most of whom are three-parts drunk most of the day - the income is substantial. We also give her bottles when we are here and since I've heard wine bottles too have a deposit value, I realize that we must be making her quite rich.
Some time after this we started getting greens from the garden of Anica's neighbors - blitva, salat that sort of thing - covered in earwigs to be sure, but great nonetheless. We actually got an extra helping after we helped Valter - another neighbor - sort out his virus infected laptop, and give him access to our WLAN (though he does have to sit in the barn to pick up the signal).
As our place isn't big, we've also been making extensive use of Ranka's apartmani - three sets of visitors so far for at least a week. She almost never has any customers apart from a few faithful in August - this village is too far from the sea to have a steady stream of visitors - so this is quite a boon for her. I think her way of thanking us it to provide us with a weekly dose of fish (I think her son knows a guy who knows a guy), though she is slightly upset that her visitors spend most of their time with us. I think she runs the apartments because she's quite lonely here, but I'll be the money helps.
Trickle down is also substantial. We seem to hive hired just about everybody who is willing to do things for us. Kuki around the corner built our cistern and septic tank, one of Anica's nephews or cousins cleared our garden, a couple of old people in the village collects our olives, and even the kids got to build cardboard houses out of the reams of furniture packing.
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