March! Onwards!

All over Europe, farmers protest. The tension between the central urban power and the weakened periphery is growing. For decades, the cities have amassed wealth, power and privilege, while ignoring and exploiting the countryside folks.

The urban elites with academic diplomas have taken over most political parties. Even the former farmers' party "Centerpartiet" has three Stockholm Engineers as the top names for the EU Parliament election in June.

Of course farmers and countryside folks are pissed off. And it has been easy to capture the anger. In each country, a different flavour of dissatisfaction has dominated, and often the big agri-business has been able to cash in after political concessions. I hope we can do that differently here.

I will join farmers' protests when they come to our town. I am thinking about slogans. What do you think about these?

More butterflies AND more farmers!
Less pesticides AND better pay!
Swedish farmers deserve Swedish salaries!
Support small farms now!
Stop "free" trade in foods! Abort Mercosur!
Gardening as key in the high-school curriculum.

As I see it, there are many problems on the countryside. One major problem is that EU farm subsidies mainly go to gigantic farms, and that the policies stimulate "consolidation". Small farms are thrown under the bus and giga-factories abound. In our small town, there used to be lots of pig farmers with 100-300 pigs. Now there is a factory with 6,000 pigs, and they just got their permit to double to 12,000 pigs. It is an ecological disaster.

Another problem is the price rush to the bottom. Since Sweden joined the European Union, farm-gate prices have dropped precipitously. Our neighbour has to compete with Bulgarian farmers, on the same market, even though the cost level is vastly different. He is expected to be happy with a Bulgarian salary. The ones who decides this, our parlamentarists, are not prepared to accept Bulgarian salaries. They get Swedish salaries. I suspect that the best move would be to stop "free trade" in food commodities. Re-introduce border tolls and tariffs, to support the local markets and avoid inane shipping.

I am only part-time agrarian, but I think that food is too important to keep on the sidelines. Food is life. Good food with friends is maybe the meaning of life?

Anyways, enough rant for this round, now on to some pictures of our place.

Cold, then mild

Most of March has been unusually mild. Up until February, we had the coldest winter in 10 years, but now the frost is receding quickly. We had some beautiful cold weather, but not much.

A beautiful cold morning

Growing season starts up!

The soil starts to warm up and spring is coming. We had Spring solstice last week and a lot of plants and insects are waking up now.

We fertilize, replant and sow, almost every day now. There are lots of things to do and fortunately the days are getting longer quickly now.

We got a trailer load of the best well-aged organic cow manure from our good friend Gun.

A generous scoop of poop.

We sow walnuts on "air-pruning beds", a frame with steel mesh beneath, with 20-30 cm of soil. The roots grow downwards until they hit air, and stop growing. Instead of a single taproot, the trees make a multitude of roots, which makes the trees more robust for replanting. We will replant the trees at least twice before they come to their final location at a customer place.

Seeding walnuts on an air-pruning bed. Gs parents came by to enjoy some work.

We all help out to get seeds into the ground.

The walnuts have been stored in moist sand in the almost frost free old stable.

We have now a handful of chestnut varieties that we will use for grafting in the coming years and some to sell.

We could get some trees from the only nursery in Denmark who is allowed to sell chestnut trees to Sweden.

Farm stand

We have organized one of our garages as a tree-garage-sale outlet. Every Saturday in November and March we are open for business. And of course in the meantime if anyone gives us a call in advance. Our webshop is here.

Welcome to our farm stand!

We have 12 flavours of walnut to choose from.

Hazel bloom is beautiful but minuscule.

Paper potting

Our friend Ulrik is making a woodden tool that is used to create paper pots out of old newspaper pages. A kind of upcycling.

Ulrik demonstrates his paper pot tool.

Seedlings in paper pots in a cold frame.

Root cellar / Potato storage room

All winter we have been working on and off with our cold storage room for potatoes and other high-humidity vegetables.

Last bricks in place. We use clay-sand-render as mortar.

We use the same clay render for the walls.

Ulrik is mixing.

One third of all walls are finished now.

Improved composting toilets

We are working on improving our sewage system, so I have been trying out a number of different loo systems lately. One of the nicest is the Wostman separating loo.

Breaking wind

We plant more wind break trees and bushes this year, now also in net cages to avoid losses to voles. Our vole wars are continuing and we are now at vole-count 23.

Unfortunately, this morning we had our first baby-vole in a trap. The next generation is begin born as we are speaking, and I fear an explosion in vole numbers. We move our six top-cat traps every morning and keep getting voles, so before Summer, I hope we will be vole-free inside our fence barrier.

There are still some voles in our field.