Trees for Peace

Midsummer celebrations

2026-06-30T00:00:00+02:00

Midsummer celebrations

Up here in Sweden, we celebrate Midsummer Night. It is the single largest celebration, if we consider the amount of people who are free from work. For centuries, during christian times, it was celebrated on 24 June, the afternoon before St. Johns mass, which was held on 25 June. Before that, it was probably celebrated sometime around the summer solstice (21 June). In these post-christian days, we have shifted to celebrate always on a Friday, and we have agreed to pick the one that comes closest to 21 June.

In the old days, Midsummer was both magical and materially important. It marks the longest day, and it also marks the first fresh food. The springtime was hard, when supplies were running short. Most people who died of starvation died in the spring and early summer. Those who made it to Midsummer usually made it until next Christmas. Something worth celebrating!

The celebration contains traces of an ancient fertility rite, with dancing around a pole with phallic qualities. It was probably good to give birth to young ones around the spring equinox.

This year, we celebrated with friends in Norway - Andrew and Malin - at their amazing place in Hurdal.

We made a "maypole" to dance around.

Before leaving on the midsummer trip to the north, we ate the last apples from last year on 10 June. They were looking a bit tired, but the taste was still good.

The last apples from 2025.

Tripping to Finland

Early June, I got the opportunity to spend a few days talking to Joel Rosenberg and the other amazing enthousiasts of the Finnish Nut Growers' Association in Finland. We drove around looking at nut trees in the Turku area.

Our fantastic host Joel.

On the way up, I passed through Uppsala, to watch the Corylus colurna trees - "Tree hazel".

Tripping in Norway

Our midsummer tour led us further north, to Grue, where we met other friends. They had bought an old farm that was quite well renovated, and were putting new life into the ground. We built a rain harvester on one of the sheds.

Collecting rainwater makes us happy.

We also spent a day with cousin Karin in Horten, walking a lot and talking even more.

Most of Norway is post-card-like.

Värmland tour

We visited Jonas and Maja near Arvika, to hang around and check out their place. Jonas is growing hundreds of nut trees from seed, all over their property. It is still early, but in a few years we will know which trees grow up in the forest landscape of Värmland.

Jonas shows where the trees grow best.

It seems like most nut trees like to start their lives among other trees. They seem to grow poorly out in open grasslands.

Blueberry bushes - not yet ripe

We also visited the artist Maria Vildhjärta Westerberg and Johannes. They are artists and forest wildlife protectors. It was great to walk around their outdoor art gallery in the middle of a forest full of life.

Sculptures everywhere.

Every year, some sculptures wilt away, new ones come.

Nuts

Hazelnuts

In Båstad, we took down two huge hazel bushes last winter, and the stumps are starting to resprout. I will document the recovery of this rejuvenation and monitor how the nut production will restart.

The stump.

I also took some photos of how we sort hazelnuts by size before running them through our electric cracker.

Brother Hugo helped out sorting the nuts.

Steel grids with different slot sizes.

Walnut trees

My friend Marc has a fantastic garden. After three years, the heart nut tree is far taller than him.

Heartnut tree in the rain. It grows 1.5m per year.

Our municipal central park has been improved this winter with three walnut trees - one Japanese walnut and two European ones. The municipal head gardener Anne is great.

New walnut trees in the park.

Farm

I had headaches around our well. The pump controller sometimes indicated "no water" in the well. Water is life and I really want to use the well water for our gardens and the tree nursery. One neighbour had got an empty well last winter and I thought that this would be the end of our well too...

It took me several weeks of thinking, measuring and checking to realize that the water sensor was malfunctioning. One of the three metal elements in the water acts as a galvanic pole and some oxide had been building up on the surface in a thick layer that conducted less and less current.

It was not a water problem, it was a sensor problem.

Now the sensor is cleaned and everything seems to work fine again.

No water alarm.

Spreading the gospel

2026-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

Spreading the gospel

Is there anything more tiresome than hearing a fanatic proselytize? Endless words about the salvationary capacity of their current conviction. On and on about the miraculous manifestations of the greater good. A simple-minded focus on "the one thing" that would change everything for the better.

Imagine you are the one talking.

During the last year, I have found myself in the role of the slightly nutty enthousiast, exhorting the endless benefits of growing nuts. Every morsel of potential value has been exhibited, from the health benefit of consuming a daily handful of nuts to the biodiversity improvement from growing food on trees; from nutrient runoff mitigation to the crisis preparedness perspective. (Nowadays, most people seem to be tired of hearing about the climate benefits of trees, either because they know or because they believe the opposite.)

I have been invited, often even paid, to come talk nuts to various audiences in Soutern Sweden.

There is a growing interest in nuts and nut trees and in the last monthly newsletter from the Organic Extension Services, every single item was about growing nuts. Maybe we have reached the metaphorical tipping point, when nut growing returns to the center court of food production in Scandinavia? There are just a dozen growers registered with the Board of Agriculture today, which is not much. However, five years ago there were zero nut growers, as it had been for the last fifty years or so. I have met almost all of the nut growing pioneers in Sweden, and many of them have trees from our nursery. Now that plantings are gaining speed and volume, we cannot keep up with deliveries, for many reasons, so we often refer to large-volume nurseries in Germany and Belgium. (There is no high-volume nursery here yet.)

At the same time, we learn a lot about what varieties work best in different locations and how to best establish nut trees in different soils. Based on that, we adjust the assortment in our nursery, to offer the best available varieties for the local conditions.

Every speaking engagement is of course an opportunity to meet more nut geeks to learn from, and to meet more potential customers to lure into the nut world.

The settings vary greatly, and I hear myself tell the same stories in new ways every time, from student meetups at the University of Agriculture, to farmers' days and garden festivals. A common theme is that almost everyone like nut trees, even the people who are allergic to the fruits.

Getterön Naturum, Varberg - Biodiversity festival - talking nuts and selling trees.

At an extension field day in Ljungby, I talked nuts to farmers and got a lot of insights into the local conditions. Peter told me that he had already planted a few dozen walnut trees to grow high-value timber, and enjoyed the nuts as a positive side-effect. Another lady told about her grandfather's old hazelnut grove, which she planned to rejuvenate.

This particular day, I think I listened more than I talked, but that is uncommon.

At a farm outside Ljungby, invited by Länsstyrelsen, talking to farmers.

We were invited to join a project to help municipal organizations to plant more nut trees, and organized a series of workshops with public servants. It was very enlightening to hear about the legal and organizational realities of the different town administrations. There are lots of competing interests and many different voices regarding how to use the common lands. Different organizations within a municipality has different goals and need different justifications for action/inaction.

In Lund, talking to ecologists park people from three municipalities and a diocese (church region).

One of the most fun workshops was a political subversion workshop at Alnarp Agroecology Farm. I told the story about the peasants in 1700-s France, where the King's tax collector could easily tax wheat, but not so easily tax chestnuts. The farmers who were surrounded with chestnut forests had more freedom than those without. That led the tax man to drive a cut-down mandate for all sweet chestnut trees and promote wheat. I shared the dream of having an edible backdrop around every village in the world, to wrench power out of the hands of the hierachies. I laid out a vision for an illegible landscape according to James C. Scott (e.g. "Seeing like a state", "The art of not being governed").

We also got to sample kernza beer and cookies, which is always good fun.

At the Agroecology Day, where we sampled kernza beer and cookies.

M. is also a nut-evangelist, here at the citadel park in Helsingborg:

M. spreading the nut gospel in Helsingborg.

Nuts

Chestnuts

The nuts that were sowed in April start to come out of the ground. The small trees are tender and pretty and promising. All together I think I sowed 600 chestnuts this year.

Chestnut tree starting to grow.

The chestnut trees that we grafted inside the tunnel, with the intern E., are budding out. 24 out of 28 seem to have taken, but it is still hard to tell. At least one is confirmed failure, but maybe more will lose viability later.

I started to graft outdoors as well, but on those ones, there is still nothing to see.

At Samuel's place, we trialled sowing 40+ chestnuts outside in cleared forest openings. We just dug small holes (15cm deep), placed three chestnuts in each hole, and filled up with soil. We covered the nut place with a pile of branches, almost 1 meter high, to deter roe deer and other tree eaters. It will be interesting to follow the development. I hope that mice will not eat all the chestnuts that are sprouting in the soil.

Building a pile of branches on top of three chestnuts in a pit.

Walnuts

The walnuts have started to sprout and we have sowed all of the ones we collected this year. We had four varieties this year: Lars Olesen's nuts from Denmark, Tova's nuts who were the most delicious walnuts 2025, Lövengripska/Lund walnuts and wild harvested walnuts from Samsö, Denmark.

When the walnuts start to sprout, time has come to sow.

Some of the walnuts we sowed on an air pruning bed.

May is also the best month to graft walnut trees and put them into the hotpipe callus system:

Putting walnut trees into the hotpipe.

When the trees are ready to take out of the hotpipe, the growing shoots often look strange. Since there is almost no light inside the sand, the shoots are "blanched" - almost white and very sensitive. Therefore, we pot up all fresh walnut trees after heat treatment, and put them in a protected spot outside of direct sunlight. After a week or two, they are green and strong and can be planted out in the field.

The black clips are supposed to make the new shoots grow more vertical. Let's see if it works.

Walnuts after hot-pipe. Almost all have started to grow, you can see the white branches.

Hazelnuts

This year I have increased sowing of hazelnuts from around 10 pcs, to more than 100 seeds. The seeds are selected large seeds from 'Halles Giant'.

Hazelnut sprouting.

Farm and friends

May is an amazing time at the farm. Everything springs to life. We had a cool April and a very dry May (no rain), so some things are a bit slow, but there are lots of things to prepare for the summer season.

Rhubarb harvest for jam and juice.

I have started grafting fruit trees as well for the year. A dozen plum trees and at least twenty quince trees of four different varieties. Quince trees are so beautiful when they flower, with pink, rose-like flowers, and the smell of quince fruit is amazing.

Grafted quince tree budding out.

Our cold storage room has worked very well this year. We still have apples.

The best apple varieties: Cox's orange, Belle van Boskoop and unknown "wintercrisp" apples store until end of May!

Our neighbour who is breeding race horses have got four kute additions to the flock.

Neighing neighbours?

We also went with some frineds on a trip to visit a special garden - "Jeppa S" - outside Osby. Five years ago, they built a 500m2 passive greenhouse, dug into a mound, and are able to grow bananas, mango, kaki and maybe even avocado.

Subtropical insulated greenhouse.

April Fools

2026-04-30T00:00:00+02:00

April Fools

We are all April fools, this year. At least me, I am in a confused state, trying to make sense of the world spinning around. Our enlightened leaders responeded to the oil supply risks by lowering the tax on diesel and gasoline. Could that help to reduce consumption in any rational way? Maybe war makes us more stupid?

During a visit to the Gothenburg University earlier in April, we saw the invitation to a lecture to prepare for war:

University endorsed lecture to prepare for war. Free coffee to encourage students to join.

We, Men, conquerors of Nature are also waging a war on soils. Some battles we seem to be winning. The other day, our road was covered in dust for hours and hours.

Some people drive at full speed into the dust cloud.

I wonder how many tons of top soil was lost that day...

So, at the end of the month, we light up the Walburgis Night fire, to scare off any bad influence that the winter months have had. I feel confident that we will wake up into the month of May with peace in our hearts and a clear mind on how to collaborate to tackle the large challenges of our times. I cross my fingers.

A good burn off to scare witches and other winter threats.

Nut trees

Chestnuts

April is the month for chestnuts, and starting some early walnuts too.

In our cold storage room, the chestnuts start to sprout - time to sow!

Most of the chestnuts (approx 500), we have sown in one of the low tunnels, and another 400 seeds outside. The most valuable seeds come from orchard trees from known, large fruiting varieties. Some of those seedlings will give good nuts, so some of those trees I will grow out as they are. Some others I will use as rootstock, or sell as timber varieties.

I learned a new technique to graft chestnuts this year - root grafting. It was fun to do this indoor, precision grafting. At least one of the seven I tried has taken, and at least one has failed, the other ones I don't yet know.

I cleft graft a small scion into the first root of the chestnut.

*The chestnut goes into a small pot, that I put in my germination box, at +30C. *

After two weeks at least one of the grafts has taken and new roots form.

One of my interns helped to plant out the chestnut seeds. It is a bit fiddly when the chestnuts have started to sprout, to get the sprout vertical downwards.

An intern helping to seed chestnuts at approx 10x10cm distance.

Another of my interns this spring learned how to do chestnut grafting. We grafted 28 chestnut trees, seedlings inside one of the tunnels. This year I will try to grow out these trees inside the tunnel to see what the growth improvement will be compared to outdoors.

Chestnut grafting on one-year seedlings inside the tunnel.

Walnuts

Walnut seeds sprout slower than chestnuts. I have the seeds in mouse-proof cold storage in moist sand over the winter, and now I try to make the seeds wake up. I want to have a short time between seeding and a seedling tree, so that mice and birds have a short time window for eating the nuts.

This year I tried to induce the sprouting by immersing walnuts in water for an hour at a time, almost every day. I rinse off the water and keep the bucket at room temperature in our kitchen. After a couple of weeks, some started to sprout and the white tongue starts to stick out of the mouth.

Soaking the walnut seeds in water.

After a couple of weeks, most of the walnuts start to open up and sprout.

I seed some of the walnuts in the ground, and some in "air prune beds", to get a more bushy root system.

Air-prune bed with 40 walnuts. Then I cover with 5 cm of soil and water well.

End of April, I also start to graft walnut trees. I dig out the walnut seedlings from last year to use as rootstock and graft varieties that I keep in my chest cooler.

After grafting, the trees go onto a "hot pipe callus-bed" for three weeks.

The rootstock walnuts in the tunnel got some frost damage in the night of 26 April. We had -2C in the air and some of the trees that had leafed out got frost damage and black leaves. Interestingly enough, not all trees had the same damage, even though they are seedlings from the same tree. Some keep their leaves green, some are black (frost damage).

Rootstock walnut - some frost damage (black leaves).

April is also the last weeks for planting walnut trees. We planted fifteen trees at Anders' farm with the Nut growers' course. He is expanding his nut tree orchard this year with one hectare and next year with another seven hectares. Lots of beautiful trees!

Anders shares his experiences of planting walnut trees.

Hazel

We also sowed some "turkish hazel" - Corylus colurna - from Helsingborg. I want to use these ones as rootstock for tree hazel hybrids, like 'Farris F88Q'.

Beautiful sprouts of the turkish hazel.

The Farm

Last summer we learned from Viktor Säfve that willowherb is their family's favourite vegetable. I did not even know it was edible, and we have some growing wild on our farm.

This spring we have been waiting impatiently to get the first shoots of this perennial flower. We picked some 20x shoots and blanched them in hot water before frying a willow-herb-omelet.

Willowherb growing straight out of the lawn.

Willowherb omelet. Tastes a bit like asparagus, but more leafy.

We are also very happy with our winter storage of apples. We have a hundred apples left. This variety looks almost as good and it tastes even better than in September when we picked it. I don't know the variety but coming fall I will mark the tree to be able to take scions and propagate this amazing variety.

Amazing crisp apple with delicious taste, half a year after picking.

Maybe the only ones who are not more confused than normal are our happy hens:

Punch in the face

2026-03-30T00:00:00+02:00

Punch in the face

Another month, another war.The latest conflagration, where the US is trying to bomb a people into submission is sending reverberations throughout the world. The choke point of Hormuz is no joke.

I am sad and disappointed that our world is still so dependent on the daily fix of diesel. I suspect that the pain will increase over the coming months, and that there will be no going back to "normal". However, I have mistakenly thought this many times the last decade, so maybe I will be wrong this time too.

The public discussion over here in Scandinavia has centered on subsidizing the remaining drops of fuel. Different political parties bid over each other on how much of the (lended) government budget they want to distribute to car drivers... Not much is done to curb the craving. I guess that long term thinking has always been a bit boring.

Maybe this is a good time to share an observation regarding public debt that I think I learned from David Graeber. Our government is borrowing heavily instead of increasing taxes on the rich. The consequence is that the rich lend out money to the government (since they are the only ones who have money, in their companies and banks). Every year after, they enjoy a backwards tax - where the government is paying them instead of them paying the government. This trick is neat and almost invisible. Especially in times of contraction, government deficit spending is a shift of burden to the less wealthy, and a long term driver of inequality and demand destruction.

The silver lining of the current storm cloud is that the rising fuel costs and reduced availabiltiy of fossil carbon inevitably leads to lower consumption and less green house gas emissions. Involuntarily, it seems, the US regime are the most effective climate actioneers this year.

Nut trees

Hazel propagation

When our mother-hazel bushes are dormant, any time is a good time to dig out the rooted shoots and replant them in beds. To see the other part of the process, look at the https://framtidskultur.se/tfp/2024-07-28-harvest-season-is-here.html.

Since last July, the hazel bushes have been growing with a collar filled with sand and biochar

I dig out the sand to expose the shoots and make it possible to break off (or cut off) the rooted shoots.

Removing the sand to expose the roots and the base of the shoots.

The shoots that have rooted well are replanted, and at the same time I cut off the tops, to keep each shoot approx 20-30 cm, or to remove most of the buds. The objective is to have a good root-leaf balance.

Some shoots root well, others not so well.

Some shoots root well.

When the trees are allowed to grow out for six years or so, they will start to produce the most delicious hazelnuts.

Hazelnut tree at my parents' place - here with my mom.

Chestnut development

We run a long term project to develop a population of cold-hardy and easy-to-peel chestnuts, with a test plot in Sinarpsdalen. This winter we have been removing some other trees to make space for more chestnut seedlings.

Last month we had help to cut down some trees, but we had not been able to remove all the branches before snowfall, so after snow melt we could get going again.

Lots of branches to remove and quite some firewood too.

Some branches were cut up and piled into a twig wall.

Some of the happy tree workers.

The wall of twigs will be home for many insects and maybe some birds.

This winter, we have had more guests than before, so we will have to consider putting up more fences, or using a better protection for the trees.

Deer bite on one of the chestnut trees.

The deer help with fertilization. At least something good.

Our tree sales have been good this year. Our biggest customer is Olof, who picked up 50x chestnut trees of various varieties for his farm, one hour drive north from here. Last year he bought 30x.

Olof picked up 50 chestnut trees this year.

Walnuts from Iran

Some good news related to Iran is welcome in these troubling times.

Thirteen years ago, the Iranian researcher dr. Sameri at the Swedish agricultural university SLU brought in a shipment of walnut trees in a project. A dozen of these trees ended up at his friend Gunnar's place and there they have grown and started to deliver nuts.

Gunnar invited me to come and look at the walnut trees, and I was curious to see how they were doing. Gunnar lives inland and north of Stockholm, in the Uppland province, not far from a large lake. The lake helps to stabilize the climate, but nevertheless it is quite a northern latitude. Much to my surprise, some of the trees were absolutely thriving!

Some were really growing well, with last years' shoots around 80cm long. Some other trees grew slower. It is hard to tell how much of this is genetics and how much is planting location. Gunnar's garden is rocky and sloping, so the soil conditions vary a lot from place to place.

Last fall, Gunnar harvested more than ten kilo walnuts from the trees, and I think that the harvest will increase with every coming year.

We walked through the rain, checking out all the walnut trees.

The walnuts were cleaned and dried, and are now eaten every day in their family.

The walnuts are very easy to crack and delicious.

Gunnar sometimes opens the walnuts with a short-bladed knife.

It was great to visit Gunnar's place for many reasons. He is an interesting man with many talents and interests. It was probably the first time in my life that I saw floor boards that were 10+ meter long. Each floor board is cut trapezoidal, to follow the shape of the log, and afterwards tongue and grooved. This workshop will look amazing when it is finished.

10+ meter long floor boards. Looks amazing.

Chestnut dessert

I love chestnut trees and chestnut food. This week, I went to Stockholm to give lectures on nut trees on the Nordic Garden Trade Fair, and to help my colleague and friend Erik to sell nut trees. Erik grew up in Switzerland, where they make the dessert called "vermicelli" (worms) from mashed chestnuts, meringe and whipped cream.

Erik extrudes the chesnut purée.

Delicious!

A day at the trade fair, spreading nut trees into the world.

I also had the opportunity to visit some other tree growing friends in Göteborg - Anne and Marcial. At their co-housing place, there is a seven year old chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima) tree, that is soon to start flowering and hopefully soon to give chestnuts. I think that this species in the chestnut family is one of the best for cooking. However, many of the seedlings that we have planted out have not been cold-hardy enough and died in the winters. This one seems to have strong genetics!

Chinese chestnut tree in Göteborg.

Veggies and Fruit

Now is a great time of the year, when the tomato and chili starts are happy and green, despite the cold spring.

Tomatoes, chilis and sweet peppers. One more month before planting out.

I accidentally dug out a string of groundnuts (Apios americana) and saw that they are sprouting. I had never seen this before, but now I know how the strings get longer and longer.

Groundnut sprouting.

Friends

Last summer I met Rick, a dutch guy who lives in Norway. He came by on a nut tree nursery roadtrip in northern Europe together with Benedicte. They helped me to do some much needed weeding, when my back was sore from overuse. We talked the whole day about nut tree growing and our experiences of different techniques.

Rick worked hard to help weed the hazel field.

Benedicte will also grow nut trees in Norway.

A long, cold, snowy winter

2026-02-28T00:00:00+01:00

A long, cold, snowy winter

Our climate is in increasing chaos. The polar air circulation is in imbalance. Even though the planet had one of the top ten hottest February months ever recorded, in our small town, it was colder than any of the neighbours remember. We had almost all of January with a dry, cold, eastern wind, without snow, so the soil froze solid, deeper every day. Since February 10, snow has covered the ground, keeping the frozen soil under a protective white carpet. These are tough conditions for small trees, when their entire root system is frozen solid. It is too early to tell the losses, but some casualties are certain. Last winter we only had a few days below freezing, now two months.

Society is changing too.

Here in Europe, "natural resources", a.k.a. mineral deposits are running low. Unsurprising, since corporations are valued for extracting the good stuff as fast as possible. Not much left of high quality deposits anywhere across the old continent where mining started in earnest a couple of hundred years ago. Not much gold, silver, copper, coal, oil, cod, salmon, old growth forests left.

Even though political shouting is loud and hot, we are in for a long winter here up north.

Despite eloquent talk about sustainability, the main political focus is to borrow money, buy missiles and remove environmental regulation that currently make the worst mining practices unprofitable. In EU, we got a "Critical raw materials act" in 2024, which is a red carpet for global mining businesses to come and extract the last scraps here, with minimal regard to the rivers, forests and people who happen to live on top of the mineral ore seams.

I often wonder if our "leaders" are incompetent or malicious, but until proven wrong, I follow the maxim of Hanlon's Razor - incompetence is more probable. In this case, maybe social posturing is a better explanation. Pretending that everything is fine, and downplaying risks was taught at leadership courses I followed when working in commercial Industry. Always exude confidence and excellent future opportunities, even when the company is bleeding money, was the mantra. I suspect that political leaders are trained in the same media-management school. Maybe this explains the impulse of our political and industrial leaders to charge ahead for "green growth"?

Fifty years ago, after a referendum to phase out nuclear power stations, there was a broad parliamentary committee devoted to Energy Conservation in Sweden. During a brief ten years of existence, they introduced a series of proposals that ended up in laws, including mandatory insulation of new buildings. Unfortunately, in 1991, the committee was dissolved by a young and arrogant prime minister who wanted more "optimism". It seems very unlikely that we will restart something that sensible these days...

So, the last week, I have been cutting up and splitting firewood to replenish the energy bank account. We have enough for at least one more winter, so this will dry and cure until the 2028-2029 winter season. Who knows what kind of winter we will have then?

Anyways, the last day of the month is the last day of winter. Now comes the sun.

Snow and frost is beautiful on the beech trees.

Our garage work area is covered in white magic.

When we moved here, we fenced the farm to keep hares, rabbits and voles out. It seems to work.

Hare tracks come to our fence and turn back.

The poly tunnels have been great to shelter our layers over the winter. Especially in January when we had lots of cold wind coming in, but also now in the snow.

Some days I had to shovel my way into the polytunnel.

The hens are happy in the tunnel, where there is no wind.

Our courtyard is very quiet when the snow is dampening all noises.

We took several walks on the beach this winter. It was quite something to see the sea frozen. The water is a part of the Atlantic, so the salt level is quite high. It is not often the sea freezes here.

The bay of the sea was all covered in ice.

Unsurprisingly, the nude beach was empty.

Growing the farm

Nuts

The soil has been frozen deep this year, so I have a long period of rest from shoveling. That is good for my elbow where I got some pains last year.

We started the fourth year-long nut growing course at Holma community college, with a new group of 21 people.

A great group at the nut growing course.

We looked at the air-pruning beds for nut seedlings.

Fabian is starting another nut tree nursery at the South-South-East corner of our country, near Kivik.

Nuts are great for so many things. In November, I met a woman who was making buttons from nut shells.

Hazelnut shell buttons.

I also could purchase four kilos of seed nuts from the excellent walnut grower Lars Olesen in Denmark. I store all nuts in moist sand until April, when it is time to sprout and sow.

About half-sand, half nuts by volume.

Trees

We run a chestnut development project, with a test site in Sinarpsdalen, about 20 km from our place.

Samuel helped to cut down some 20 small and 2 large trees.

A lot of work to clean up the place and move the firewood to the outside.

Here, we have room for the next generation of the chestnut project.

Some trees are just generous with flowers.

Pear branches that we cut a couple of weeks back, now in white flowers.

Food

I am growing a nut that is not a nut, but called a nut. Apios americana - the american groundnut. It is a legume climber with beautiful purple flowers and an edible tuber.

The tubers are located along an underground string.

Fried groundnuts are delicious. Somewhere between chestnuts and potatoes.

At the nut-course, we had a cooking session with the amazing chef Anna M. She taught me a new way of cooking dried chestnuts. Soak overnight and fry with oil, salt, pepper and garlic. Delicious! Actually even better than frying deep-frozen chestnuts, which we trialled side by side. Dried chestnuts are so much simpler to handle than deep-frozen, so I know what I will do more of coming October.

Frying chestnuts in oil, salt and pepper is great.

Seeds of Change

2026-01-23T00:00:00+01:00

What drives change?

We live in interesting times. Greenland is up for grabs. Presidents get abducted. A lot of noise in the media about who said what outrageous statement. It is often hard to understand what is for real and what is distraction.

This week, I finished the peculiar book 2052 by Jörgen Randers, one of the authors of the original 1972 "Limits to Growth" study. The book is a mix of resource depletion scenarios, techno-optimism, market economy believes and solid systems dynamics. It was written in 2012 to mark the forty years since the original study, and Randers wrote the book as an outlook for the subsequent forty years. We are a third into his story, and many things have materialized while others not.

The most interesting part of the book, I think, is his reflections on how people in general don't want to understand how the world works, and instead follow traditions, media reports and politicians rallying cries. I quote a long passage from the introduction, where he talks about the learnings from the original study:

The main conclusion from our exercise in the early 1970s was that, without big changes, humanity was poised to grow dangerously beyond the physical limits of our planet. This was a conclusion based on the observation (self-evident for us, but not for all) that it takes time for humanity to solve any pressing issue arising from the finiteness (obvious for us, but not for all) of the planet. It takes time to identify the problem, time to accept that it is real, time to solve it, and time to implement the new solution. The first part—the “observation and acceptance delay”—made it likely (to us, but not all) that humanity would allow itself to grow in size and physical impact beyond the sustainable carrying capacity of the global ecosystem. This long delay would allow—and even invite—what we called overshoot, especially if humanity was growing fast toward planetary constraints. Practically speaking, it is possible for humanity to remain in overshoot for a while (as when overfishing), but overshoot cannot and will not last forever once its foundations have been destroyed (when there are no more fish). Randers, "2052", Preface, p12., Chelsea Green, 2012,

The tendency for delay and denial is strong. I observe a growing number of people who claim that the climate is not changing, and if it is changing it can not be due to their consumption. I guess it is similar wherever you are.

In the agricultural sector, I hear similar denial regarding the complicity for eutrophication. It must be someone elses nitrogen that kills the fish in our bay.

It is hard to accept that we are part of a problem. Usually reality catches up sooner or later, but I think that many people will live their whole lives in denial, telling fictional stories of how they are good people, until they die, smug and content.

I wonder where I am stuck in denial and delay? Where will reality bite me in the back? What drives change?

Cold farming

We are in the coldest time of the year. The days are short and the nights are long. A good time to read, reflect and recover. Long evenings with the fireplace sizzling. Some weeks we have snow, some not. The temperature goes up and down a bit.

The first days of January, we had a real cold snap, down to -16C for a couple of days.

Snow is pretty.

The neighbour's birches are beautiful.

We protect what needs to be protected, like the hens. We moved the portable hen house into one of the poly tunnels and I move it once per week. Most of the time the hens are free to roam the tunnel and we feed them kitchen scraps a bit here and there, to get nutrition well spread. Inside the tunnel it is cold, but since there is no wind, it is fine for the hens. I put a small 30W electric heater to keep their water from freezing.

Happy hens in the cold.

Solar power is great when the sun is beaming for long hours every day. Not like the situation is for us in the winter. As Chris from https://ferngladefarm.com.au/2025/06/16/its-what-you-dont-know/ says; if the plants cannot grow, there is not much energy in the sunshine.

The solar panels don't do much good this time of year.

Walking around our place in the snow is very revealing, since many animals leave tracks.

We found two holes where voles have come in and out during the snow time. I know where to put a trap as soon as the soil thaws.

Winter is a great time for walks in the woods.

We also take time to do some walks on the beach (approx 10 km from here) to get some sunshine into our eyes.

Beach time.

The frost is pretty on the sand.

The seaside forest is also nice in the frost.

Nuts and grafts

Winter is the best time to collect graftwood. This year I started to sell graft scions from the chestnut mother trees here, since I now have more than I can use myself.

Chestnut 'Bouche de Bétizac' - a french hybrid chestnut.

I also collect some apple scions for fun.

On a rare day of thaw, I planted out some hazelnut bushes.

The farm

Life goes on on the farm.

Our winter storage of apples is still amazing.

I repaired an old spinner that we got from a friend. Maybe M will make some yarn?

I oiled the tools with wooden handles.

Our friend Johan made lactofermented carrots. Yum.

Helena and Fabian came by to sort and crack some walnuts.

Seeds of change

Change is constant. I do have a preference for change in a more life-positive direction, and I guess that we need to sow the seeds of change that we think are necessary. We collected some seeds from our vegetables and flowers, and coming Saturday some friends are coming over for a seed exchange.

Plenty of seeds to spare.

The most beautiful seeds are the Hablitzia tamnoides round small spheres of life.

Our darkest hour

2025-12-22T00:00:00+01:00

Our darkest hour is now

The orbital tilt of our planet points away from the Sun, for us on Northern latitutes. Today is the shortest day and the longest night. Both from a seasonal point of view, but also from a political standpoint, many things are dark. The only thing that is certain is that daylight will return. Politics is another story. It can get a lot darker yet...

Last week, the Swedish parliament changed the law, so that our government can easier seize power "in case of emergency". The government decides what is an emergency, and they tell us in with so many words that they will of course never use this escalation of powers. Unless it is necessary. During the last thirty years, many laws have been changed to shift power away from the elected parliament, towards indirectly selected bodies like the European Commission and our national government. Some domains have been completely ceded by our representatives to "the market", which will allocate resources optimally. (Optimal for whom?, I always wonder...)

If that was not depressing enough, I broke the shafts of two spades in one day, and a few weeks before another one. Now my three most favourite shovels are out of action.

The first one to break was the glass fibre shaft of my hand forged Belgian root-cutting shovel from the Polet workshop. This shovel has been my go-to shovel for digging out trees for five years, so I can understand that the wear and tear is breaking even the glass-fibre reinforced plastic handle. I bought a replacement handle, I thought, but since it was from another supplier it didn't fit right, so I have contacted the supplier to get an original spare part.

Broken. Understandably so. Just need a replacement shaft.

The second one was the Spear & Jackson 4041 garden shovel that I have enjoyed for at least five years. I did put too much bending force on the shaft and it broke off without warning. The loose part shot up and cut my chin. I am happy I did not get it into my eye. I think I will get a handsome scar, reminiscent of the schmiss- or bragging scars that were popular in early 1900s Austrian culture.

I was digging out some prunus trees that were getting too large for this location.

My chin started to drip of blood. I was cold and surprised, not much pain. Mostly embarrased.

The third and most disappointing spade failure was the Atlas trench spade that I purchased this summer. The forged steel broke off when I was cutting out some turf to plant a tree. The centimeter-thick steel just broke open and the blade fell off. I was so surprised that it took me some time to realize what had just happened. It is a quite heavy spade, so I thought it would be around until next generation. Instead, it broke just six months after I bought it.

This heavy duty spade broke even with a relatively small load.

Looking at the fracture surface, it is clear that there was already an earlier crack that had some corrosion. Production error?

Now comes the next phase - getting new handles and for the Atlas spade, a replacement blade, hopefully reimbursed by the warranty. I have contacted the suppliers, but since the Spear & Jackson is a UK spade, and Polet is made in Belgium and the Atlas is made in the Netherlands it will be some logistics to get replacement parts. I bought all the spades in the Netherlands. Considering that we are quickly approaching Christmas break, I think it will take some time before the spades are operational again.

Fortunately, I am the Jack of spades, and I have at least ten other tools to use in the meantime...

Growing the farm

Tunnel

The polytunnels are great in the winter too. No wind and no rain inside. We moved the mobile chicken house into one of the tunnels to give a cozy protected environment for the hens. The hens find all manner of bugs that they clean out, and they pre-fertilize the soil for the next growing season.

Happy hens.

Since I spend some time in the tunnel, I have been thinking a bit about the tomato and cucumber trellis wires. I have tried several kinds of string.

Tired rests from previous growing season.

Along the top bars of the polytunnel I have strung three parallel lines of 2mm steel wire along the whole length, above the beds. From these steel wires, I have strung strings down to the ground, onto which I have clipped the plastic clips we started using last year. I tried to tie the strings with a sliding knot to be able to lower the top of the plant, but it was too complicated and crowded. Next year I will just plant more.

Some of the lines snapped when the tomatoes start to hang heavy.

The best lines are 5mm jute. They did not snap. The ones that did not work well was 3mm cotton string and 3 mm jute. The 3mm jute was almost good enough, but not all the time. It is a mess when a tomato plant full of fruit falls over and I try to trellis it back up onto a new string.

The worst one is a nylon string that was completly destroyed by UV light:

Useless nylon string.

In the next photo, I touched the wire and a section just "disappeared" into a cloud of plastic fragments.

When I touch the string it turns into a white nano-plastic powder.

Food

In the Christmas time, there are several traditional foods that we make. I like baking seasonal things.

Swedish lussekatt bun, this time with wholemeal wheat and sourdough base. Yum!

In the Laholm town park

We have a great team at the municipal parks department. Anne has expanded the town park to enclose a soccer field, and this time with an edible theme. A dozen fruit trees, three walnut trees and a dozen berry bushes were planted a couple of weeks ago. It looks great.

Fruit trees surrounding the football field.

Some walnut trees. There are already three large walnut trees nearby.

Berry bushes, probably black currant, and lots of strawberries.

It will be interesting to see how the trees will grow and who of the neighbours will harvest.

November, Treevember

2025-11-28T00:00:00+01:00

In the City of Power

This week, I spent a few days in the capital of our frosty country, on the icy shores of the Baltic Sea. It is a peculiar experience, to walk through the streets of a wealthy town, in the week of the Black Friday, watching one jammed shop window after another. Even the Old Town Island was drab, with neon colored flashing sales signs reflected in the small windows of the late-medieval alleys.

The City is a magnifying glass. Rich is richer and poor is poorer.

A couple of colleagues and I from a nut growing project were invited to give a seminar/workshop at the Royal Academy of Agriculture and Forestry. Flattered and nervous, I came to the prestigous location, with a presentation in my laptop and a bag full of assorted nuts to share with the participants. Oil paintings and arcane titles made me feel far away from the farm. A few of the members of the Academy were present in the audience and they gave us a gracious welcome.

Together with my colleague Lova, at the Royal Academy place, a cold november morning.

Maria led the discussions and gave a warm welcoming to everybody.

Fortunately, we also had a few friends in the crowd, which helped me to calm my nerves. Anders G., who grows nuts on a peninsula jetting out into the Baltic. Erik K., who runs a micro-size nut tree nursery. Julia K. and her parents, who run a beautiful farm in a place a few provices further North from the Capital. The lion share of the audience were people who I have never previously met. Some academics, some farmers, some orchardists, some dieticians, some students and a couple of food-forest people.

We shared our learnings from the last year of investigations, farm visits, variety trials and culinary explorations. After lunch we had a workshop where the participants would discuss and share their perspectives and advice on how to proceed. What is most important to focus on in the coming year? All in the context of: What would it take to grow professional nut farming from 10 to 10,000 hectares?

It is even possible? How long would it take?

Even on that scale, the production would cover only 10% of the recommended consumption of nuts for the Swedish population, from a health perspective.

Afternoon session workshop.

Some of the new acquintances shared innovative nutty perspectives, like Astrid, who makes hand crafted buttons out of nut shell materials.

See if you can find the heart-nut buttons.

Buttons made from heart-nut, black walnut and manchurian walnut shells.

When we were in the Stockholm area, we also visited the food development farm Torsåker to talk about growing nuts and cooking with nuts. A good vibe with the team there.

Visiting the Torsåker experimental farm and kitchen together with Lova from Miljömatematik.

Back on the farm

November is a good time of the year. We start selling bare-root trees when the leaves drop, which is around the first week of November. First out are the walnut and hazelnut trees, and a couple of weeks later the chestnuts drop their foliage.

Every Saturday, the farm store is open and people come by to get nut trees. Some of the people I have met before, but almost half of the customers are people whom I have never met. Since March this year, I produce a monthly podcast about nut growing, and some of the customers tell me that that is the reason why they came. Others have read about nut growing in one of the farmers' magazines, that featured nut growing this year. Others still tell us that they have seen the road sign and were curious to come by and get a tree or two.

Eagerly awaiting the first customers of the year.

Sandboxes full of trees. Walnut, chestnut and hazelnut plants, in alphabetical order of the varieties.

Snow

In November we got a week of snow, but it all melted away and we are back to +8C and drizzling rains.

A beautiful morning with 10cm fresh snow.

Snow is tough on the polytunnels, so I have to sweep them with a brush.

The days are short and evenings long, so it is a good time to make apple cake and pumpkin soup.

Our storage is almost full of apples and nut seeds.

Courses

During the year I give nut growing courses at several places. This is a part of the business that is growing well, and something that is very rewarding.

One of the settings is an experience sharing network for farmers who are starting to establish agroforestry systems on their farms.

Anders talking at a ERFA meeting.

Another place is the Holma Folkhogskola - a kind of community college an hour drive from here.

Field which gets rows of productive trees.

Different establishment strategies are tested.

We are all king Midas

2025-10-21T00:00:00+02:00

We are all king Midas

A long time ago a man was rewarded by the gods for being a nice chap. He could choose his reward freely and chose to get the magic touch to transform anything into gold.

Maybe you remember what happened to the fragrant flowers that lost their scent as soon as they were picked? And the food on the table that turned into useless lumps of yellow metal? Did you know that the favourite daughter froze in an eternal embrace?

Anyways, that was a long time ago, in a country far, far away. In these enlightened times, we would never do anything so foolish.

We would never turn rivers into polluted sewage ditches, just to gain some grains of gold. We would never spray poisons over our fields just to increase profits. We would never clear cut forests and wipe out fungal species just to earn more money. We would never expose our kids to chemicals and slowly toxic foodstuffs just to save costs.

Or would we?

What is needed to break the spell?

In the old story, king Midas had to go to the source of the river and dive into the cool pool of fresh water to lose his magic powers and his greed. It seemed to work. Or he died there. Who knows. According to legend he lived a happy life with the poor people in the woods. At least he never came back to the royal castle, that much is clear.

Is there a way for us to metaphorically dive into the pool and clear our heads, collectively? What would it take?

Isolated individuals have been railing against greed and overconsumption since at least year 395, when Evagrios Pontikos formulated the seven capital sins, and proposed to live frugal happy lives. He did lead by example, which is not bad.

A string of books, from the holy book to Thoreau's Walden Pond, Nearings' The Good Life, Rowland&Grubb's Art of Frugal Hedonism all claim that happiness comes out of living with less consumption and more collaboration and family production.

In the days of Evagrios, just like in our times, most people who have a choice seem to not heed the advice.

Nuts

Obliquely related to collective stupidity, autumn is a time for harvest of the crackable bounty of the nut trees. Hazel season is over, now in October the walnut harvest is in full swing and chestnuts are just starting to rain.

We organized the first ever Nordic Nut Championships, to share that there are great nuts grown in the Nordic countries.

Nordic Nut Championships

We invited nut growers to bring their best nuts to compete. We also included a category of "nut dish", something made of at least 50% locally grown nuts. The expert jury are three amazing people - Titti Qvarnström - michelin-grade chef, Lars Olesen - the largest walnut grower of Denmark, and previously jury in world champions of tobacco snuff, Philipp Weiss - author of the best book in swedish language on nut growing.

We had 15 competitors and approx. 75 in the audience.

The location is in the former people's house (Folkets Hus) in Malmö, in their old library. Now the walls are covered with book-looking wall paper. (What is wrong with people? Who wants to have a faux-library?)

The expert jusy and the competing nuts.

There were five kinds of nuts this time - hazelnuts, walnuts, almonds, pine nuts and in the dish also chestnuts.

Kristoffer from Denmark won the category "nut dish" with his hazelnut burgers with chestnut mash.

Sidsel brought the second best hazelnuts from Bornholm.

Nut Day at Holma

At the Holma community college (Folkshögskola) in Höör, we organize every year a meetup for nut people. Last year we were almost hundred people, but this time we had an unfortunate storm event in the night before so many trains were not cancelled and there was a recommendation to avoid certain roads.

Nevertheless, we were fifty unstoppable enthousiasts who met up and sampled delicious nut foods, talked about growing experiences and harvest techniques.

Colleague Janne who runs a fruit- and nut tree nursery Räveboda. He has found a bush with giant hazelnuts.

Janne brought jars with sample nuts of the varieties that he sells. Fantastic diversity.

We also had some machine demos.

Jouke demonstrated the polish electric nut cracker that he bought. It works for hazelnuts and dried acorns.

We also demoed nut rollers.

Samsö Chestnut Festival

In October each year, some friends on the island of Samsö in Denmark organize a chestnut festival. We had heard about this event, and were curious to go there with some nut friends.

Birgit Rothmann is one of the organizers of the event and she sold chestnuts from her own tree.

Chestnuts 'Bouche de Bétizac'.

One guy was roasting fresh chestnuts, to have the classic French style experience. There were also local products with chestnut theme, like chestnut beer, likeur, syrup and bread.

Locally brewed chestnut beer.

Likeur.

We went there together with some friends and colleagues, to work out a plan for an upcoming project that we hope to get funded soon.

The project team of the upcoming "Nötverket" project.

Collecting chestnuts

In Sweden, there are still very few chestnut trees. Maybe a thousand. Three good trees are in a restaurant garden some twenty kilometers away, and during the last week of October I went to pick more than thirty kilos of chestnuts there. I went three times, with a few days between each visit, and each time I could collect more than ten kilos in an hour or so.

Some of the nuts I will sow for new trees, some are peeled and eaten.

The tree with plenty of chestnuts.

Back home - running the chinese chestnut peeling machine.

Veggies

It is also the end of veggie season. The only ones alive outdoors are the swiss chards and spinach, and in the ground we still have some potatoes and small carrots.

Tomato vines dying due to a few nights of frost. Next year a new season!

September Sunshine

2025-09-28T00:00:00+02:00

Weathering the sunshine

It is an old saying here, that farmers always complain about the weather. I think that it was even more true in the earlier days when every farmer was growing a dozen different crops. Every year some crop would fail. Often due to weather events.

This year, we had a cool spring, moderately wet summer and dry end of summer. From 15 July and the next seven weeks, almost no rain fell. Once in a while a short showed that immediately dried up afterwards.

Our farmer friends here have had the best grain harvest in recorded history. All over Sweden, grain harvest is higher than ever. In total the harvest is more than 500kg per person in the country. Almost all grains are grown with pesticides and synthetic fertilizer.

How much grains do you eat? We make oatmeal breakfast, and have home made bread for lunch every day, so we eat almost 250g grains per day per person, which makes about 100 kg per person per year. This is quite a lot. But even we don't come close to the 500kg that is produced.

So what do we do with all the other grains that we produce?

Feed for pigs, chicken and cows, both for domestic use and for export
Liquor - Absolut vodka and other destructive export products
Industrial ethanol
A small amount is exported for food.

I think that we have a problem of grain overproduction.

This year was the record area of wheat planted. Never before so many hectares of wheat has been grown in our country, and never before so much fertilizer has been spread on the fields.

I talked to some nitrogen experts at the Swedish Board of Agriculture, and they said that this year we therefore have the highest ever runoff of nitrogen into rivers, lakes and seas.

Large parts of the Baltic Sea are completely dead, due to eutrophication. Here on the West coast it is a bit better, but not good. The river in our town brings each year 3 million kg of pure nitrogen nutrients into the shallow bay. It is an enormous amount of nutrients that are wasted, and at the same time it is killing off the more sensitive fish and crustaceans in the sea.

I think this is nuts.

Is it possible to stop this in some way? I am convinced that in a decade or two, we will have to stop due to running out of energy resources for producing ammonium fertilizer. But what can we do in the meantime?

Nuts

There are better nuts. In September, the hazelnuts drop from the bushes. It is a busy time for nut hatches, squirrels and mice, to gather and hide away as much as they can before we come to harvest.

At a friend's place, I collected some beautiful nuts from a purple-leaved hazel bush. Delicious!

Red-leaved hazel gives hazelnuts in purple husks.

Another early nut is the japanese/manchurian walnut. There are a few trees in a park in Laholm, so I went to collect a few hundred nuts. I want to use these seedling trees as rootstock for heartshaped walnuts.

There are a handful of these beautiful trees.

The nuts fall with the "fruit flesh" on them, so after harvest we need to clean them so that they won't rot.

After dehusking and pressure washing, the nuts are clean and ready for storage.

Veggies and garden - winter is coming

Harvesting is great, but then the real work starts, to process and can the bounty.

Apples are great, since most of the good apples can be stored as they are, in our cold storage room. We have maybe a hundred kilos of apples there.

However, some apples are bruised or damaged in some way, and will not store well. Those we process into dried apple slices or into apple sauce/mash/jam. Sometimes with added sugar, sometimes pure.

We organized an apple picking afternoon in the town.

A lot of different apple varieties, with different flavours and storage capabilities

Tomatoes are more difficult to store as they are, so usually we cook tomato sauce with onion, garlic and salt, and can in glass jars.

Boiling and mixing the tomatoes into a smooth, runny tomato sauce.

Canned and almost ready for storage. Just add a label and tuck away.

I also try to make cuttings of the physalis plants, to store indoors over winter, to get an earlier start of harvest for next year. This year we grow from seed, which made the start of harvest quite late.

Friends

We organized a visit to our friends place to spread the gospel of composting toilets. Palle has

The throne is impressive.

My friend Marc and me visited a garden fair in Ängelholm, where we met Ville who grows garlic. He knows a lot about garlic varieties and how to fertilize to get big bulbs.

Marc and me bought some garlic to use as starters for next season's growing.

Ville had his own stand at the market - quite entrepreneurial.

2025-08-31 Summer's last kiss

2025-08-31T00:00:00+02:00

Organic Summit 2025

Sometimes, I try to understand the political situation in Europe, in Sweden and in our small town Laholm. It is not easy. The political positionsing seems weakly connected to the reality that I observe. I look and learn and every time my expectations are slightly reduced.

This month, I had the opportunity to join the "Organic Summit 2025", organized by the Danish government, now that Denmark is chairing the EU. The objective was ostensibly to work out a manifesto to enable the shift towards 25% organic agriculture by 2030, as the official goal of the European Union is.

Since the current area of certified growing is approx 12%, and grows with approx. 1% unit per year. The challenge is immense and I thought that this could be two days of interesting, thought-provoking and potentially controversial discussions. I was wondering - what could make thousands of farmers change over to pesticide-free farming? Who would spearhead this change? Which countries would take the lead?

The backdrop here in Sweden is that organic farming is shrinking, already for five years in a row. (Our nut tree nursery is a minuscule part of the organic certified area in Sweden...)

There are many reasons to promote organic practices. For me, the main driver is to reduce the toxic mess and stop the over-fertilization of the rivers and the sea. We destroy the very ecosystems on which we depend. Organic farming would be a step in the right direction.

Herbicided potatoes, on the way to town from our place. The leaves are killed to simplify harvest.

I came in the morning to Copenhagen and biked down to the epicenter of political power, next to the Parliament, known as Borgen. As a statement, I came to the meeting wearing a new t-shirt, with a nut-promoting message on both front and back. Nobody would miss that we now grow nuts in Sweden. ;)

Anticipation was bubbling, and I was eager to hear the proposals in the upcoming discussions.

The political power center of Europe the coming six months.

The very first panel discussion at the prestigious conference venue set the tone: "It will be hard.", said the farmers' union representative. "It will be expensive", said the retailers' man. "It can't be done", said the researcher, "maybe to 2045, but not to 2030". "Ok." said the moderator. I almost fell off the chair, but fortunately, the satin plush seat held me in place. Nobody else reacted, it seemed, or they were already jaded by the experiences from previous conferences.

The rest of the two days meetings were nice presentations about good examples of organic farmers, public meals, retailers, food processors and distributors.

But no discussion about how to reach the goal.

The organizers had already prepared a "charter" document beforehand that said nothing. It is available to read here.

Some of the presentations were informative and inspiring, so the meeting was not a complete waste of time.

Public meals in Copenhagen are 90% organic. 110,000 meals daily.

There were also some nice people at the summit who shared their personal stories. Some of which I had just had email or telephone contact with before.

I also got to meet some great people, like my hero Gunnar Rundgren.

Nuts

We keep growing nut trees. Organic nut trees. ;)

The chestnut scions growing in the tunnel grow too fast in their second year, so I had to cut them back.

Scion wood growing for grafting next season. Some scions are far too thick. Next year outside, I think.

The trees grow well this year, especially the walnuts, but also the hazelnut bushes look good. I am almost up to speed with weeding this year. Much better than last year. It feel so good to having the nursery looking better and better.

Hazelnut bushes in neat rows.

We also organized a trip to Denmark to visit a chestnut and a walnut grower. I met with them a year ago, and it was good to come back to see what it looks like just before the harvest season. The trees were full of nuts, so I think the harvest will be amazing.

New trees growing at Hesle Nygaard

We also keep cooking more and more dishes with nuts. The hazelnut burgers are really good. The recipe is based on the classic Cranks' nut loaf recipe.

Old bread, hazelnuts and stock make perfect patties.

Farm life

Our hens are now allowed to roam for a few hours before bedtime whenever we are at home. They seem to enjoy the bug life.

Happy hens walking about. Like Pettson?

The tunnel centers are good for tomatoes and cucumbers. We have six tomato varieties that are all good in a different way.

The tomatoes are in full production.

We are preserving food for the winter, and the drier is happy to assist. Dried tomatoes are excellent as snacks, an as additions to soups and stews. They keep for years.

A bowl of cherry tomatoes is cut in quarters and loaded onto trays.

A couple of days later, they are dry and hard and ready to stow away for darker days.

Not much volume, but a lot of flavour

M. found a note that we had been collecting wild plums in August last year, so we set out to the same place and found plenty of plums to eat and to cook jam.

Plenty of plums.

Friends

We have been fortunate to spend quite some time with friends this summer, and I hope it will continue into the fall.

A month later, we checked on the minikiwi - still not ripe.

My old friend Vince came over from the Netherlands to spend a couple of days. He helped out with cleaning and painting our white fence in the front. We use the Ottoson lineseed oil paints, made of mainly edible ingredients. It will be interesting to see how long it will last.

Pressure spraying the algae before cleaning and painting.

Our friend Tina organized a jam session in our party barn, and we met a handful of new local friends. Talented musicians who live just a few kilometers away, whom we had not yet met. Some people are great at connecting people, and Tina is one of them.

Jam session in the barn.

We also joined a protest sit-in to re-kindle some interest in climate action. I am not sure that it helps much, but at least it was good to meet some other citizens who care. The more evident the climate chaos is becoming, the harder some people close their eyes and ears. As in previous crises, most people will shrug and carry on until their ordinary life is no longer possible.

Rebel moms sharing their anger and concern.

2025-07-31 Harvest season is on

2025-07-31T00:00:00+02:00

Social Summer

This summer has started out with a record time spent with friends and family. Most of the tree business is taking care of itself now, the trees grow well and they require something like one hour per day of care. Some fertilizing, some weeding, some watering, some peace.

Time with friends is important for us. Both to recover mentally from the depressing realities of the larger world, and to bounce ideas and strengthen our own thinking about the world. Strengthening and deepening networks of resistance and collaboration. We have been lucky to meet a few new friends too.

I am more and more convinced that the meaning of life is to cook good food and enjoy with friends. And once in a while make a contribution to the living world. What else is really there? At least for me. It is great to grow food and share meals.

It is good to meet new people at other people's parties too. Our friends Simon and Alexandra got married and had a cozy garden party. It was good fun to meet their siblings and their other friends.

Simon and Alexandra got married at their place, overlooking the river.

We also prepared the birthday party of M. Our boys came home for a week to hang out and prepare the party scene. They live something like 700km away, one to the north-east, one to the south-west, so we don't meet so often. They live in a very different world from when I grew up thirty years ago. Or, rather, they are aware of the destruction and decline of the industrial civilization, whereas I was blissfully ignorant of any reality at all. When I was in my twenties, during the second half of the 1990s, everything seemed so easy. Now, not so much. Reality has arrived here.

Our boys cooking pancakes on the frying pan Muurikka

M's friends came over for a wild celebration with dinner and songs. Good fun.

We were lucky with the weather.

The forest

During the last few years, we have learned a lot about the Swedish forests. Most people believe the wood/paper-industry propaganda that the forests are better than ever. Scratching the surface, the picture is more depressing. We are losing habitat for lots of species, and the destruction has accellerated since the Russia-Ukraine war started in 2022. The industry had been buying lots of wood from Russia, but that was now blocked. Now there is an over-capacity in saw mills and paper plants, so the hunger for forest is larger than ever, while the old forests are almost all gone. This conundrum leads to record high price for timber and the logging companies are now clearing out the last (previously un-economic) patches of old forests. It is an ecological disaster.

Some people organize to try to get the companies to follow Swedish law, that on paper should protect the environment and the last populations of endangered species. They meet up every two years to talk and strategize. This year, we joined. The location is an amazing forest garden in middle-south of Sweden, a place that is a lot cooler than where we live. I was amazed to see thriving chestnut trees here!

Viktor shows one of his chestnut trees.

Our friends Etta and Jona arranged a fire starter ceremony in the stream.

Fire in the forest.

On our way there, we stayed with friends in their forest house on a cliff overlooking Vatter lake. It is a big lake, some 100+km long, so the other end is on the other side of the horizon.

M and me, looking over the water.

On the way back, we visited the idyllic and touristy town of Gränna. It is most famous for a kind of candy, but there may be a change of pride. There are also a couple of very impressive chestnut trees in the park.

One of the Gränna Park chestnut trees. There are also amazing ginkgo trees.

Small town life

In our small town, we had a coffee at Cecil's the other day. It is a friendly café/bakery with 1950's theme, and it is very fitting to the city market square. This time, we learned that they had opened a small and cozy back-yard-area to sit outdoors in a quiet corner.

You can imagine our surprise when we came into the hitherto secret back yard and were welcomed by a huge minikiwi-vine, full of fruit!

Minikiwis at Cecil's courtyard.

Life here on the countryside is seldom boring. We are trying to get a reduction of the speed on the road outside our farmlet, so everytime there is a crash, we call up the newspapers and send a letter to the road authorities to reduce the allowed speed.

Another opportunity to call for speed reduction.

We visited a friend of M., who showed us how she is weaving mats of raw wool. That would work out well for us too, I think.

Weaving raw wool, directly into the warp.

Farm update

It has been a busy month, mainly with weeding. No exciting pictures of that. Most of the trees grow very good this year, with rains and good heat. Only the "mother trees" for walnut scion wood have not been happy, and we will try to relocate that function.

Also, it seems that we have run out of voles. I have seen no damage in several months, but whenever I see a hole in the ground, I place a trap.

This time, we had a novelty. The first rat was caught in the guilliotine.

Rats... First and hitherto only rat at our place.

2025-06-30 Toktok

2025-06-30T00:00:00+02:00

Toktok

The latest rage here on our farmlet is toktok, an entertainment platform that delivers hilarious content in snippets from 3 seconds to 60 minutes. The audiovisual experience is captivating and worryingly addictive.

Every morning, the breakfeast ritual is a joy for the eye, when the four participants devour a melange of sprouted fava beans and grains.

The toktok system also delivers most excellent food ingredients.

Four hens in a row

We picked up four hens from our friend Susanne. The layers are experienced and know their stuff. Susanne is transitioning to a different breed, and these Marans-Bovans-hybrids had to go.

The hens are cautious and curious, at the same time.

Omlet Eglu Cube

After a year long on-and-off decision making process, we spent some mad cash to purchase a mobile chicken coop/house from the UK brand Omlet. There is a lot of information online about these henhouses.

The main reason we chose this one is that it is supposed to be easy to clean and easy to maintain. All the plastic looks terrible, but it is supposed to be sturdy and last for at least a decade. The main disadvantage with plastic is that it is difficult to repair and that it will break down into microplastics, some time in the future.

The Eglu Cube is supposed to house up to six large hens, but it looks crammed with four.

Nuts news

We continue with the nut growing course at Holma Folkhögskola, with excursions to different places. In the first weekend of June, we had the course here in Laholm.

Also this year we went to my friend Marc's place to look at his amazing nut trees that he has planted during his ten years at this place.

Walnut trees thrive in this place.

The walnuts are growing from pollination in May until harvest in September. This time of year it is possible to harvest green nuts to make liqueurs and pickles. This year we made just a small jar of sweet pickled walnuts and half a liter nocino liqueur. Next year more!

The nuts are gaining size.

Marc's place is a great place to see what is possible even in our Northern climate. He has several chestnut trees that bear well, as well as various walnuts, two different kinds of heartnuts and plenty of hazels. All on an acre (5000m2).

The course participants are inspired.

We also went to the town of Lund to lead a workshop on cooking food with nuts. We made a nut roast (based on the classic Crank's recipe) and we baked pancakes on an outdoor Muurikka kitchen.

It took some time to get used to this pan, but in the end it worked great.

Back home on the farm, the main work in the orchard is weeding, watering, fertilizing and mowing the lawns. And enjoying the successful grafts.

It is like magic when the scion sticks come alive.

Nut trip to the Netherlands

We organized a week-long study trip to the Netherlands for swedish nut growing enthousiasts. We visited seven companies, ranging from tree nurseries, nut orchards, a nut-oil presser, nut cleaner/cracker and an agroforestry design/implementation company. Lots of impressions.

We visited our old friend Wouter and his amazing food forest Ketelbroek.

The chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima) is happy here and produces well.

The hickory-pecan hybrid ("hican") grows well, but not much harvest yet.

One kind of business that we do not yet have in Sweden is a dedicated agroforestry design/implementation company like the dutch Agroforestry Supplies, run by Sjef van Dongen.

Sjef shows us a research plot where they trial ground covers. It seems like white clover gives the best growth and harvest.

Sjef and Wilma also run a nursery of a hectare, to grow out some of the trees that they plant.

We also had a long weekend to visit family and friends. And to visit some of the trees we planted when we lived there.

Almond tree in the Clemenshof community orchard, planted in 2017.

Walnut trees in the Clemenshof, planted in 2017.

Farm news

Every week, we try to fix something on the farm. This week it was time for maintenance of the lawn mowers.

After a year, some heavy denting. I guess this came when I accidentally mowed one of the traps for voles.

Now the berry season has started. Black currants, red currants and alpine strawberries produce well. Last year we planted 25 small trees of Amelanchier alnifolia and they already start to produce berries.

It is amelanchier-time.

We picked the first black currants as well. Yummy.

Friends

We enjoy meeting with friends and family, as the regular reader may have noticed.

Cousins on the Bosse and Bodil side of the family came to visit, with kids. We went to Kakor & Kackel.

Farm Expo

I went to the main swedish farm expo at Borgeby. It is a celebration of large tractors and technology. A small section devoted to organic farming, agroecology and a life-affirming future.

Welcome to the Borgeby farm expo.

I really like the test plots where they have planted various crops, so that visitors can see ten varieties of oats next to each other.

What was less inspiring was the chemical product companies that showed the effect of their various concoctions, pesticides and hormones.

There has been quite some breeding effort into making grains grow shorter, to make more seeds and less straw. This increases the yield of grain and reduces risk for falling over in rain events. The disadvantage is that weeds are not suppressed, since there is less shadow on the soil. Therefore, these grains are almost always grown in combination wiht various herbicides.

There are also hormonal treatments available to make grains grow even shorter. What could possibly go wrong when we put hormones on our food and into our soils and waters?

Wheat grown with and without hormonal shortening agent.

We are looking to make a mobile nut processing facility, to make it easy for nut growers to get their nuts sorted, graded, shelled and bagged. There was a Danish company that has ten grain-processing trucks, and they showed a grain sorting truck on the fair.

Danish company who comes to your farm to clean your grain and pick out the largest seeds for next year's sowing.

2025-05-28 Ashes to ashes

2025-05-28T00:00:00+02:00

Ashes to ashes

We and everything we make are part of the circle of life. Everything we make will one day be composted into constituents. Even the plastics will one day, a thousand years from now, be gone. Closer to home, our neighbour Ulf passed away late April and is now back in the soil.

As mentioned last month, I have been on a journey for fifteen years now, to understand my part in the dance of elements, rain and sunshine. Said Nick Ritar inspired us to investigate how to better utilize the output of our bodies, as a source for new food. We have now two years of experience of composting the solids and diluting the liquids to utilize as nutrients for the food we grow and eat.

We are what we eat

From an atomic perspective, our bodies are built up of elements from the food we eat. The more we eat from our own place, the more important it is that the soil contains the minerals that we need.

A thought-provoking essay by the most excellent David Holmgren of permaculture fame about their health problems that came from eating only home grown food has reverberated for years. He shared a story, the gist of which was that he had been over-applying dolomite lime to their gardens, which caused a mineral imbalance that showed up as teeth problems. After thoughtful analysis, soil sampling and finally bringing in some other minerals, their own produce was again health-promoting.

In the past, many peasant populations have had mineral deficiencies from eating only "home grown" food, depending on the local soil mineral availability. Most successful cultures have included migrant species, often fish, in the diet to accumulate minerals from a larger area. In France, I have seen pigeon-towers, where pigeons could live and defecate, to bring in nutrients from a vast region to the local farmer.

Mineral deficiency does not sound nice. So, the plan was to bring in the missing nutrients in some form. But what should we get? What are we missing?

What is in our soil?

Our soil is a fine sandy soil. The main fraction is small silicate stones of 0.2mm diameter. The topsoil is varying from 15cm to 90cm in different parts of our 5000m2 farmlet. The thinnest soil is on the highest ground, and the richest soil is in the low-laying area where a stream used to run. (The rivulet was dug into a pipe in the 1960s or so.) I think that the availability of water helps to build top soil.

We sent samples of our soil to a lab to determine the nutrient content in both the top soil and in the sand below.

The first analysis was to see the soil particle size distribution. Mainly 0.1-0.5mm fine sand.

The top soil contains several water-soluble minerals, a.k.a. "spurway" analysis.

The top soil contains a little bit more of the ammoniac-leachable "albrecht" minerals, but they only check a few.

The sub soil sand contains almost nothing that the plants can absorb.

A photo from last months digging of the wetland - here is 40cm of top soil, and then yellow sand.

What does that mean? What should we do?

Now we have a pretty accurate number of the concentration of the minerals in the top soil, but what does it mean? What is a "good" level of manganese? Nitrogen?

I looked into the literature for tree nurseries, but found nothing. I then looked into organic vegetable growing, since vegetables for our own consumption is the highest priority product.

Organic manure is always good. We bartered two trailer loads (1000kg?) of top quality, well matured, organic cow manure from our friend Gun. That should bring a basis dose of nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium for the growing season, I thought. At least a good start.

Well-matured manure.

To get other phosphorus and minerals, we bought a big bag of granulated blood-and-bone meal (BioFer 9-3-4+1). We plan to use it over a three year period, using 250kg every year on our 3000m2 growing areas.

Blood-and-bone-granules called BioFer.

Comparing our mineral concentrations from the soil sample, with the reference, I thought that boron was the only mineral that seemed lacking. We purchased a 25kg sack of boric acid (Granubor 15% B), and it was quite expensive at 400euro.

Granubor - a boron mineral approved for organic farms.

Since we sell trees that grow out of our soils, we will lose some nutrients every year, so we need to find a way to replenish, at least the 100kg or so of tree growth that is lost. I thought that bringing in a few tons of woodchips each year would make up for the losses in the woody matter that we sell. This year we brought in another 40m3 of freshly-chipped alder. It helps to keep moisture in the ground and reduces the load of seed weeds.

We want to increase the soil carbon and depth of the top soil. The best method is to have a woodland for a century. The second best option seems to be to add biochar. During the last two years, we have used more than 1m3 per year as a soil amendment.

Two big bags with biochar.

And for the permanent trees, we also use our own well-matured manure (100kg after two years?) and diluted golden liquids (400liters saved over the winter + fresh + 90% water).

The output shrinks during the composting period. After two years a whole year-production looks like 100kg. It looks just like soil.

We collect during the winter months in 3x 200liter tanks.

We use a venturi valve to suck a 10% solution to water our permanent trees (not part of the organic nursery).

Humanure is not approved for organic farming, so we do not use those products on the tree nursery.

We applied a lot of the nutrients during the end of May, now that we finally got some rain. For seven weeks, we had no rain. Fortunately, the weather has been cool, so the damage has been very limited.

This is what it looks like, with quite some nutrients applied.

We will apply more nutrients in June.

Nuts

We organized a nut growing course, to introduce farmers to hazelnut growing. Some were very inspired to get started, others realized that it was not the right fit for them. All got good value out of the training.

11 participants came to the one-day introduction to hazelnut farming.

We have also got to know some people who have the most amazing property next to the river. We are starting a collaboration with them, to grow nuts together.

We planted three walnut trees in a field.

We also visited a farmer who collaborates with a company that has brought classic pulses to the Swedish food market. They have reintroduced different kinds of lentils and peas and beans, all organic.

Maybe they can process hazelnuts in their plant, and bring to the market?

Looking at dried fava beans after shelling.

Veggie news

We have good help to keep the voles at bay with our cat. He often comes to join us when we work in the garden. Sotis is always vigilant.

We also have a kind of brown slug that is known by the name of Spanish Cannibal Slug. They came to Sweden in the 1980s and have no known enemies here. They can devastate veggie gardens. One way of collecting them is to make beer-traps. I realized that I preferred drinking the beer, so I started using sour-dough instead. The smell is attractive to the beasts and I eliminate several dozens every evening.

We also have slugs who feast on our veggies and flower beds.

When my friend Marcel came over from the Netherlands, we fixed our pond to look a bit better.

Now it is easy to jump in, or to collect water from the pond.

I got to visit a tree nursery that is 100 times larger than our business. It is the largest park-tree supplier in Sweden. It was great to see how they work. I really would like to learn oculation/budding from them!

Trees of a larger size than our trees.

The manager was the third generation in the business, and the one who changed focus into only 5-meter-trees.

Friends

We met a lot of friends in May. We had great weather to meet up and do things together.

My friend Marcel helped to plant some new fruit trees.

Marcel and the intern Alex helped plant out walnut trees

Jan-Erik showed us his yearly spring task, to re-lime the clay walls of their house.

2025-04-30 We can be earthworms

2025-04-30T00:00:00+02:00

We can be earthworms

No gardener complains about having too many earthworms. "They eat too much!" or "They poop too much!" are never uttered, when it comes to these lowly residents of the soil. Earthworms help cycle nutrients faster through the system, converting plant matter to nutrition.

We can do that too.

More than ten years ago, I watched a no-nonsense TEDx-talk with Nick Ritar. (https://www.milkwood.net/2011/10/31/nick-ritars-tedx-canberra-talk-two-things-you-can-do-every-day-to-save-the-world/) He talked about the linear phosphate path of industrial civilization and how we flush out the most valuable nutrients into the sea. How industrial Man has moved out of the original niche of a fruit-nut-and-fish eater and garden fertilizer, to become a force of destruction on epic scale. The solution was as simple as provocative - urine diverting compost toilets. Huh?

At first, I thought he exaggerated the impact of our s***. It couldn't possibly be that bad, at least not in our civilized corner of the globe, I thought to myself. So, at the first possible opportunity I visited the local wastewater treatment plant and talked to the people who worked there. It was not as good as I had previously believed.

A 90% reduction of nitrogen seemed impressive, but when they explained that the nitrogen is transformed from plant-usable nitrates and ammonia by de-nitrification bacteria into nitrogen gas, I was baffled. By blowing air through the effluents, we destroy this precious nutrient resource.

From an energy point of view it is madness: First we use fossil gas to convert nitrogen gas in the air into nitrates. Then we put energy into a bassin to help bacteria transform nitrates into nitrogen gas.

The phosphate side of the story was even worse.

During the literature review of humanure handling, I came back to "Farmers of Forty Centuries", where FH King describes the practices of the peoples in east Asia who have been growing food in the same place for 4000 years. One common theme of those cultures was that they returned their bodily outputs to the soil.

During this time, I also found the recently published "Planetary Boundaries" by Rockström et al., where second largest threat to civilization was shown to be nitrates and phosphates that pollute rivers, lakes and oceans.

I realized that this was a problem of civilizational collapse proportions.

Nick Ritar from the TEDx presentation looked kind of like me, and I thought - if he can do this, so can I.

The challenge was addressed in a small part when we lived in a townhouse in town, but since moving to the countryside, we have been able to reuse more and more of our personal deliveries.

During the springs, we combine our leeking with biochar to use as foundation in garden beds, and we compost our solid wastes in buckets for two years before applying them to our fruit trees and bushes. (Strangely enough, humanure is not approved for organic farming, so we cannot use it in our commercial nut tree nursery.) The whole winter, we collect our golden liquids in vats, waiting for May to come around when the plants are hungry for nitrogen.

Wetland

This year in April, we finalized another part of the water system, an artificial wetland for all greywater. We dug a pond with a liner and filled it with volcanic porous rock, and planted reeds and bulrush. The greywater enters on one side, and exits on the other. The pond is 2x5 meters, and is quite a lot larger than needed for only greywater. Our neighbour Edvin came in with his excellent excavator skills and helped dig and connect the pipes. My friend Palle also helped with the installation and manual digging.

First our friend Micke helped to make a new hole in the output drain.

New drain pipe. This is where the clean water will exit the wetland, into the ground water well.

Edvin the Digger helps to connect, by inserting a PP pipe inside the crackled cement tube.

The blue marked pipe on the left was an "irregular" overflow into the stormwater system, draining the fields of our neighbours. It is not good for waste water, but now we have the basis for a better stormwater system on our farm!

The black pipes on the bottom of our new wetland are part of a ground-heat heatpump system that can heat our house. Good to know where these tubes are. We got no maps from the previous owner...

Empty wetland, a pond-liner lined pond.

Incoming water (far end of the picture) and outgoing water collected with the black pipe (closest).

Volcanic rock is of low density, but still quite heavy.

All you can see is a liner border, some cleaning pipes, volcanic rock and the first strands of bulrush.

Nuts

Nut course at Holma Community College

We spent a weekend at Anders' place, where he is developing an ecological nut forest.

A hickory nut tree in Anders park forest.

Anders seeded some of his own chestnuts to make new trees.

A stone age (?) implement that was dug out of the clay soil at Anders' place. We think it was an ancient nut cracker.

Nut growing instruction material

We are collecting a lot of material to help farmers get started growing nuts.

Together with Simon and Joan, I made a series of instruction films, probably next month on Utoob.

We also made a leaflet together with Håkan, one of the hazelnut pioneers in Sweden.

Chestnuts

It is also season for grafting chestnuts. Here we did some in-situ grafting at Gun's place.

I usually do the Z-grafting technique. (I apologize for the blur.)

Gun is taking great care of the trees.

In the tunnel, the chestnut seedlings start to come out.

Axel, a young enthousiastic nut tree grower, came by to practice grafting.

Walnuts

We are grafting walnuts mainly in April.

Intern Daniel shows off his Z-graft skills.

The z-graft is great when the scion and rootstock have the same size.

I usually use rubber band and tape before waxing the whole scion.

Then we pack the trees into sand and a hotpipe at 27C helps the graft to callus/heal.

Pieter came by and helped to sow walnuts for rootstock.

The first seedling walnut trees are coming out. These onese come from a disease resistant tree, so maybe I will let them grow out to trees to plant out.

Veggie news

We are a bit behind schedule for the veggies this year, for various reasons. We have a few seedlings going that will be planted out next week, but some things work out great. Especially the perennial vegetables are dependable and are already in production. We had the first asparagus last week, rhubarb pie and started to use our climbing/vining spinach.

The vining spinach plant Hablizia comes great this year.

We had the monthly peasoup-and-pancakes gathering for transition people at our place. A record five kids joined this time.

Finally - we celebrate Sir Sotis. Our new cat has captured at least two water voles!

2025-03-26 So, what do we do?

2025-03-26T00:00:00+01:00

What do we do?

The other day, I listened to two excellent interviews with the same person, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. One with Nate Hagens, one with Rachel Donald.

Fressoz wrote the book (that I have not yet read) "More, more, more!" about materials and civilization. We have kept using more of everything, all the time. One of his main points is that talk about "energy transitions" is a story based on a false history.

I guess you have heard the story that we used to use wood for heating, then we found coal and shifted to that power source. Later oil took over and now we are on the cusp of shifting to renewable energy. Right? I had heard it, and I think I also told this story to other people. The problem is that it is wrong. We never stopped burning wood. We burn more wood today than ever before. We use more coal than ever before. We use more oil than ever before. And we use more renewable energy than ever before. So, talking about "energy transitions in the past" is talking nonsense.

Talking about "energy transitions" in the future is more interesting. Not because we will change to solar and wind and everything will be fine. But because we will have to shift back to solar and wind, and we will have to make do. There will either be no oil to burn, or we decide to keep the stuff in the ground. In any case, we will not burn much oil a hundred years from now. Maybe not even a decade from now.

So, what do we do with these insights? How can the realization that we will have much less energy in the fugure help us choose better what to do every day? Those questions I ponder when I weed the fields where the new hazelnut bushes will be planted tomorrow. (I did write a chapter about the myth of eternal availability of cheap energy in my book about popular delusions that block the transition to a sustainable civilization.)

Nuts

Nut course at Holma Community College

We started a new round of the Nut growing course at Holma earlier this month. It is the third year we run the course and interest is strong.

We start the course by planting a nut tree together

Excellent intern

This spring we will have three interns at the tree nursery. The first one is a cider expert, who is diversifying into nuts. I learned a lot from this experienced vegetable grower and we planted out quite a lot of walnut trees.

Happy intern, grafting his first walnut tree

The walnut trees go into a hot-pipe callus system for three weeks

We went to our friend Josefine to help her graft 200 apple trees for her new orchard.

Josefine was happy with the trees.

Seeding time

We are also seeding the nuts that are starting to sprout. Most of the chestnuts are now in the ground, and soon the walnuts and treee-hazels will follow.

Chestnuts are sprouting first.

One tree-hazel (Corylus colurna) even started to grow out into a small tree.

Cracking nuts

We are running a grant-project to support the establishment of nut culture in Sweden. One of the good things from that kind of project is that we get to purchase tools that we evaluate and share.

After harvest, nuts must be dried quickly, to avoid toxic mold.

Sizing hazelnuts before cracking.

The electric nut cracker is quick and effective, if the nuts are sized well.

Another great thing is that we get to meet up with intelligent and fun people. We had a whole day workshop with the smartest people in the Nordic nut world, and learned a lot from each other. We also learned a lot from Tomas from Nordisk Råvara, a company that has reintroduced a series of delicious pulses to the Swedish food market. It is a long journey to get into the food distribution system. For some growers, direct sales will be enough, but for a large chunk of the market, the supermarket system is necessary. (Many customers want to only purchase food at their local supermarket.)

Nordic nut experts - the best ones here.

We had a whole day workshop planning ahead - how to build up the value chain?

Cooking with walnuts

Our friends Lova and VIdar organized a cooking event, where we cooked a three-course meal with hazelnuts as the main ingredient.

A hazelnut-risotto (barley-otto) to start with.

Great nut people for a good meal. The meaning of life?

We all brought our best cooking skills, here Tatjana shows her onion skills.

We also had a short workshop on making tempeh with lentils and hazelnuts. We got some to bring home.

Planting nut trees with friends

March is a good time to plant bare rooted trees. We love to plant trees with friends.

My good friend S. celebrated his 50 years with a dancing party. The next day we planted a walnut tree.

Our friends M. and K. are foresters, and here we do a nut tree trial at one of their replantings.

Storage

We built a cold storage room during the summer and now it has proven its value. The temperature went down to +1C at the coldest of winter, and now the temperature is slowly rising. Apples and potatoes have stored quite well, and the nut seeds this year look great.

Overview of some of the apples that are still ok.

Some apples store remarkably well, they look almost as fresh as when they were picked six months ago.

We still have some 30kg of potatoes left (out of maybe 100kg?)

The nut seeds have stored well in here.

A walk in the woods

We also took some time off, to walk in the woods. We even had one night out in a tent last week-end. It is great to be out in the forests.

The forest just north of Knäred.

The old mill of Knäred. In the summer it is a café.

2025-02-22 Winter came back

2025-02-22T00:00:00+01:00

Winter came back

This winter was very, very mild until the middle of February, when we got a week of -5C to -10C. The ground froze solid for the first time this year. The misty weather cleared up and we got a whole week fo blue skies and beautiful winter weather. Cold weather helps to keep down populations of rodents and some problematic insects.

Not much solar PV electricity, even on sunny days.

Our farm/garden is full of useful trees. Fruit trees and of course lots of different nut trees. Also some vegetable trees with edible leaves. Most trees are just gray-brown stems during the winter time and not very interesting to watch. We do have one exception - the 'Winter orange' cultivar of the linden tree (Tilia cordata).

Tilia cordata 'Winter orange' - you may guess the origin of the name.

Going nuts

Most of the work during this winter is to prepare course material and instruction material for farmers who want to start growin nuts commercially. We run a project for the Board of Agriculture to establish a knowledge hub for the budding Swedish nut industry, and it will continue until 2029. Most of the material we produce is in Swedish, so probably of limited use to the readership of this blog, but I will surely post some links and info here as well during the coming years.

Seedy chestnuts?

I check on the nuts in the storage every now and then. I had some containers with chestnuts out in a cooler in a garage, and earlier this month I checked them and saw that they had started to sprout. I seeded the first 150 or so chestnuts, just the week before the colder weather, and I hope they will not get freeze damage.

The chestnuts started to sprout - time to sow.

First, the root comes out and grows downwards.

Winter layering propagation - chestnuts

We graft most of the chestnut trees. That is the most common procedure in Europe to propagate specific varieties/cultivars.

When I was in France a few years back, visiting the amazing tree nursery of Sebastien Linard, I learned how to do mound layering.

The 'Marigoule' chestnut branch has started to grow roots.

The method is called 'marcotte' in France and the method is quite similar to the old ways of propagating currant bushes and apple rootstock. A mound of sand and sawdust is built around young twigs of a re-sprouting tree trunk. Six months later, some of the twigs have rooted and are clonal copies of the original tree.

The roots look good.

The same tree planted out in a garden bed, to grow out for another year.

Cracking fun

We got a nut cracking machine from the German company Feucht. It is a nut-cracker for hazelnuts and walnuts, and a connected wind-sifter that blows all shell fragments to the side. Nuts fall down in the stainless steel bin and the shells in the black bucket. A video is available here.

The Feucht-cracker/separator is great

Fun on the farm

Winter is also a time to spend long dark evenings in the kitchen cooking and talking with friends.

Party pumpkin.

We got one of the light color pumpkins last summer and now was a good time to cook it up. We made all kinds of pumpkin pie, soup and fries. We saved some seeds and already look forward to next winter...

Last week-end we took a walk in some fields to the south of our place. We saw that the potato farmer had not harvested the last 500 kg or so in one field. The boars were helping out.

Boars seemingly like potatoes.

Talks, talks and talks

Winter time is also the only time to get really busy farmers to leave their place and give a talk. We are lucky to know a legendary horse-farmer who lives some 20 km from our place. He gave the second talk in ten years or so, and we were quite a full room there to listen. I think we were 260 people in the audience, enthralled by the beautiful images and the deep ecological knowledge that John-Erik shared.

John-Erik to the right talks about their farm and the yearly tasks that come back again and again.

I also got the opportunity to give a talk about common popular delusions of our time.

Outside the Ide A Library in Helsingborg.

2025-01-31 Crying wolf

2025-01-31T00:00:00+01:00

Crying wolf?

Those who look reality in the eye and share their observations often get flak. "Party pooper". "Negative attitude". "Cassandra". I like the humor and irony of the excellent thinker Ugo Bardi calling his old blog Cassandra's legacy. Most people don't want to know.

What could possibly go wrong?

Ten years ago, when I learned about our civilization overshooting the carrying capacity of the planet, I spread this picture to everyone I knew. It is a simple model of a species overpopulating a finite resource base. Simple. Collapse is avoidable only if we drastically reduce our resource use.

I thought that I could convince people and in some way influence their future actions, to tread more lightly on the earth. I had completely misjudged the human propensity for believing in fairy tales, make-belief and myth. What psychologists with a fancy word calls "motivated reasoning".

Adult people would tell me with a straight face that economic growth is always good and exactly that which we needed more of. Even close friends would tell me that it couldn't possibly be that bad: "Otherwise someone should have done something, right?"

Why is that?

In the subsequent decade, I have come to meet quite a few people who understand the situation and who dare talk about it, but most don't. Most won't. Most people have conciously or un-conciously decided not to let the ecologic realities of overshoot enter their worldview. They prefer to live in a self-affirming delusion.

Therefore, I have completely abandoned the plan to "convince enough people", to generate "change".

Instead I quietly whisper "wolf" and see who reacts. From the most surprising corners of my network, people come out discreetly to me, and ask to talk in private. In small groups. Building resilience, networks and trust to support each other in the coming turbulence. We talk about what we love and what can save. Similar to the Deep-Adaptation credo of looking into what to relinquish, what to restore, with whom to reconciliate and how to build resilience. I wrote a book (only available in Swedish) to cast a wider net to get in touch with more like-minded earth lovers.

These practices have helped me to find amazing people with fascinating skills and deep love for our planet. People who plant seeds for a humane and dignified tomorrow.

What else can we do?

Wolf!

Early January, M and me took a walk in a forest 15 km from here. It is a Nature conservation area called Göstorps skog.

It was the first time we went there, and it was a beautiful day with sunshine and snow and giant boulders and beech trees reaching for the skies.

We were the only people who walked here that day. No other human footprints to see in the fresh snow. Just our car coming to the parking place on the edge of the Reserve.

But we did see two pairs of paw marks halfway along the path and after the round hike, we came back to our car and saw that the canines had been sniffing out our little Volkswagen.

Stable, dog-like paw marks in the forest, just a few kilometers from the place where two parent wolves were shot a week earlier, leaving a litter of five youth behind. Were the young adults looking for mom and dad? Or looking for trouble?

We will never know.

Car troubles

We also had a visit of a louder kind, when a young guy from a village down the road sled into our tree nursery, landing on the roof. Fortunately nobody was hurt, but it was a close shave. The Volvo just touched a thick birch tree, so if they had been a meter to the side, probably nobody would have walked out of the wreck.

Here is a photo of the car, when the youth had managed to get it on to its' four wheels again.

Surprise visit at 4am.

Next day we had a visit of a young guy who came to apologize.

Next day, inventory of damages. Glass. Broken trees.

We agreed to fix the fence together and he would compensate the damaged trees. I guess this is how we get to know more people outside our eco-bubble here. Getting to know a handy guy in the next generation local carpenters.

A few days later, we fixed the fence.

More nuts

Nuts have amazing health benefits ...

I always kind of knew that nuts were "good for health" as our Chinese friends say. (对身体好!)

In preparation for a conference of health and the environment that was organized by our province, I decided to read up on the available literature.

There have been numerous studies of tree nuts (as different from peanuts) and health effects. With the exception of the 3% who are allergic to hazelnuts, most nuts have amazing health effects.

A study with thousands of heart-patients in Spain indicate that the risk of stroke goes down with 50% and the risk of cardiac arrest goes down with 25%. These are huge numbers. A simulation paper converted the results to the Swedish situation (Eneroth, H. et al., Risks and benefits of increased nut consumption, Nutrition 9, 2017). They found that eating 30 grams of nuts every day would reduce the disease load (DALY) with 8%. This is huge. It is on par with health effects of alcohol. Or the risks of a sedentary lifestyle.

A serving of nuts is a small cost (50 eurocent per day) for the individual and yearly savings of billions for society. Furthermore, roasting of nuts make most allergenes dissappear.

Daily dose of nuts - 20-30 grams.

Why is this not more spread? Is there any propaganda or health information in your countries regarding tree nuts and health benefits?

Me and my friend Marc sharing the joy of roasted hazelnuts

An image in Swedish sharing how many yearly deaths would be avoided if people would eat more in line with the Nordic dietary guidelines. The most impactful would be for people to eat more vegetables and more nuts.

Avoided deaths per year if people ate 20% more in line with the Nordic Nutritional Recommendations.

... and gloriously delicious

Together with our partners in nuts, Lova and Vidar, we tested our new machine. It is a rotary wet-grinder that is commonly used to grind cocoa beans into cocoa mass, for chocolate production. This is the process that Rodolphe Lindt invented in 1897 and that changed chocolate eating forever after.

The same process can be done to transform chopped, roasted hazelnuts into a silky nut-butter.

Friends loading the machine.

Inside the drum, there are two rotating stone wheels, in contact with a flat stone surface at the bottom of the drum. After an hour or so, the nut pieces are transformed into semi-liquid hazelnut butter. A pinch of salt and the spread is perfect for home-made bread.

The wheels are made of a stone material, and they grind onto a flat stone surface.

Scion cutting

A year ago I got a most excellent advice from my friend Philipp to grow the chestnut "mother trees" inside the polytunnel. I tried it this year and the results are amazing. I planted small trees in April 2024 and within one season they grew shoots of more than one meter. One tree generated six meter-long shoots with excellent scion wood.

If I compare it with outside growing conditions, the growth inside has been something like four-six times faster.

I cut the yearling shoots.

The branches go into zip-lock bags into a converted fridge that keeps 0-1degrees C.

No shit

Finally, the winter is a time for rotating equipment. One of the interesting things to observe is the workings of our composting loo bucket. After a year, there is nothing to see that reminds of the origins of the matter.

What used to be turds and loo paper is now rich humus.

According to local regulation, we keep this for another year before spreading it on selected areas of our garden. (There is actually a clause in the European organic farming legislation that prohibits us from using our own turd-soil in the certified tree nursery. So we put it in other places.)

We follow the rules as long as the European Union functions. According to Ugo Bardi, not for much longer.

2024-12-28 We are winning

2024-12-28T00:00:00+01:00

We are winning

For five hundred years, we have been waging a war on Nature, and now the end-game is in sight. We are winning. We powerful men of European white descent, have relentlessly fought, generation after generation. We have built bridges and dams to restrain rivers. We have covered cerrados with concrete constructions. We have eliminated the eagles, the bears, the tigers and rhinos, from all but the most desolate destinations. The oceans echo hollow after our voracious vacuuming for fish, large and small to consume or convert into feedstock for our livestock.

We have taken hairy boars into captivity and bred billions of naked pigs. We have converted the ancient aurox into cattle and covered the surface of the planet with our four-hoofed offspring.

Man, conqueror of Nature, can proudly look back at a successful series of campaigns to destroy birds and bees, whales and warthogs, ticks and tropical trees.

In the remotest of seas and the most uninhabitable valleys, there are still some remnant populations of refugee vertebrates, but all the great swaths of fertile and lush lands have been developed into industrial parks, farming fields and celebrated cities.

Alas, a few backwards people could not understand the greatness of our destiny and have objected in protest, but their voices have been effectively silenced by our mainstream media machine. Hear the jubilation when our economy is growing! Hear the happiness with the release of new short-lived electronic gadgets! Hear the celebration of human ingenuity!

The facts exclaim our victory; Our concrete constructions now outweigh all living matter on earth. Our prodigious production of plastics outweigh all animal biomass. The most common wild mammal, the white tailed deer, has a lower biomass than our fat domestic cats.

We are winning.

Man, Conqueror of Nature

Biomass vs Human-made mess Elhacham, E., Ben-Uri, L., Grozovski, J. et al. Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass. Nature 588, 442-444 (2020).

Humans vs wild mammals Greenspoon, L., Krieger, E., Sender, R., et al. The global biomass of wild mammals, PNAS 120 (10) (2023)

Life at our place

December is a time to slow down, reflect and remember the ups and the downs of the year. We have had lots of ups, but also some downs, of course.

We were lucky to have our boys come over to spend Christmast with us, for a week together. Lots of traditional foods. I was down with a stomach flu, so this was a weight-loss holiday. I have been healthy most of the year, but sometimes I am just as unlucky as anyone else.

100% whole grain rye-wheat bread. Also good at Christmas.

Our home started to hear to a new sound; boom-boom. Boom-boom.

M got a loom from a friend, and is learning the ancient skill of weaving.

Our new friends Marianne and Anders gave us the permission to take a tree in their forest.

Christmas tree of the right size for us.

Trip to the Netherlands

We had a good start of the month with a trip to the Netherlands to visit family and friends. First we stayed at Ms parents and visited her brother to celebrate his birthday and meet his family. We don't see them so often, so it was good to spend some days together.

First a day with our nephew Darius.

We also spent a few days in our old town Soest, where we lived for 15 years. Of course we have many friends there.

Our friend Els, with a newly planted tree.

I also visited some of my non-human friends; some of the trees that I planted during our time there. Some of them have grown amazingly well.

A hickory nut tree from 2016, it was only 30cm then...

In the small community orchard Clemenshof, the trees are really taking over now. It was a dry sandpit when we started in 2017. Now it gives bucketfuls of fruits and berries, and starting to give nuts.

A walnut tree in a community orchard.

We also visited friends in Amsterdam who had the most clever knitted sock-slippers:

Most excellent socks.

Back on the farm

We came home, and it seemed like the winter really had come here. Beautiful frosty nights and clear blue skies.

Frost came here, but no snow.

Could it maybe snow tomorrow?

No snow. Instead, we got warmer wind blowing in from the South. We have so far had no snow in December. It is very mild and we even had an unseasonal drizzle rain on Christmas Day.

The weather is strange. We just had two hard winters, maybe this will be one without any frozen ground and no snow? It is still early, the coldest time is usually around the end of January.

Nuts and Trees

Our colleagues in Malmö, who run the Miljömatematik company organized a community cooking event. We made a three-course lunch with walnut as the main ingredient. Delicious. Filling. Fun. It has been one of the best things this year, to work more together with them.

Lova shares the instructions and divides us into teams

Delicious lentil-walnut-burgers

Happy people preparing healthy and sustainable food. What is better than this?

On the farm, since it was so warm weather, I took the opportunity to take out the hazelnut branches that had been mound-layered. Some had beautiful root systems, others almost nothing. Some had not made a single rootlet. What a difference! What makes one root and the other not? What can I do to improve the probability of success?

Here I had put a bucket with no bottom at Midsummer, and top-filled with sand and sawdust.

Another good example. Lots of roots!

Wish you all a good end of this year, and best of strength for 2025. The ride will just get wilder!

2024-11-26 Tree planting season

2024-11-26T00:00:00+01:00

Tree planting season

Trees are amazing. From the tiniest birch seed a mighty woodland wonder can emerge. From a throw-away apple core, another tree can sprout, to give bounty over generations.

What is not very natural is: moving trees. In Nature, this almost never happens. Trees stand where they stand, from seed to rotting stump a century or two later. No bear digs out spruces to replant them next to their den. Beavers move trees, but not for replanting. At least not that we know.

We humans have invented the shovel, so that we can move trees, even long distances. Trees are shipped all over the world, in the most esoteric ways. Some large trees are trucked to new and more convenient locations.

I have been moving trees for a decade. Thousands of trees. Most of the trees I have grown out from seeds, and grafted some more interesting variety onto the rootstock. (Grafting is another very un-natural transplantation process, where a limb from one tree is stuck on top of an other unsuspecting guilliotined tree.)

Moving trees is a peculiar human habit. I have heard very specific wishes of where a tree should come, and in which directions the branches should reach. Sometimes these wishes are granted by the tree, sometimes not. We shape the face of the earth in our own image, perhaps?

What is not moved is the amazing ecosystem in the soil. Some soil and a few billion bacteria and microbes tavel along, but the network of mycelia and earth worms are not coming on the journey. Lots of roots are also damaged in the process. It takes time for a moved tree to re-establish relationships in the new place. It is maybe like moving a third-grader to a new class? Who knows which mobbing occurs when the teacher isn't looking?

I have moved and planted trees in all seasons and from all kinds of sources. In my experience, what works best is to move "bare-rooted" trees in the beginning and end of winter. We wait until the leaves fall to the ground, and then we dig out the tree that has been growing in the ground (not in a pot) and replant it somewhere else. Usually, I put a plastic bag or cloth around the roots during transport to reduce dessication.

Trees in their winter sleep can survive weeks out of the ground, as long as they are cool and out of the wind. I try to replant within a day. If that is not possible, I plant the trees temporarily in a sandbox.

Here in Southern Scandinavia, the best season for most trees is to move them in November to March, when the temperature is above freezing. Last week we had a few days with -10C, and that is no good time to dig out and replant trees. Better to wait for thaw and then pick up the shovel. The later in the winter we plant, the more we need to water next year, since the roots have less time to anchor in the new place.

In November, we open the farm store and sell trees to fellow nut-lovers who want to grow nuts in their gardens and on their farms. I think that this is the best time of the year, when I get to see how the trees that we have nursed travel out into the world to spread beauty and nutrition.

A week before the black-friday-madness, our farm store spread joy to nut growers, young and old.

My friend Erik plants seedling chestnut trees from Stockholm at our place.

When the snow started, I dug out a few trees for a customer who would come the next day, to avoid breaking the freezing ground.

Nut growing course

I have had the privilege to teach at a nut growing course at Holma Folkhogskola, which is a Scandinavian kind of adult education. We have now finished the second round of the year-long course, and it has been a fantastic opportunity to meet other people who are just as nutty as we are.

Some of the great nut people having lunch at our place.

A chestnut at Marc's place. Seeds ready to eat or to plant...

Looking at hazelnut bushes at Janet's place.

We also went to Jon's place to plant some trees.

A well-organized tree planting is great.

Wintertime in the orchards

I could go twice to visit nut growers to document their stories, as part of the paid project that we run this year and next. The first trip was to Håkan, who is a pioneer hazelnut revivalist. For the last fifty years, we had no commercial hazelnut growing in Sweden, but now some trail blazing farmers are building a renaissance movement.

Håkan really loves his hazelnut trees. The trees are pruned into single-stem.

1.5 hectares (3 acres) of hazelnut trees were planted in 2020 and this year was the first harvest.

The second farm is a mixed homestead, vegetable and nut farm. It is an old water mill site, but the last mill was taken down more than a century ago. The beautiful people Linda and John raise a family there and trial all kinds of nut trees. Their almond tree 'Ingrid' is the most productive almond tree I have yet seen in Sweden. I have six seeds in the fridge, and next year I will try to grow out new seeding almond trees.

I still do not know how to ensure compliance with the complicated regulation around Prunus trees, so I will not yet add them to the assortment of our tree business.

It was a winter's day when I visited Låremölla Farm.

They have built many things, among others a very useful root cellar.

Breaking bread

Last month, I met an amazing activist baker, Sébastien Boudet. He inspired me to restart baking 100% whole grain bread. In one way, it is easier, since there is no need to knead the bread. On the other hand, I need to re-learn how wet the dough should be. Anyways, whole grain bread from heritage breeds of local grains is a super food. And sometimes the loaves look quite good.

100% whole grain rye-wheat bread.

2024-10-30 Chestnut lovers

2024-10-30T00:00:00+01:00

Chestnut lovers

October is the month of chestnuts. Maybe October even means chestnut in latin? No, it means eighth month, which was true a long time back, but no longer. Like many truths that were true in old times long time gone but no longer accurate. Statements like "growth is great" were happily repeated in previous centuries but are obviously obsolete these days.

Back to chestnuts.

I love chestnuts. That should come as no surprise to the well-informed readers of this blog. Chestnuts are like hot-buns in my heart. Chestnut trees are beautiful and the wood is amazing. What is not to like with chestnuts?

I even think that there are no allergies to chestnuts, which make them a safe bet for school yards and public parks.

There are few chestnut trees in Sweden, on the order of a couple of hundred. My dream is to hundredfold this number in the coming decades. I fantasize of a future where delicious chestnuts will rain from the skies in every hamlet and every city of Southern Scandinavia, to mark the beginning of October.

We have identified a dozen good trees in our surroundings, where we harvest buckets of chestnuts, mainly for sowing. The new trees will be grafted with large-fruiting varieties or just sent out into the world to bring chestnut joy to the unsuspecting masses.

Chestnut road in Halmstad, changing from horse chestnuts to sweet chestnuts. Smart municipality.

One of our favourite places is the old restaurant/auberge Margretetorp.

We come home with buckets full of deliciousness.

Some of the chestnuts we peel in our Chinese electric chestnut-peeler.

Chestnuts help to make friends. Here is Erik, who collected these chestnuts in our Capital, Stockholm, to share.

The young chestnut nursery-man Zaio is selecting chestnuts to use as seedling starters.

Also my friend Leo is happy when he finds 'Marigoule' giant chestnuts.

We visited the elder in the fruit-and-nut-growing field, Verner, at his biodynamic farm in Eastern Denmark. We gave them some black walnuts to divert attention from the chestnuts.

The easiest way of cooking chestnuts is by cutting them in quarters and then boil them or fry them.

The pellicle falls off easily when the chestnuts are heated for 10-15 minutes.

We run a chestnut breeding project to develop an improved population of chestnuts, according to the Philip Rutter method. Here is a trial planting.

Planting chestnut trees is lots of fun for old and young! The tree is tiny, but the potential is enormous.

We store chestnuts in sand with a steel net, to survive the winter months. In April we can plant the sprouting seeds outside.

My friend Ola gives a workshop of how to cook with acorns - a kind of bitter and complicated chestnut. The main advantage is that there are already a million oak trees here...

Chestnut trees are happy in mixed forests. Here with beech.

Agroforestry

One way of growing food trees is classic orchards, of course. Another option is to combine trees with other agricultural activities. This has the fancy name agroforestry. Classic wind breaks as well as tree-rows between strips of cultivation count as agroforestry. Even putting nut trees among cattle or chicken counts as agroforestry.

At the Holma Folkhögskola, we are currently designing an alley cropping system, which is an even fancier name of having trees in rows, and cultivating something useful inbetween. We will have fruit and nut trees in the rows, and vegetables and small-scale grains in between.

Planning for the tree rows, access roads and water points.

Marking the rows in the field. Is this really a good idea?

We visited the educational farm Angereds Gård just outside Göteborg. They planted quite a lot of trees in an agroforestry system during the last two years.

Mauricio shows the windbreak of poplars.

Mauricio and the group discuss pruning of hazel bushes.

It is a good design, I think, since they include chestnut trees...

October is such a great month, that I think that we will start to call this month Castanotober instead.

Veggie harvest

October is the end of the season for our vegetable and fruit harvest. Some nights will dip below zero for several hours and the frost kills off the most sensitive plants.

We had a few nights of frost. Both in the beginning of October and in the end.

Frost is beautiful but killing for tomatoes, pumpkins and peppers.

This year we trialled one plant of physialis and it grew beyond expectations. The fruit was amazing.

We also got a create of quince from a friends' food forest system. We boil the fruit and then conserve using the classic boiling method.

We started to fill up the storage room that we built this summer. The apples and quinces smell great.

Tools and toys

Technology is great, when it is simple and repairable. Preferrably as little digital as possible. This website is a simple system based on the 'Pelican' html-generating tool, to reduce the server load. (Thanks to Kris de Decker for the inspiration, see www.lowtech.be

Josef shows a very simple drying tool for grains. Maybe this will work for hazelnuts as well?

We prepare to open the tree shop the first Saturday of November.

Friends

Our good friends Marcel and Berthe came over for a long week-end from the Netherlands. Marcel is an amazing tree-lover who knows more trees than anyone I know. He knows them by first name.

Berthe helped to cook hot-sauce of our chilis.

Marcel just identified a black walnut tree in the park in Halmstad.

And we cooked pear sauce from buckets full of gleaned pears from a roadside tree.

Collaboration project

It has been a good month in many ways. We have had lots of time together with each other and with friends. And we have learned that we got a grant to run a project to popularize nut growing in Sweden. Together with Lova and Miljömatematik, we run a project for a year. The first deliverable was to setup a knowledge sharing platform, see SvenskaNötter.se. Part of it is an online-forum, just like internet used to be in the 1990s, with a bulletin-board system. It is our small contribution to move online collaboration away from the tech-bro platforms. We'll see how it goes...

2024-09-27 An apple a day

2024-09-27T00:00:00+02:00

An apple a day

Apples are the quintessential fruit in Scandinavia. It was introduced all the way from Central Asia to Sweden more than 4500 years ago, during the stone age. The oldest archeological finds are from 2500 BCE. Apples are still the most grown fruit, present in many private gardens and on most old farms. The commercial fruit growing in Sweden is mainly apples (1600ha out of total 1800ha.jpg). Apple trees grow well in the southern half of Sweden where most people live.

Despite the amazing characteristics of apples, most people don't take care of their fruit. An estimated 200,000 tons of apples rot away in gardens all over the country. How can that be? At the same time we import something like 100,000 ton apples every year.

Maybe we are so rich and spoiled that we think it is more convenient to buy a Chilean apple in Febriary, instead of storing some 'Belle van Boskoop' or 'Ingrid Marie' over the winter?

I suspect that the skills are missing. We train young people to recognize clothing brands and automobile variants, but not in the arts of picking ripe apples, how to store them for the winter, how to make apple sauce and cider.

We organized an apple event in September, in our small town. See link for some photos

Beforehand, I had talked to some people with lots of apples, and with the municipal garden service manager Kjeld. So we had four gardens with apples to pick. We also sent out an invitation to the local Nature conservancy association to invite for an apple-craft afternoon. In total we were 9 people, young and old, biking around town, picking apples and practicing storage methods.

We brought in 100kg apples, most to the participants, some to process.

We went to our place to cut up apples for apple sauce and for drying apple rings. It is great to work together - talking about collapse feels better when we do something useful.

An old apple-sauce maker that we bought on an on-line secondhand market last year. It will last another forty years, I think.

We put the apple sauce in used glass jars and boiled them afterwards (classic canning.jpg).

We also made some apple juice to ferment over winter.

There are quite a lot of apple trees along public roads that are full of delicious fruit. Most of the fruit just falls to the ground and rots away. It is better for the fruit quality to pick or remove the apples, to avoid spreading fungal diseases.

Fantastic, mostly flawless apples along the road from Genevad to Öringe.

Nuts

Almonds

Our friend Linda has a small but growing harvest of almonds 'Ingrid' from her place. She is both a homesteader and author. Her first book is on Kickstarter here during October 2024.

In the picture you see some almonds, and also a pre-copy of her new book.

Hazelnuts

We planted hazelnut bushes at my parents place four years ago, and they are starting to give a harvest.

Mother is happy with the first hazelnuts

A small bucket-bottom of prime hazelnuts. Next year more...

Chestnuts

It is not yet chestnut season here, but the trees look promising. We found a few new chestnut trees in the nearby towns of Halmstad and Helsingborg.

Helsingborg city park Kärnan has a cluster of chestnut trees (and walnut trees and Turkish hazel).

Veggie harvest

The most kilos of harvest this month is clearly tomatoes. Our hoop houses work great for tomatoes. Until now, almost no disease and very minor insect damage. We have a rotation system in place to have at least 4 years between planting tomatoes in the same place, but since we have only been here for two years, it is too early to tell if it will work out. Probably we will have to move one of the hoop houses every ten years or so.

Abundance and buckets full of tomatoes.

We eat at least half a kilo of tomatoes every day now.

Some of the tomatoes we boil and puree.

We can the tomatoes in old glass jars and in "Weck"-pots. Classic canning.

Some of the cherry tomatoes, we dry. They are delicious snacks for the winter days.

Out in the world

M and I went to a weekend with the Nature conservancy association (Naturskyddsföreningen.jpg) at a place very close to where we married 20 years ago. The topic was biodiversity, and it was interesting but disappointing. We talked a bit about the problem, but not much about what to do about it.

We visited a breeding station working with rare agricultural local breeds.

We also had a workshop on scything, with LieMats.

The sunset was great.

Tools and toys

For my birthday, I got a carbon steel pan and a oat-meal-flattener.
We try to get away from the PFAS-pans with non-stick coatings, and so far it has worked with everything except eggs. The black cast-iron pan works great for everything except eggs and pancakes, so M got me a carbon-steel version from De Buyer.

Steel pan that can fry eggs without sticking.

Friends

We are getting to know great people in our area. Once per month we have peasoup and pancakes for transition-style people, sometimes with a work-together afternoon. It is one way to strengthen the local networks, outside of the money-economy. We learn from each other and help out when needed. There is a lot of knowledge, especially with the older generation, and they are usually very happy if someone wants to listen and learn.

Ulrik and Hans helped to raise the "clothes line" for hardy kiwis.

We also organized a short "writer's retreat" at our place for a friend who is writing a book about the climate movement, civil disobediance and non-violence. I have read the first chapters and I really look forward to the release of the final book!

Pontus visited us (and we went to Kakor & Kackel in Knäred.jpg)

2024-08-31 Sunshine and hot, hot peppers

2024-08-31T00:00:00+02:00

Bragging hot

I like peppers. They grow great in our hoop house and they look amazing. We have several varieties, from 'Long slim' to 'Cayenne' and a few that have long lost their providence, but we keep seeding. They change over time, of course, due to cross-pollination with each other, but that matters not much. However, some chilis are just too hot for me. I think we will stop growing the hottest ones next year. They are just crazy. Braggingly high scoville-unit burn factor. For me, it is too complicated to dose the right amount into a stew. Too little, and the broth is bland. Just a sliver too much and it is too hot to handle. When I cook, I prefer the medium-hot chilis, where the right amount is "half-a-chili".

I wonder about the fascination for extremes that make the super-hot, almost-unusable chilis attractive to many (male, if I may) growers. Is it the same drive that excites people who own poisonous snakes and racing cars? The joy of playing with fire? Feeling alive, by being close to death?

Nowadays, being a middle aged content dude, I don't need many thrills to feel alive. Digging potatoes is enough for me to feel connected to the larger Universe. Cooking apple sauce. A laugh with a friend. An intimate moment with my wife. Swimming in the sea.

When I was younger, I loved the rush of travelling into the unknown, to faraway braggable destinations. The confusion and despair and fear, when I was hitchhiking over the Kazakh-Kyrgyzstan border, and was being held up by armed border patrols to join their barbecue party, was enough adrenaline to keep me going for months. Then I had to get away to an even crazier adventure in the Russian arctic, or to the Taklamakan desert. My thills were more important than the ecological destruction I caused by flying everywhere.

In many ways it was a distraction that helped me drudge along, in meaningless and well paid work for corporations that enriched the owners and destroyed the planet.

Nowadays, I am most days working on our farm and I enjoy smaller and less lethal experiences. Fresh baked bread. Tomatoes in season. I guess it is part of growing old and boring.

And on second thoughts, chilis are not bad. If someone chooses for an exciting scoville-burner instead of a heli-ski vacation or a muscle-car, I am all for it. Go hot!

The Trees

Chestnuts

Last winter was a disaster for our chestnut seeds. We had collected something like 3000 seeds, but almost all of them froze and died. Six trees came out. I cried when I smelled the rotting mess of dead seeds in the sand.

Coming winter, we have a different and hopefully vastly improved system for storing the seeds in our new cold-storage room, and we will be able to graft plenty of trees in 2026, and sell in 2027. Trees have long lead times...

In the meantime, we have collected all of the grafted chestnut tree varieties that are available in Sweden. (Sweden is still, unfortunately, a "protected zone" for chestnuts, so we are not allowed to bring in new and better varieties from abroad.) In the hoop houses, small chestnut trees are coppiced for graft-wood and they produce quite a lot of graft wood.

We have maybe 50 seedling trees left from last year that we can graft coming spring, to keep a small trickle of trees coming out, before scaling up seriously.

"Chestnut road" in nearby town Halmstad. Dying horse chestnut trees are replaced with sweet chestnut trees.

Trees are mysterious. One chestnut tree died. The roots died, and the graft tried to form new roots, but failed.

Walnuts

The walnut trees that we grafted in May are looking good. About half of the grafts took, a bit dependent on the quality of the graft wood, I think. We had only fifty rootstock to graft on, but coming spring we will have a couple of hundred small trees.

One of the walnut trees that was grafted this spring.

We also seeded quite a lot of Japanese Walnuts - Juglans ailantifolia - to use as rootstock for Heart-nuts. They look and taste great and are very cold-hardy. The total nut yield mass is lower than for ordinary walnuts, but for home garden use, they are fantastic. The leaves are beautiful and the trees grow vigorously and wide, perfect parasol-trees for a larger garden.

Heart-nut tree in Marc's garden grows 2 meters this year. Amazing trees.

Hazelnut bushes

We are eagerly waiting for the stump-layered bushes to make roots in the sand that was added in Midsummer time. In the sand, we hope that the branches will make many new roots, but we will only know when we remove the sand in December. After that, the small trees will have a year or two of strengthening up before being ready to sell and plant out.

We have seen a new disease in hazel nuts this year, at Janet's place.

The nut changes colour to chocolate, the rots off. What is this?

Nut tree park

Peter guided the nut growers from Holma through the arboretum in Alnarp, near Malmö. Nut trees grow there for more than one hundred years and some have reached considerable size and harvest volume.

A cluster of sweet chestnut trees (with small nuts) grow well here.

The Japanese walnut trees. Beautiful trees.

Swedish nut growing

This year, our friend Håkan in Vollsjö, has officially re-opened the Swedish commercial market for locally grown nuts. His hazelnut plantation started to yield this year and he could deliver to a few top-notch restaurants who were enthousiastic about the freshness and quality.

Swedish commercial nut growing has been gone for fifty years, and is now making a comeback. This is exciting and promising. There are now tools and techniques that reduce labour and make it economical to grow and sell nuts, despite the current EU subsidy system that promotes high-volume, large-scale operations.

It is great to be part of this movement.

Veggies

We have a good harvest season. Plenty of tomatoes and potatoes. Some great pumpkins. Quite a lot of chard. Crispy carrots. Some disappointments as well, with record amounts of snails eating leek, dahlia and onion.

M spotted a twin cucumber.

A pumpkin shines light on the rest of the garden. Next year we will expand pumpkins in a different place.

Friends and fruit

On a short tour to the East coast, I visited Ann Marie, who grows an array of amazing fruit and nut trees. Her sweet chestnut tree is unique in that it is self-pollinating. She also has a series of red-fleshed apples, some sweeter than others.

Dark red apple tree.

The skin is almost black and the flesh is like beetroot.

We are so happy to meet old and new friends this summer. We had a visit by the Farmer and the Chef, Eva-Maria and Martijn.

Eva Maria & M meeting up at our place

Our friend and carpenter Palle helps with our outdoor loo for the summer party.

A new activist café

Now the café is open every week-end in Västralt. Stina is making amazing bread and Palle shares stories about a good life inside planetary boundaries. They lead by example in circular-nutrients, beautiful buildings and happy life. I imagine the concept of "RetroSuburbia" manifest in everything they do. They inspire dozens of visitors to live lighter.

Activist café - Stina baking bread and making vegan cake. Hampus helps serving and cleaning.

When we have friends over, we go there. This time with Signe.

Apple sauce

August is the start of the apple sauce season. We have no apple trees to harvest, yet, so we go around looking for fruit. Both in public places and in gardens where we ring the bell and ask to take part of the bounty.

One of the trees along the bike road, the old train tracks.

Summer apples - light and sweet.

M is cutting parts of the apples, and removes any rotten pieces.

We boil the apples a couple of minutes until soft.

We use an old Bosch meat grinder with mashing unit to smash the apples and separate out seeds and skin.

September will see more apple harvest. I hope we can fill our cool-storage room with plenty of apples!

2024-07-28 Harvest season is here

2024-07-28T00:00:00+02:00

Harvest season, or "As you sow..."

Once upon a time, we taught our children that there are consequences for our actions. The debts we took on had to be paid back. There was a lot of talk about responsibility (in the personal kind, not the blame-someone-else type of responsibility rants as we often hear nowadays.

I am a bit old-fashioned. The older I get, the more conservative I get. (Could it be a drying process? That my brains lose the wet mush of youth and turn into cardboard papier-maché?) I admire people who can wield a scythe. Those who know how to plow using a horse (e.g. Jan-Erik Linde). Those who can build anything with second use materials.

The metaphor that was common in those days was a backwards farming-life allegory based on seeds. Nowadays, most seed companies in the world are owned by a handful oligarchs who own most of the seeds that we plant, even in our own gardens. Who would have thought that someone else could own the seed genetics of a seed that we bought for mad cash? My seed is no longer my seed... Is it due to the acoustic backing of Nick Cave?

These days are confusing. Money is no longer what it used to be and debts seem to accumulate without end. There is an arbitrary element regarding who gets to keep borrowing and who is suddenly called to the bank to deliver the goods or go into indenture slavery. My guess is that the one who makes this decision has the real power in our society today.

The most excellent Graeber wrote about the perils of lending money to Kings. They would never pay back, but expect more next time they come around. Who are these kings today?

When I cannot figure out what is going on in the world, I go out to the trees and the veggie patch. There, reality rules. One reality is the temperature. Today was a mild 22C summer day. Perfect growing conditions.

We have busted straight through the 1.5C limit of the famed Paris Accord, even before the 10 year anniversary could be celebrated, and nobody has yet stepped on any break. We still accellerate into the abyss. This week, Paris is the capital of gold medals. Will the trees that we plant survive us?

Trees love the sun-rain-sun-rain weather

Chestnuts

We grafted 100+ chestnut trees in May, and now it is clear that some of them have been successful. Some have clearly not taken, and some are slow to bud out.

Chestnut grafts from May start to grow out.

Same chestnut graft from the other side.

Some only bud out now in July. Why? Was it a dormant bud?

I found some chestnut graftwood ('Bournette') in the cooler when I cleaned out for the summer cleaning. So I made another attempt with the rootstock where the graft had not been successful. I could make 12 new grafts. I have never grafted this late in the season, and the graftwood has been in the cooler since December. Low chance of success, but why not try?

A test for a late chestnut graft in July. Will it take? (apologies for the out-of-focus photo)

When I visited my older brother and his wife, I picked up a bag of ready-to-eat cooked chestnuts in the shop. This kind of product was common in China when we lived there, with various flavours. It is the first time I see this in Europe.

Cooked chestnuts, ready to snack!

Hazelnut propagation

We do hazelnut propagation in a very similar way to what was described by Alphones du Breuil in 1846 (illustration from Wikipedia). We cut the hazelnut bush down to the ground in the winter and let new shoots emerge, that we try to root in a pile of sand.

Illustration of the general idea.

We use a bucket without bottom to keep the sand in place.

Using a ring-pliers, we make a strangulation on each shoot.

Maybe you see the green rings on the branches, quite low.

Then we fill the bucket with sawdust and sand and wait until Christmas.

E cut off the bottoms of the buckets.

Walnuts

Walnuts, especially the more sensitive grafted trees, are borderline hardy here, so it is great to be part of introducing new and more resilient varieties. And to meet people who already grow walnuts here.

The walnut seedlings were late to sprout, but now they come up in most places.

We get to know lots of great people. Here is Peter B's walnut tree.

Fruit

The first fruits to deliver are the berries. We have already finished the currants, and now the gooseberries are sweet and sensual.

Veggie time

Veggie harvest is boosting these days.

The last beet roots are plump and juicy.

M enjoys the fragrance of the garlic

These beautiful flowers are edible - Hemerocallis - day lilies.

Not a veggie, but a surprisingly fragrant clover - Trifolium resupinatum

Farm improvements

We have now finished the potato cool-storage and white-washed the clay render with lime.

J helped out with the painting of the new side of the house that we got installed last year. Lineseed oil paint is great to work with, but dries veeeery slowly.

Life in a small town

Small town life here also includes the confrontation with industrial chemical farming. 1000 hectares of potatoes, which is not organic means lots of chemical spraying. Here is a kilometer from our place, a bi-weekly fungicide dressing. And some people wonder why there are so few insects?

The other day, I met a Dutch guy, Peter, who was participating in a bicycle race from the Northernmost part of Sweden to the southern tip: 2100km in seven days. He was using a tricycle with an aerodynamic foil, a.k.a. Velomobiel de Snoek. One day I will also get one of those. I hope before I get too old to climb in and out.

The future of mobility - low-energy vehicle.

2024-06-23 We prune the prunes in June?

2024-06-23T00:00:00+02:00

June pruning?

In the entertaining book "Fruit for Life" by Tim Foster, he tells about the old rhyme to prune the prunes (e.g. plums, cherries, abricots etc.) in June. The old cherry tree gave two cherries this year, and they are long gone, so now would be a good time to reshape and give more light to next year's flowers. But the plums are far from ripe, so I let them hang and wait until harvest is done before I take out the secateurs to clean up the wild growth.

The days are long and the weather is great - rain every second day - so everything grows like crazy. Including the weeds... I am so happy that we could clean up in many places during April and May and protect the soil with woodchips to reduce weed pressure. Our most excellent intern Jane did a great job.

Trees for life

Air pruning

The walnuts grow great in the air-prune beds. We have to water them separately, they are one of the few crops that is not connected to a dripline. The fact that we have to give them water make us go there more often. The more I watch them and can remove small weeds early, the less work it is later.

Small walnut trees - to graft on next April.

Chestnuts bud out

The chestnut trees that we grafted in May have budded out. Some budded out after a week or two, but some only come now, seven weeks later. I think these ones had only "dormant buds" under the skin, which is why they took some time to develop.

Chestnut budding out, seven weeks after grafting.

Stolen fruit

We tried this year to sow Japanese walnuts outside, in a garden bed. Our neighbours, the rooks, found them and had a large walk-in buffet of nuts and young nut trees.

I love biodiversity and the rooks, but next year I have to figure out something to keep them away. Maybe a net above the nursery bed, and some free-to-eat nuts on the side for the rooks?

The rooks dig out the small trees.

Sometimes they eat half the nut and come back next day for the other half.

Edible park in town

We live in a small and picturesque town, with a beautiful central garden. Lots of people enjoy this place, and I am happy to see all the edible trees that have been planted. Not only chestnut and walnut trees, but also American pawpaw and Asian onion-tree.

Pawpaw tree - with light and drooping leaves. No blossoms yet, but in a few years, this tree will give lots of great fruit.

Along the bike path, there is a magnificent Toona sinensis - a vegetable tree. The young leaves are used in cooking, quite a lot like leek.

Botanical expertise

We joined the local Nature conservancy group ("Naturskyddsföreningen") and have been on a few excursions to see plants and hear stories. It is amazing how knowledgeable some people are about the little mosses and ferns and lichen and beach cabbage.

Our guide, Lars-Erik shows the water cress groing wild in the artesian well, not far from the sea.

The main focus on trips like this are on the rarities. This blue flower is "spiked speedwell", which sound more like a snorting drug than a flower.

Larger than life

We encounter life in many forms on the farm. When we picked up a load of old organic cow manure from our friend Gun's farm, we found this huge caterpillar.

E. shows the caterpillar.

It is the largest caterpillar that we have seen so far.

Death is everywhere

The agricultural area around our place is industrial, for about 10km in every direction, with minor gaps and occasional hedgerows. Every week, we see different fields being sprayed. The worst fields are the sugar beet and potatoe fields, where the sprayers drive over every other week throughout the summer. Especially when there is rain, fungi are ready to attack, which means that the sprayers are not far behind. When some organisms die, others also die.

All this toxic poison leaches through the sandy soil into the ground water and into the river and the ocean.

Anyone thinking about consequences?

Typical effect of selective herbicides, where the corn keeps growing and everything else withers.

Home made fertilizer

We visited an amazing couple who live five kilomters from us. For 25 years, they have been using composting toilets with urine diversion. All their amazing garden is fertilized with home made golden water. They had an ingenious system with free downhill flow. Their houses and loos are located on the highest point in the garden, and from there, the urine flows in tubes into tanks that can be accessed directly from the garden. No carrying of buckets like we do. Very ergonomic and hygienic.

Jan-Erik shows us how the tanks are connected and how the irrigation works. This is the future!

2024-05-22 Come What May

2024-05-22T00:00:00+02:00

Come What May

We live in a time of slow and inevitable collapse, as the most excellent blogger Chris eloquently describes from his small-farm, small-business perspective from the other side of the planet. We have been overloading the planet for fifty years and the ecosystems start to unravel. At the same time we run out of the resources upon which we have developed an addiction.

This week I was in our capital, visiting the premier researchers on sustainability science. Some of the smartest people in the world working on understanding the interconnectedness and what we should do to transform society. They dispair. One young PhD student told me that she would like to live within planetary boundaries, but if she did not participate in the international conference scene, she would not get a researchers' position anywhere. She felt that even the discipline of sustainability science is built on the same edifice as our crumbling civilization. Another told me that the research seemed a bit pointless. From a zoom-out perspective, we have all the facts to act now. We don't need another decimal to the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet. Politics could act now, or could have acted decades ago, if science were the bottleneck. The light and modern and elegant office environment was a stark contrast to the dark realities with which these young people wrestle. The older researchers seemed more laconic and assimilated into the university bureaucrazy. I think that no revolution will start here. But I secretly hope that I am wrong.

We talked about simple things that have worked in the past. We have changed the societal attitude towards smoking during my lifetime. By consistent messaging from the official society and by blocking advertising. We could do the same for flying, but we don't.

If our political leadership took this serious, they would start weekly press-conferences, announcing restrictions, just like in the pandemic times of the past couple of years. No additional science needed.

I cannot make anyone else want something, so come what may.

Hoopla!

Back on the farm, we have had amazing developments. Thanks to the intern Jane and that I now only work one day a week in the off-farm office job, we have been able to put a lot of infrastructure in place.

We built the second hoop-house:

Uncle Bosse helped to raise the second hoop house.

Jonatan spent a week with us, and helped to attach the UV-stabilized polyethylene skin.

The two hoop houses are in line and you also see some of the wood chips that have been spread out.

Walhalla - something with walnuts?

This year we have been sowing walnuts for the first time. We collected 30 kg of nuts in a nearby town, and saved something like 7kg over winter to sow. We kept them in moist sand in a fridge in a garage, with a thermostat setting of 0-1 centigrades, just above freezing. What I had not anticipated was that the temperature in the garage dropped to -20C and inside the fridge, the minimum temperature was around -10C. The walnuts survived fine, but approx. 80% of the chestnut seeds froze to death... Next year in a different place. Or a supplementary heater inside the fridge.

Anyways, we have sown walnuts both in air-pruning beds and in the ground in the new hoop-house.

The walnut trees that were seeded in April are now shooting out of the ground.

Some seeds start to sprout in the sand. What comes first is a rootlet, and is planted vertically downwards.

They are full of life, these walnuts, after six months in moist, cool sand. I take them out of cooling a few days before planting.

We had a few small trees of walnut rootstock that I got from my friend Jan. We grafted delicious varieties onto those in April and after three weeks we could take them out of the hot-pipe and planted them in the field. The purple color comes from a grafting wax that helps to keep moisture in the scion during the hotpipe sejour.

If you look with a sharp eye, you will notice a green shoot coming out of one of these purple sticks.

Water is life

We continued building infrastructure for rainwater and for the dug well that we use for irrigation. Last year in June, we overloaded the pump by running hot when the well was sucked dry. Now we have installed an electric sensor system that turns off the pump if the water level goes below a certain limit. We tried to suck the well dry, but the groundwater level is fortunately now so high that the influx was larger than the pump capacity. Therefore don't yet know if the sensor system works. I am almost sure it will work, but since I have not been able to test it, there may be something I have overlooked.

We have had no rain for four weeks and +25C weather and dry Eastern wind, so the ground water table is dropping. On the one hand, I want rain, but on the other, I would like to see how the sensor in the well works. Come what may...

The wall mounted white box contains the logic and the relay for the green hydrophore pump.

We have now 600 meters of drip irrigation, but some parts of our gardens we still need to water with hoses.

To the left you see apples, and a row of lying rootstock apple trees to propagate A2 and B9 rootstock. And drip.

This year we pre-emptively cover the kale to see if we can reduce moth/caterpillar damage.

Denmark - Scandinavia's kingdom of nuts

There used to be a vibrant nut growing tradition all over Scandinavia, but the commercial growers in Sweden all closed down after WWII. It was so much cheaper to just import from Italy and Turkey. In Denmark, there are still a few operational orchards left, from 1900s. And during the last 5 years more than 200 hectares have been planted to new orchards. Sweden is far behind in this development, so we went to the Danish island of Fyn to visit some nut growers and the best nut tree nursery of the Nordic countries.

2024-04-19 April's Fool

2024-04-19T00:00:00+02:00

April's fool

Who is the greater fool? Probably me.

Many of my old friends think that we are crazy who moved to a farm, just outside a forgotten small town. What could possibly be interesting out there?, they scoff.

When I talk to old buddies, from my engineering past, they tell me about their strategic career moves and expensive company cars. The boredom I feel when they mention their latest stock exchange position is only equalled by the boredom they suffer when I talk about soil. I guess it is called "drifting apart"?

One day a week, I am in an office doing paid work, to the great relief to my slightly worried parents. They think that I have an open door back into the mainstream middle class life. And it is kind of true. (As in, if the farm burned down, I probably could to go back into the office world for some time. My optionality is of course based on my privileges and how I can leverage all unfair advantages that have been heaped upon me. But that is another story.)

My consolation when I think of the friends that I lost, is that I have made so many new phenomenal friends and met amazing and inspiring people. Much more interesting than in the office world. People who actually compost their own shit. Amazing bread makers. Wood artists. Musicians. Poets. Activists and political utopist philosophers. People who inspire and share their wisdom and experience.

Amazing people who seem to enjoy hanging around with us tree loving fools.

Snow surprise then sunshine

April weather here is know to be unreliable. One morning in early April we woke up to a decimeter of snow. It was beautiful for a couple of days, but later in the week it all rained away.

A beautiful evening sky full of heavy snowflakes

A few days later we had the first summer clouds passing by.

I think these coulds are called Cumulus, but I am not sure. We only see them in the Summer.

Interns and learnings

Being an old guy, one of the most cherished moments is when someone comes to ask me something, so that I can tell stories. Even better when someone wants to learn a skill that I could share. Both M and me love teaching.

Often when I am asked, I think to myself, (insightully prompted by Chris): What do I really know about this? Probably not all that much, really. Nevertheless, teaching moments are good opportunities to distinguish things that I read in a book from what I have experienced myself. To tease out hearsay from observation. Exaggerations and extrapolations from inferences. The challenge is to not water it all down to "it depends".

This month is exceptional. Many opportunities for talking and feeling important. We had one of our boys come by for a week, with a friend, to do a couple of days of organic veggie growing practice.

We also have an intern from the Swedish Agricultural University, who will be here for nine weeks. She works hard and I have a tough time keeping up with the intensity. More things were done in the first three weeks with the intern at the farm, compared with the first three months of the year. She helps out with both practical work and helping out to get our soil tested. So far very good.

I also got the opportunity to give lectures and workshops at a few different places, among others in a beautiful refurbished barn in Unnaryd, up in the woods, at a club and at a University.

Interns E and M planting chestnut seeds.

The beautiful Studio Folkhemmet in Unnaryd.

Cozy place

Our place gets more and more cozy. We continue the work indoors and outdoors to make the farm conducive to life and love.

This duck found one of our flower beds a cozy place to nest. She made seven eggs and is now brooding.

We continued with the clay render finish of the cool storage. A long term project that is not urgent but important.

Grafting season started

We started the grafting season this week. I love the meditative concentration of working with sharp tools. First a day of walnut tree grafting and later an afternoon of grafting fruit trees for friends.

Intern J, in deep concentration.

Most of the grafts are "whip and tongue", like this walnut tree

This is how happy we are when a graft looks good! We are even happier a month later when we can see that the scion is growing!

Friends who moved from Australia to Sweden are here to learn grafting.

K and A have bought a farm where they are planting lots of good trees.

Even apple trees make us happy.

Trees love to grow

We visited our good friend Marc, who planted nut trees ten years ago. It is amazing to see the good growth and generous harvests at his place.

To the right is a chestnut tree, eight years after planting.

Back on the farm, we look at the seedling walnuts in the air-pruning bed

Water is life

Our soils are sandy and last year we had a terrible dry spell with eight weeks in May and June without rain and many days above 30 degrees C. I failed to water the trees properly and we had some losses.

This year, we are preparing for spigots on six new places and are prepared to roll out three hundred more meters of drip irrigation if needed.

Today I took out the two-wheel tractor and mounted the revered rotary plow "GroundBlaster". Moving along the pathways, where I will not rototill, I dug out a trench into which we could place the polyethylene tubing.

It is a bit of a gamble to use the quite narrow 20mm tubing that I had bought last year, since it is 75 meters from the pump to the furthest spigot. Will the resistance in the tube be too much? I made a test with the whole roll of 100m PE tube, and the water flow out of the other end was acceptable, I think, but I am not sure. We will soon see. In the coming days I will mount the spigots and test with the drip lines. The drip only need 1 bar overpressure, at quite low flow rates, so it could be ok. We will see...

Here are some photos of the trenches that we made. It is probably not possible to understand for you, but for us it is important to take many photos to remember where we dug in the pipe.

We made the trench quite superficial, with 15-25 cm depth. It will not be frost free in the winter, but that should be ok, since only plastic parts are in the soil. The main challenge is to avoid cutting the pipe with a shovel or a rototiller.

The water comes out of the stable, where the pump and the well are placed.

View from the highest point of our field, down towards where the water comes from.

Connection to where our second poly-tunnel will come.

Moving backwards towards the stable.

Turning around towards the stable.

The second branch line for water, to the hazel field and the first poly-tunnel (behind me)

To a spigot in the center of the first poly-tunnel.

Intern J placing the tubing in the trench.

We also started to collect rain water in 1000 liter tanks. For our Australian friends these tanks are tiny...

2024-03-29 Spring is coming

2024-03-29T00:00:00+01:00

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.

Diverse species wind break - here Aronias.

The eastern border gets the winter winds.

Garden wakeup

It is great to see the garden wake up in the spring time. Today we spotted the first butterflies.

Rhubarb comes back

Cuttings of the yellow flexible willow, with which we can make knots.

Transplanted to get more root volume before planting out.

There are a few flowers that I still don't know.

What are these?

Narcissus

Crocuses

Another unknown flower. What is the name? Could it be a hyacinth?

2024-02-25 Cold and wet

2024-02-25T00:00:00+01:00

February - Cold and wet

This month I am re-reading the most excellent book Overshoot by William R. Catton. If you have not read it yet, make a note to get a copy from your local library, and read and reflect. The predicament of our Civilization is long in the making, and Catton makes that perfectly clear, using the language and concepts of ecology, as if Homo sapiens is an animal among others. As if we are not 'above' the other species.

His dry humor penetrates the delusion of 'human ingenuiety', and I realized again how dependent my lifestyle is on mining. Mining is by definition a temporary activity. Everywhere I look in our place, especially while writing these words on my computer, I see manifestations of mines and mining. Not much would be here without minerals and fossil carbon.

The scientific spotlight on our conundrum is unforgiving. The Overshoot book has a very different message than the cheerfully coloured UN "Sustainable Development Goals", where some rich countries like Sweden have top scores (despite being completely dependent on myopic strategies like mining).

We are in for a ride.

The main focus for me for the coming time is to continue to reduce dependencies on grid electricity and centralized systems.

One incident happened last week, which again highlighted a weak link in a chain, and how a temporary fix is called a 'solution'.

Snowmelt and flood

Since December, a small lake has been forming on our neighbour's land. Since early February, a second lake formed on the other side of their farm. There are fields of approx 500 hectares that are drained to a culvert system that passes under our small land, below another neighbours asphalt driveway and passes under the large road to the West of our place in a large pipe.

Lake forming at our neighbour's land. Our place is on this side of the white fence.

The pipe was clogged under the asphalt somewhere, so the stormwater could pass the road bank. Therefore the ground water level kept rising, until last week it went above ground level.

Ground water level is now higher than the soil level

Walnut trees do not like this. Fortunately only for two days. This time.

After a day of slight panic and many phonecalls, a pipe-cleaning contractor came to clear out the culvert.

The next day, I dug a hole to better monitor the ground water level, now at 40cm below.

During pipe cleaning, quite a lot of sand and gravel came with the water, which means that the pipe is broken somewhere below the tarmac. The 'solution' is just a postponement of replacing the broken pipe.

I also think that the clogging is due to eutrophication from the fields, which leads to a strong growth of a kind of algae mats inside the pipes. These algal clots sometimes let loose and cause an blockage of this vital artery of our water system.

In the past, the water went through an open ditch/stream, and I wonder if it is not better to sacrifice some productive land and make an open waterway again, at least across our place until the road bank culvert.

Or have a specialized contractor dig in another pipe under the road, to have a backup solution in place when this happens next time...

Floor plans

Our Sunny Room is now almost ready. Since we got new windows in place in September, we have been fixing lots of small things, and the last thing to arrange was to paint the floor. Inspired by our friends Palle and Stina, we decided to paint using egg-oil-tempera, with burned earth as pigment.

10 eggs + 500g lineseed oil makes a nice mayonnaise, plus 500g water mixed with 500g burned earth.

The mixture looks and feels like chocolate sauce. But it smells quite strongly from the lineseed oil.

This time we purchased earth pigments. Next time maybe we can find some interesting soil nearby?

In a dance, we got the floor painted.

Two disadvantages so far:

Very slow drying of the paint. It takes a week between coatings and at least a month before the smell is gone. I realize why modern building painters don't choose to use this kind of edible paint - it would be too time consuming and therefore costly. But for us who have time, it works great.
Too matte surface. It gets dirty too quickly. We are looking into how to make it more glossy. Maybe a shot of pure lineseed oil will do the trick. We will try in a corner.

Graft and grift?

Winter time is also a time for cutting cuttings. I did only take photos of a few places, here is the amazing forest garden of Bosse outside Goteborg. At this place, it works. He has hundreds of different trees and bushes and climbers with the most amazing flavours.

I got some chestnut graft wood, which is very precious in Sweden, since we have strong import restrictions.

Bosse at his amazing forest garden

A bag full of genetics

Lent to remember the hunger gap

We made some Swedish style 'semla' for the mardigras celebration. It is a sweet and greasy bun that was eaten the day before the lent started, to gain some additional calories to survive the semi-fasting period of 40+ days until Easter.

Traditionally, they are filled with marzipan, but we made a hazelnut filling which was great.

Almonds are much more difficult to grow here than hazelnuts. So we used hazelnut mixed with honey instead of classic marzipan.

Sweet and fat.

Nowadays, most people, including us, just eat the bun and skip the fasting.

Nut growing course

Last year, I was one of the teachers to hold a nut growers' skills training course at Holma Folkhogskola. It was quite appreciated and we decided to run it again this year. It is a 12-day training, spread over 9 week-ends over a whole year.

We started by planting a hazelbush 'Gunslebert', and everyone got a shrub to bring home to plant as homework for next time.

Walnut seedlings in air-prune beds made of pallet-collars. Clever!

Clear cut

No words can express the pain of the stupid clear cuts that plage our forests.

Vole wars

Those of you who read regularly know that we wage a war with our rodents called water voles (Arvicola amphibius). They are vegetarians, which is good. However, their favourite food is tree roots, which is not so good for our tree nursery.

We surround these poor rodents with candy. How could they resist?

The roots are all gone. This was a 'Red Cascade' silverberry.

This was a kaki tree 'Russian Beauty'

This was a fig tree

In the beginning, I planted only our apples and prunes in nets, but now we have resorted to netting all tree roots of the trees that are here to stay.

Steel mesh around the roots to discourage rodent nibbling

I tried to entice the voles to move out, but when that failed, we erected a steel mesh fence around our whole property and are now waging a war of attrition.

I use five different kinds of traps, but so far only one of them has caught voles (so far nine voles).

And the visiting dog Ester.

Ester, the vole hunter.

We are not yet ready for a dog at our place. We are still too often out for a week-end or off all day on lectures or other paid work, and have not found enough back-up here. One day, when our roots here are deeper, I think a dog will join us on the farm.

In the meantime, visitors like Ester are most welcome!

They are beautiful creatures, like small beavers

Larger than mice, smaller than rats

The only trap that has worked until now is the Top-Cat trap by Andermatt.ch. It is a Swiss company, and it is a high quality product. Since snow melt I have caught approx 2-3 per week. I think we are only half-way.

I also purchased four of their Standby traps, but so far, no vole has been trapped in those ones.

The gun-powder-powered Kerbl did not yet fire.

The Swissflex traps have not yet shown their killing skills.

And the old clamp that I got from my Uncle Bo did not once clamp shut.

Farm Chips

Around us, there are quite a few potato farmers, and some potato processing industry. One of the factories make chips/crisps called "Farm Chips".

Why is our society so forgiving to corporate lies?

That is a question I have been thinking a lot about lately, and I do not know the answer.

When I grew up in the 1980s, we were laughing at the Soviet Union, where the TV news did not tell the truth. Every year was a 'record harvest', even though there sometimes were bread queues. The name of the main newspaper - 'Pravda' - was kind of a joke, since it means 'The Truth'.

However, nowadays, half the content of any newspaper I pick up in the Western World is advertisement, i.e. lies. Why do we accept that? What do you think?

A most unusual farm.

2024-01-28 Winter ways

2024-01-28T00:00:00+01:00

January - Winter ways

Clay render

This fall and winter, we have intermittently worked on our sunny room. It is the south-most room in the old part of our house, built in the 1800s. We chose to put in large new windows in the hitherto window-less south wall of our house, to invite more sunshine.

This room was used as a laundry room until the 1980s, with a wood-fired water kettle for washing. Water was brought in from the adjacent beech, which no longer is visible. The stream was buried in a concrete pipe sometime in the 1980s. Now that concrete pipe has some problems, since the throughput is constricted, which leads to flooding at our neighbour, and high water table in our basement.

Anyways, we applied clay render on the southern wall end as well as on part of the floor. We had tried once at our friends place, and this was the first time we did it ourselves. Not perfectly smooth, but very artisanal.

We use clay from somewhere else, and our own sand from our garden in the mix, as well as some horse manure from the neighbour.

Clay render mix. 1 part clay, 3 parts sand, 0.5 part horsedung, 1.5 parts water.

We also learned how to make edible paint, a.k.a. egg-tempera.

We make two separate mixes: One mayonnaise out of 10 eggs + same weight lineseed oil. The other is a mix of same weight of water + pigment. We used iron oxide, zinc oxide and burned soil as pigments, all of which we got from the excellent artisanal paint dealer Claessons.

It is great to work with edible materials (except the zinc oxide).

Walls and floor painted with egg-oil-tempera with iron oxide (yellow) and burned earth/umbra (floor)

Tracking time

Winter is a time when the movement of animals is recorded as tracks in the snow. The exploratory movement of a couple of hares in our tree nursery was shown in December, and now we have blocked the last entry point:

Mice are very active next to our house, and we have caught a dozen or so this winter. They are fine, as long as they stay outdoors, and especially if they don't eat our nut that we store for seeds. Every winter we lose some seeds, and that is fine. We collect much more than we need.

Mice tracks

On the other other hand, we have a real problem with water voles, a kind of burrowing vegetarian rat that loves to eat roots of trees. We can see their movement under the snow surface, and in some places we see the openings to their burrows.

We are still losing trees to these d***head rats. Every week one or two of the hazel bushes is lost, and we have ten traps of three types to capture and kill the evasive rodents. Until now, the battle is not quick. One type of trap, with a guilliotine mechanism (top-cat) is the only one that has worked so far. Five down using that one.

The other two types (stand-by and swiss-flex) have not yet yielded any kills. If you have positive experiences with these two types of traps, please let me know how you do it.

Water voles in the snow

Water vole burrow

A kilometer from our place is a small woods, maybe 200x500 meters. We took a walk in the snow and enjoyed the beautiful sunshine.

We found tracks from a whole family of wild boar. I hope they stay away from our place. They could easily upturn our fields in a single night, even though they would not eat our trees, just our vegetables.

Dance tracks from the boars

Sleeping place for a family of boars

When the snow melted in the end of January, we could even see tracks in the fields across the road, 500 meters the other direction.

Boar tracks in the field

Trees talk slowly

Winter makes trees even more beautiful. We had the rainiest fall in recorded history, with very little sunshine since July 1st. Maybe that's why it feels so liberating with cold winter days that start in mist and develop into sparkling diamond showers.

Trees in the morning

Trees on the bike road into town

An oak, where the boars live

More trees in snow - what a joy!

Solar power and shade

Our Solar PV installation is doing great some days. The winter sunshine can be terrific, though short. For a couple of hours, we can reach quite good output. Some days there is nothing, despite the sunshine, since the panels sometimes are covered in a few cm of snow.

And as has been suggested elsewhere: little energy for plants to grow means very little surplus energy to harvest with our electronic devices.

Solar panels - no power

One nice example of shade trees for summer use are these well-pruned linden trees in Gothenburg. We will do a similar thing on the south side of our place, to show how much more energy efficient a green wall is, compared to air conditioning.

Well pruned linden trees - shade in the summer, beautiful branches and light in the winter

Winter work

There are many maintenance tasks to do in the winter months. Finishing the bookkeeping for the business and preparing the tax documents. Planning the next season. Improving the webshop. And oiling the woodden handles of all the garden tools. We use local lineseed oil, which is slow to dry but durable and edible. I more and more enjoy using compostable materials.

The workshop with tools

Romantic comeback

We had a trip to Ljungskile - the place where we got married 20 years ago. I participated in a panel at the local community college about sustainability. I talked about my own debilitating delusions of growth-focus and techno-narcissism that I used to cherish.

M and me stayed overnight there and had a romantic breakfast before taking the bus and train to travel home through the winter world.

In this chapel we got married in 2004. Time flies

2023-12-30 Winter and holidays

2023-12-30T00:00:00+01:00

December - Winter and Holidays

Titans of waste

I would like to start with a winter story I heard a few times when I lived in Russia in the 1990s. It was an anecdote about the poor results of state-led allocation of resources.

"In the Soviet Union times, the government resource planning agency (GosPlan) decided who would get which materials and how much. In the 1950s, a large part of the titanium metal production was allocated to the metal strips on childrens snow-sledges. Said and done, such was the production. At the time, the engineers who were working on the space programme needed titanium for the rockets and the spacecrafts for Laika and for Yuri Gagarin, but this initiative started halfway through a five-year plan, so they had no allocated titanium. The engineers went out all over the country to purchase sledges, and re-machine the metal strips into usable titanium sheets to build their rockets!"

It is hard to verify the veracity of the story, and if anyone has some sources or links, please let me know! The point was of course that "the market" would allocate resources much more efficiently than a Moscow bureaucrat. In the 1990s, the market extremists were very loud and convincing. I fully bought their message at the time.

Anyways, jump forward to the fall of 2023, and I was looking into titanium use in OECD. The immediate reason was that EU has declared titanium to be a "strategic raw material". There will come new legislation deciding how much of the titanium used in the EU must be recycled, and I was looking into how we use this valuable and important mineral. Some of the titanium is used in metal form in various alloys, and the pure metals can be found, isolated and re-used. But not all titanium is in metal form...

As is common these days, we leave it to the market to find the most optimal use of this resource as well. Today, more than half of all titanium is used as titaniumoxide (TiO2) - a white pigment used in lots of paints, coatings, toothpaste and even "coffee-whitener".

This kind of use is a one-way use. We spread out the titanium in a thin layer over the whole planet and it will never come back to be recycled and re-used. It is lost essentially forever.

Are we really so much smarter than the Soviet GosPlan functionaries?

Winter work - scion cutting

The most important tree nursery task for the winter is to cut scion wood when the trees are asleep. For us here in Sweden, the most important tree is the sweet chestnut, since there are restrictions on importation for graft wood. My good friend Anders Linden has some beautiful trees from large-fruited varieties like 'Comballe', and I was allowed to come cut scion wood. It was a snowy and cozy day in his food forest.

Winter Tracks

We have now placed a steel mesh fence around our whole property, to keep out hares and water voles and other tree eaters. When the snow fell, we could walk around to see where the animals move and if there are any gaps in the fence. We had left one big opening on our driveway, where we thought no hares would run, but that was not true. We saw tracks from two different hares, running a wonderful round in our property before exiting. Fortunately, no damage on the trees.

We could also see several places where the water voles were moving, and one place next to our compost pile where the mice were super active!

Continuning the masonry for the potato cellar

For several months, I have started too many other parallel projects, so I had no time to work on the potato cellar - a cold and wet storage for apples, potatoes, carrots. One of our boys was home for a few days and we contined with a few more layers of light-concrete brick.

We use a mix of clay and sand to stick the wall together. The walls stand on a strong concrete foundation and we secure the wall to the other adjoing walls, so I think this will be strong enough. And it will be possible to disassemble if needs arises.

A tour to Holland

We went for a week to the Netherlands, to visit our son J. and to see the growing family at M's brothers place. It was great to meet friends and family. For me, family, friends and food are most of the meaning of life.

We had dinner with my good friend Marcel.

We passed through Lubeck to visit the Christmas Market (Weihnachtsmarkt) to enjoy the atmosphere and drink some gluhwein. As you see behind me, they also served roasted chestnuts ("Heiße maronen"). Mmmm..

European re-use packaging

During the last year, working with recycling of materials, I start to notice some good systems in different places. In Sweden, there is almost no re-use packaging for anything, unfortunately. There used to be re-fill glass bottles for softdrinks, wine, beer and juice. Nowadays almost all of that is gone.

Dutch re-use glass jars for dry stuff:

German dairy in refill jars ("MEHRWEG" means usable multiple times - deposit scheme for refill containers).

German mayonnaise and other sauses in refill jars.

German veggies in refill jars.

Ending the year

We ended the year with my parents and brothers for a large dinner in Trollhattan. Before that we baked some Dutch style "oliebollen" - a delicious deep-fried bun.

It has been an intense year. My good friend Joop died. I worked a bit too much in the office, especially in the beginning of the year. I started many projects, but did not finish more than a handful. Therefore, my new years resolution is to start less projects and finish more instead. I have water tanks for rain water, not yet connected. I bought greenhouses that are not yet assembled. I even bought components to build a better composting toilet, not yet built. The firewood storage needs another compartiment. The room that got new windows needs some interior painting. I want to dig in some water piping to have permanent taps on more places. A veggie prep kitchen will be installed in the old stables... Lots of thinks to work on...

On the other hand, next week I promised to start working on a new project to support farmers to plant nut trees, probably for one day per week for the whole year. Next week the first meeting with the project team will reveal more of what we will do...

With M. we will grow more vegetables and enjoy our place even more. We are happy to be here.

2023-11-30 Drizzle and Snow and Sunshine

2023-11-30T00:00:00+01:00

November - drizzle and snowshine

It was a month with record low sunshine. 29 hours, according to the statisticians. One hour per day. The rest of the time it was gray, and quite a few of those long, drizzling rain days.

We did get started on some outdoor projects. The most important of which was to build a steel mesh fence around the whole property, except the driveway. We want to keep hungry rabbits out and exclude water voles.

Unfortunately, we already have a few of those tree-root-eating marauding water voles inside, so we will also need to trap those. They eat the roots of our chestnut and hazel trees.

We finally made a rodent-proof enclosure around the nut tree nursery area.

Farm Shop

We also started the farm stand tree shop. Every Saturday in November and March, we have open farm stand tree shop. So far it has been good and the people who come by to pick up some nut trees are great. I am so grateful for meeting these wonderful people who want to contribute to a better future by planting nut trees.

Some ordinary citizens who plant in their garden, some are farmers who try out different nut trees to see what works well in their contect.

Farm stand shop, with a frost-free indoor sandbox for all-winter pickup.

My good friend Marc came by to help to dig out some walnut trees before the first open day.

Chestnut eating time

We bought a new chestnut shelling machine, one size bigger and better than the last one. The new one is made of stainless steel, so that we can use it for food-grade production later.

In half a minute, it peels half a kilo of chestnuts.

Chestnut peeling machine - appropriate technology for 5-500 kg harvest.

Last day of the nut cultivation course at Holma. Anna made chestnut baklava and we planted a tree.

Winter preparations

We pack the fig trees in our hoop house to help them survive the winter.

Other observations

An interesting apple tree in the garden of one of the neighbours of my mum and dad is a late bearing tree. The fruit hangs on to the tree into the winter and they are deliciously crisp, even when the weather is freezing. Natural anti-freeze?

We went to a place outside Halmstad to look at a composting toilet called "Sunshine Loo". During next year we will make a couple of solid composting toilets and urinals to make it easier for guests and visitors to deliver a gift during the visit.

We brought in a 40m3 load of woodchips, from deciduous trees. Our goal is to improve water retention on our soils, so we will use the wood chips to cover walkways and to cover the soil where we plant new rows of trees.

As you see in the picture, we had some snow and a whole week of below-zero temperatures.

2023-10-27 Nut harvest season

2023-10-27T00:00:00+02:00

October - Nut harvest season

In October the walnuts and the chestnuts are ripe here in Southern Sweden. This summer, we have been biking around the villages in around here and talking to people with nut trees in their gardens to ask if we could come and harvest later. Everyone we talked to was happy to share their bounty.

We also made more apple sauce...

Apple sauce of an old variety called Husmodersäpple - house wife apple. Light color flesh of the apple and a wonderful fragrance.

End of the walnut season

We collected more nuts in Båstad at our new-found friend's place. We shared to the owners, and got quite a lot for ourselves. Half for seeding, half for drying and eating.

M rolling kilos and kilos of nuts.

We collected more than ten kilos every time we went there.

And in the nursery, the walnut trees have had a great second half of the summer, with lots of rain and a few warm weeks.

Our own walnut trees are ready for transplant and sale soon, in November our shop opens

Acorns as food

Ola Shubert and Jouke Bruinsma are probably the premier acorn eaters in Sweden. Ola had a workshop at Holma in mid-October where he and Jouke shared their best methods of leaching tannins out of acorns. They also generously shared acorn bread and we cooked delicious dishes all afternoon and evening.

Ola Shubert shares how to harvest and process acorns

Under a magnificent oak tree, Ola showed how to select the best ones. Tens of kilos of fresh acorns

Our chestnut peeling machine also works great for acorns!

Thirty seconds for 0.5 kg acorns, they all come out neat.

Chestnut adventures

Twenty kilometers from us, there is an old restaurant with three old chesnut trees in front. The current chef is not interested in the harvest and we could collect what we wanted. An hour picking and rolling, and we left with 13 kg fresh chestnuts. Half for eating, half for seeding.

One of the chestnut trees where we gleaned.

At the beginning of the fall, the water voles are again starting to eat tree roots. During the summer they have been happy eating other things, like one of our pumpkins, but now they are both numerous and hungry.

We have still not bought a rat eating dog, and our cat is too old to make a difference. So, now that we start to notice trees with damages, we have started to dig out all the chestnut trees.

Chestnut tree with no more roots. Voles...

Most of the trees still have good roots.

I am amazed with the beautiful roots of some of these trees that we seeded in April, just six months ago.

And in the hoop house - in the heat and protected conditions, they grow even higher. 10% of the trees are taller than me! (185cm/6ft)

Nut friends on visit

The most knowledgeable nut experts in Sweden are good friends of ours, and they came to visit us at our nursery and to the local hot spots of nuts.

Philipp, Marc, Martin at Marcs amazing nut garden.

We got a pawpaw from our friend, the tree nurseryman Peter. The pawpaw tastes great, even though it is not a nut.

Erosion distress

As a reminder of why we plant trees, I took some photos of the wind erosion going just across the street from our place. It was hard to capture using my mobile phone camera, but I think you get the gist. A few more years, and the dunes will dominate.

In the distance, a cloud of dust is blowing off the field.

What is left in the field are the sand grains, when the carbon and minerals are blown away.

Some house fixing

The southern facing wall of our house had no windows. We wanted to get in more light and solar heat, so we had a local carpenter come and help us do this. We got two good triple-glass windows with extra sound insulation. At the same time we took the opportunity to improve the wooden cladding of the house and replace some old and rotten wood.

Now the wood is fresh and strong, and all painted in with red and white linseed oil. Great stuff. Some planks could be re-used and that is only visible when you come close.

Removing the old wooden boards revealed a few surprises...

For instance, we could see where there had been a window and a door in the past

We had the insulation improved as well, when the boards were down.

Final boards finishing

On a sunny day it is great in there. No additional heating needed. But on a cloudy day, it is just as cold as before...

In the coming months, we will do clay rendering for the walls, and maybe the floor of the room.

2023-09-27 As you sow so shall you reap...

2023-09-27T00:00:00+02:00

September - Harvest Times

From times immemorial, there have been sayings in the style of: "as you sow, you shall reap". Ominous words, indicating that you get your just deserts when fall comes.

Those of us who are eager and optimistic infallibly sow more than is practical to harvest. Especially in these times when other activities distract us from working in the garden.

Here in Sweden, an apple tree is for many people too much of a burden, so most apples are not harvested and cared for, but left to rot in piles. It is said that 90+% of all apples in Sweden rot away. At the same time, we import 100,000 metric tons of apples, to sell in supermarkets.

We moved in here last year and planted a few apple trees, but it will take many years before they bear. Therefore, we have been biking around town to ask people if we could purchase some of their apples. So far, we have not been able to pay anything, everybody is happy to get rid of their surplus. I think that we have collected closer to 100 kg apples so far, and still some storage area to fill for the winter.

Hoop house harvest

We brought 12 different varieties of figs, and two of them have already fruited.

Here is one of my favourites - 'Hardy Chicago':

We also had 22 tomato plants in the hoop house and we have had a perfect size harvest, enough for our own use and to generously share with family and friends:

We train single risers of several varieties. Some hybrids but most are "heirloom" open pollinated seeds that we collected from last year.

One of our favourites is 'Valencia' that we got last year as a tomato from Palle and Stina, and this year we have grown out those seeds. These tomatoes are orange-fleshed and orange skinned with a sweet and rich flavour.

Some we cook into salsa with home grown chili, to store for winter use.

Going nuts in September

The walnut trees are now getting ready for harvest. The last days of september is when the first walnuts fall out of the trees.

In Båstad, we found a family with a beautiful walnut tree, where we will go to "roll" walnuts in the coming weeks

In the middle of our small town Laholm, there is a large walnut tree, but it is quite alone, so the pollination is not perfect. Beautiful nuts, but not numerous.

And in September I have given several workshops at my old university in Gothenburg. Every time, I pass by this young specimen (10 years?) that is starting to give a rich harvest of well-shaped nuts.

Many walnut trees have nut-rot this year, since we had rain in July and August almost every day, but not this tree. All nuts that I can see are perfectly green and glossy.

Pumpkins and squash

Pumpkins are great fun and fantastic indicators of soil fertility. In well-fertilized and well-irrigated spots, the pumpkins grow like crazy, both vines and fruit. In other parts of our sandy garden, the plants barely could survive in the competition with other plants like grasses.

Here is a part (20%?) of our pumpkin harvest:

Solar power

We also installed solarPV this year. We have a 10kW installation of grid-tied solar. Not resilient in any kind of catastrophic scenario but maybe good for the local energy use.

Next step will be to build some kind of interface to force our heat pump to run when the sun is shining...

For the laughs

25 years ago, when I was a student, I was part of a comedy musical group. This year, we gave the show again, two Saturdays in September. It was a lot of work to study the script, the dances and the songs, but it was great fun.

The feeling when the audience is in contact and enjoy the show is exhilirating. I had forgotten how energizing it is to sing and dance together, just for the fun of it.

Singing and laughing and eating good food with friends is the meaning of life. All the rest that we do is just to make this happen.

I even got to play the role of the disillusioned and disappointed futurologist called Nostradamus in 16th century France. Most of his predictions centered around death and destruction, and his books described a difficult future.

Quite similar to the book that I wrote, that was released this year. Coincidence or not?

2023-08-31 Joop

2023-08-31T00:00:00+02:00

My friend Joop

I want to share a few memories of my time with Joop Wantenaar, one of my best friends. Joop passed away on 31 august this year.

Joop played a key role in my life during the last eight years. Without the discussions with Joop and his generous sharing of his insights from his life as a farmer, I would never have dared to leave industry to become a farmer/nurseryman myself. And when time came for me to start my own agricultural business, Joop and Corine generously offered me a place at their wonderful farm Het Derde Erf.

First interview and discussions about agroforestry

When we moved back to Europe in 2014, I started the "Eetbaar Soest" platform, inspired by Incredible Edible in Todmorden. I reached out to several farmers, and Joop and Andre were the ones who reached back.

We met up and I made an interview for the local ecologically sound food website, and took some photos.

We already then decided to plant some nut trees at their farm.

First nut tree planted in 2016

We planted a walnut tree in the field. Joop was both happy and curious to see how it would work out. They had two 20 year old walnut trees next to their house, and those were doing well, but here in the field it was a much more windy place.

Afterwards, I have come to realize that we should have planted many more shrubs and support trees, to give the walnut trees shelter. Anyways, we were happy to start a collaboration and a crowd-sourcing for more trees.

Sailors for Sustainability visited in 2018

The two sailors of sustainability - Ivar and Floris - came to visit this lighthouse of organic/biodynamic mixed farming. They wrote a section about this on their blog, and were inspired to meet more agroecological farmers during their later journeys.

In this photo, you can see that Joop was not so tall. He was a strong and energetic person, but he was not physically intimidating. He was nice.

A short giant.

Dutch Organic Growers - Bronze medal in 2019

The agroforestry concept with walnut trees among the cows was nominated for the EkoLand Innovation Prize, and we got the bronze medal.

I will not mention how difficult it was to negotiate with the municipality to get a permit to be allowed to plant more trees. (We failed.)

Making space for a nut tree nursery in 2021

When I finally decided to leave industry and work full time with nut trees, Joop and Corine generously offered a place to raise a hoop-house, a workshop and an outdoor field for trees that I could rent.

He jumped into his tractor and harrowed a part of this permanent pasture. Sandy, but well manured and deep soil.

It was the start of a two year intensive work relation. I was at Joop's and Corine's place almost every day for two years. Sometimes I could help out with the cows, sometimes I would hang around with oma Corry. I could borrow tools, and we made infrastructure improvements together. A groundwater pump, electricity for a shed, fixing the roof of the workshop. Small and large things we did together.

Coffee at 11. Some days with other volunteers and clients, sometimes in their home.

It was an intimate time, and I learned a lot about how Joop made the farm financially feasible, despite a government system that is pulling hard to increase industrialization and monocultures. Joop had a background in accounting, which helped him to make the right decisions for investments and to forego many luxuries. He was the only farmer in town without air conditioning in his tractor. I suspect that this farm was the most financially stable.

Joop taught me a lot about everything from getting the cows to the milk machine, to soil health assessments. Enough for me to get EU-organic certification for my tree business, and he shared his thoughts about the strengths and weaknesses of the biodynamic philosophy.

We talked a lot about sustainability, material and energy use, and the role of food as the basis of life. Maybe as the meaning of life.

Joop had an amazing commitment to the health and well-being for his cows, his steer and the calves. Whenever they needed him, he would be there. And when something went wrong, he would cry together with the mother for a lost calf.

Chestnut tasting

We organized a chestnut tasting event at the farm in 2021. 25 people came to taste roasted chestnuts and other chestnut specialties, including "chocolate" ice-cream flavoured with koji-fermented chestnuts.

As typical of Joop, after twenty minutes, he resumed working, this time preparing the vegetable harvest for the Friday CSA pickup.

He really liked to work. To make useful things. To fix things.

In early 2022, I had a storm damage to my hoop-house. It was all my fault, since I had made a mistake when assembling the structure. I had forgotten four screws, and the result was a shear stressed and deformed hoop house.

No problem for Joop, he took the old tractor and we pulled it straight.

Last meet up

One year ago, I moved to Sweden, and have been only occasionally in Soest, so the contact was mostly via phone and email. During the whole winter, Joop had health issues, and in the spring time it was clear that a cancer was taking him down.

On 1 August, I had the chance to go to Soest, and I went all the way from Sweden to meet Joop at his 60th birthday. We met and talked, but there were not enough words to describe the depth of our bond.

Here is the last photo I got of Joop, thanks to Corine.

Thanks

I am grateful for the time I got to work closely with Joop and to get to know him and his wonderful family. Thanks to Corine, Rebecka, Julius, Sofie. Oma Corry. Harriette. And to the fantastic hangarounds Maja, Jos, Hendrik, Frank, Henrik, Valerie, Gryt, Leonne, Beatrijs, Hans, Arjan, Rob, Erik, Manda-Marieke and everyone else.

2023-08-27 August rained away

2023-08-27T00:00:00+02:00

Some like it wet

August came and went. It is usually the warmest month, but this year we had not a single day reaching 30C. After a very dry early summer, we have had for almost every day in both July and August. Very unusual weather. One day we had 80mm rain in one day, during the rainstorm called Hans.

The trees love the rain. They grow like weeds. And the weeds grow like crazy. What a difference from when we planted in April! It is magical to feel the soil start to come alive and the weeds that I chop-n-drop turn into black magic.

Planting in April:

In July:

Now in August:

Now is a good time to start planning a nut orchard, since November is the best tree planting time in our area, so I am preparing the sales lists for this season. I look so much forward to the sales season, and like every year I am a bit anxious. Sales is a special skill and this is not (yet) my forte. Every year, I do get better and feel more relaxed in the role.

Our Webshop

And I really love the feeling when the trees that I have nursed go out into the real world to produce delicious nuts for beautiful people and animals.

Walnut wood is beautiful

We met a wonderful wood-artist, Anders, who lives 8 km from here. We got a log of an old walnut tree that I could cut up and prepare information signs for our place. The walnut wood is so beautiful!

Energy politics - my minor contribution

Energy availability and scarcity became apparent last winter, even though most of it was quite mild here. All of a sudden, the political majority flipped into a pro-nuclear frenzy. Instead of closing down the 50-years old reactors, they will be patched up and continued. And alongside, ten new reactors will be added.

Since I did study engineering physics back in the day, and have thought a lot about nuclear waste, I wrote a short opinion piece in the largest newspaper of this area.

The title was "Nuclear power is like wetting your pants", alluding to a saying that when you are cold, you can take a leak to feel warmer for a while. A simplified short term vs. long term cost/benefit analysis.

The point I made is that we get a lot of energy for a low cost now, but we leave a terrible mess behind. The nuclear waste is both radioactive and highly toxic. No country in the whole world has built a long-term storage. I think this behaviour is an example of great arrogance towards future generations. They will have all the bads of the nukes we use today, but none of the goods. And the funds that have been put aside to handle this (USD500 per kilo of highly active spent fuel) were inadequate to start with and now quickly inflates away.

We can print and delete money, but we cannot delete nuclear waste with a strike on a keyboard.

Our society is full of magical thinking, the illusion of clean nuclear plants is just one of them.

Nobody will be swayed by an opinion piece, but at least I speak out and show that the consensus is not complete. Maybe the mechanism of the "smokey room experiment" could work here too?

Maybe it is enough to share a dissenting perspective to allow other people to speak out against the madness?

My take on the energy story is that the smartest way forward is to use less energy. Here in Sweden, we have quite a lot of water power, which we could keep running for centuries or millennia. If we keep our society inside the water power budget, we don't "need" nuclear power, nor most of the fossil stuff that we mindlessly burn today.

I think that designing a low-power civilization is a worthy challenge.

The best work that I have seen until now are the initiatives LowTech Magazine by Kris de Decker and Living Energy Farm by Alexis Zeigler. In the last issue, Kris details out how Alexis is doing what he is doing. I think this is the most interesting challenge of our times: How to live a good life within planetary boundaries.

Walnut harvest time

In August, the first nuts are ripe. Hazelnuts rain from the bushes and the Japanese walnut (Juglans ailantifolia) shares its bounty with us and all other nut loving critters.

We use the German-made Roll-blitz from Feucht Obsttechnik to collect nuts and dispose them in a bucket. In other areas of the world, I think that the same product is called Nut-wizard. It is a joy to get buckets full of nuts without straining our backs.

M. is dancing with the roller. Here in a public park of Laholm.

We are eagerly waiting for the European walnuts (Juglans regia) to be harvest ready. Here is a beautiful tree in our small town:

Soon we will collect, both for eating and for sowing new walnut trees!

2023-07-27 Summer Chestnuts

2023-07-27T00:00:00+02:00

Summer Chestnuts

The summer is an exciting time, when the chestnuts that I seeded in March are growing out into small treses.

I built two airprune beds and they seem to work fine. One was weak in the bottom and fell out, so I fixed that one, and the other one was stronger built and is still working fine. My main concern is that the soil dries out quickly, and I suspect that the nutrients in the soil that I started with are soon depleted. I will try to add some soil next week.

The chestnuts that I planted outside grow much slower than in the hoop house.

On the right in the image, next to the edge of the hoop house, I have planted three rows of chestnuts. I tried to seed some vegetables as well, and the dill took off great. We have eaten spinach and beets that was grown next to the first 100 or so chestnut trees. Now we have some carrots and dill left to enjoy. (in the middle row we have figs)

The dill attracts all kinds of visitors who enjoy a rich pollen meal.

On a suggestion by Philipp, I planted four graftwood trees (sweet chestnut cultivars) in the hoop house to get more vegetative growth. This was a great suggestion and I will have much more graftwood from these trees than from the ones that grow outside. In the coming years, obtaining Scandinavian grown chestnut graftwood is the limiting factor for propagating grafted trees, so this will make the transition quicker.

Chestnuts in Laholm

I see more and more chestnut trees in our place. I have seen at least six sweet chestnut trees in our municipality, also in the main park next to the town center.

Here is one of the three that grows in the town park "Stadsparken":

Here is a tree in a private garden next to the brewery Sofiero:

2023-07-22 Trees and Tables

2023-07-22T00:00:00+02:00

Trees and Tables

I love trees. Trees are our friends and teachers. Trees have been around for millions of years. The oldest family that is still with us is the Ginkgo family, with small changes over the last 200 million years. They were around in the time of the dinosaurs and will be around long after we humanas are gone.

In the last ten years, I have planted thousands of trees, mainly fruit- and nut-trees, and the trees teach me patience and observational skills. Some trees love it in a certain place, others don't. Some individuals take off and grow strong, others are weak and die.

Trees teach me to think more long term. In the past, I had difficulty doing tasks that took long time, like baking bread or growing a garden. I would lose interest. Think of other things. Forget. Get distracted. Look for something exciting. Go on a journey.

These days, I am a middle aged man. Maybe that is why I have less needs for thrills? I have slowed down, almost to the pace of the trees.

Walnut tree from 1800s

The other day, I was checking out the place where our old wheelbarrow was made, in Trönninge, to see if I could purchase another one, or a lower, flat wagon. The workshop was closed, but when I took my bike back to the main road, I saw a walnut tree in the garden next to the industrial zone.

It was the largest walnut tree I have seen in any garden in my whole life. (I have seen forests of walnut trees in Georgia, back in 1996, but at that time I did not take photos of trees...) I rang the bell and the owner of the old farm, a delightful lady close to 90 years old came out, and told the story of her grandfather who had planted the tree in the 1870s. The tree fruits every second year, buckets of walnuts, and this year is an off-year. She invited me to come again next year to collect some pails full of nuts.

The tree had some damage from a storm a few years back. One of the four main trunks broke off, and the roots probably now start to rot. A decade or so from now, the whole tree will probably be gone. In the meantime, jays plant nuts all over the surroundings. I could count to four seedling trees in the neighbourhood, some of which seems to bear nuts already.

Trees to Tables

Trees are great also after they have died. They can help us in the form of tools and tables for centuries more. During this spring, I have met an artist, Anders Ölund, who creates the most wonderful furniture out of deceased trees. Most of his library of logs come from the Dutch Elm Disease, which hit hard in parks and plantations during the 1990s.

Anders gave me a log from a walnut tree. It was half rotten, but we give it a try anyways.

I could borrow his bandsaw to cut it up and load it into our small VW Polo, to get the logs home.

It is now drying, and hopefully I can make some nice signage for the nut tree nursery of the wood.

However, the wet wood is still full of mycelia, so I hope I will be faster than the fungi to make something useful of the wood...

Newfound friends

My new friends P. and S. are also supporting the artist, and have some of the unique furniture in their café. Next year their café will open to the public, and it is an amazing place. If you ever go to Knäred, be sure to look for the "Kackel & kakor café"

P. is a very skilled chainsaw specialist, and here he is working an elm log with a steady hand.

P. also showed me how to grind and finish oak slabs for benches. It is great to work with wood, and turn trees into art.

Here we worked together on a complex piece of elm, which needed several subsequent cuts to get the right shape.

You can order woodden art benches, tables and other furniture from Anders Ölund at Olunds.com.

2023-06-16 June - light and dry

2023-06-16T00:00:00+02:00

Dry June

June has been extraordinary dry. No rain for six weeks and 25-30 degrees most of the days. Neighbour farmers even ir!rigate the grassy hayfields, which I hear is new in this area. In the past, only vegetables and sometimes grains were irrigated. Since May I have been trying to get drip irrigation hoses to the farm, and last night I finally got three rolls of 100m each to roll out and connect to our pump with well water. Right away I connected the first loop around the hazelnut bushes on the highest and driest part of the field.

We have also got to know a wonderful retired organic farmer, Gun, who has a wonderful place some 30 km north of us. Her great grandfather built a huge stone barn and a mansion more than 100 years ago and it is still magnificent, but more inspiring is the shift (back) to organic that Gun did with her father during the last thirty years. It is now a place that is buzzing with life. She shared some of the most valuable harvest from the farm - ripened cow manure from organic cows. In our area, this is very, very rare. A form of black gold. Gun expertly handled the front loader and gave us a trailer full of the most wonderful life-giving dung compost.

Linden leaf production pruning

I got the question on how to best prune linden trees for leaf harvest, and here are two photos that show my favourite pruning style. It is a five year old tree at my parent's place. In the first photo you see the tree without, and then with leaves. I like to cut/shorten small branches throughout the growing season, since every cut stimulates the growth of new shoots. (This is the only kind of "green growth" that I believe in...)

Fragrant flowers

June is also the time of Robinia flowers - a delicious "vegetable-flower" that is tasty and chewy. I love the wonderful smell of the Robinia flowers, and I like their taste - peas with a dash of sweet nectar. Just put the whole flower in your mouth and pull out the stringy stem, using your teeth to capture the separate mini-flowers.

Local established chestnut trees

In the city park of Laholm, I have now spotted three sweet chestnut trees that all look happy. One is growing together with a red-leaf beech tree, the other one just in front there. In the past, nobody grew chestnuts for food in Sweden, just as ornamental trees in parks and arboreta. However, now is a good time to start growing large-nut varieties with superior flavour and easy-to-peel cultivars. I am collecting photos of known trees in public spaces in Sweden, and the most northern one so far was spotted by my wife in a park in Västerås. (Of course our friends in Stjärnsund also grow some, but not in public places.) If you know of any other sweet chestnut trees in Scandinavia, please let me know, and if possible share a photo.

Summer care of the walnut trees

June is also a time for us nut tree nurserymen to give a little love to all our young trees, to prune off shoots from the rootstock and to adjust the growth of new branches. In the photos below you see what rootstock shoots look like on a walnut tree. (The rootstock is the part of the tree below the grafting point, and we want to have only new growth above the graft. If we leave the shoots to grow out to branches, they will take over and eventually kill the graft.)

2023-05-21 Growth is Great

2023-05-21T00:00:00+02:00

Growth is Great

Organic growth in the early summer is amazing. We have warm and pleasant weather (20-25C at noon, 10C minimum), so everything that is planted out is growing like crazy.

Chestnut seedlings on an air-pruning table

The poly-tunnel is a mediterranean climate, of dry, warm weather. The figs thrive.

We have 10 flavours of figs.

Happy as a hazel

The mother trees were cut short before planting out.

This is the red-leaved variety "Red Zeller".

*These small trees will be ready to plant out at customers' places in November. *

These seedlings started out this year in the polytunnel and were transplanted earlier this week.

Berry promises

We inherited three berry bushes from the previous owners, and we have planted out twenty more. This year will give a modest harvest, but the gooseberry bush seems happy with the fertilization.

The gooseberry bush is promising harvest in July.

What - growth??

This week, my first book comes out. It is a book in Swedish about looking reality in the eye, and how to crush the illusions we are fed from an early age.

One of the myths I dissect is "Growth is Great".

For me the disillusionment started when I realized the scale of Ecological Overshoot, based on the concept "Ecological footpring" by William Rees and Matthis Wackernagel.

Humanity is overloading our planet since my birth in the middle of the 1970s.

We need to shrink our human negative impact on the planet (our footprint) and increase our positive actions (our ecological handprint). Let's plant more trees. Let's turn lawns into meadows, fields into forests.

Cornfields into organic nut orchards.

2023-04-30 King of Spades

2023-04-30T00:00:00+02:00

Crazy April

It has been a crazy month. Very busy. Very good. Sometimes deeply sad, sometimes joyfully exuberant.

We give a ten day, whole year training on growing nuts, at Holma Folkhögskola, my friends Johanna, Anders and me.

Here we are at Anders' place Rydeholm.

Anders shows one of the 10 year old grafted chestnut trees. It grows 1 meter per year in the protected park.

A happy customer, O., who just got some trees.

Anders demonstrates a way to measure land distance, 2m at a step, with quite high accuracy, using a "famnamått".

Dutch days

We went to the Netherlands over Easter to meet family and friends and I spent a few days at my first nursery in Soest.

Maja and Marcel grafting chestnuts, with French hybrid varieties.

I spent a couple of afternoons grafting trees. I love it.

King of Spades

My friends Marcel and René helped me to get my tools in order.

Now you know who is king of spades: it is my friend René, who invented this system!

Reach out

I participated in the Food Innovation Forum in Malmö, Sweden, to find other players who want to contribute to a nut value chain. I met quite a few enthousiasts!

Growing season starts

We have had a strange season. March was exceptionally warm, and April has been quite cold. Just a few days with sunshine.

The first chestnut seedlings start to pop out in the air-pruning-beds.

We planted out hundreds of hazelnut bushes and walnut trees in the field.

2023-03-20 Fruit rootstock

2023-03-20T00:00:00+01:00

Planting out fruit rootstock

Nut trees are the best, but I also like fruit trees. They all have a role to play in a diverse food ecosystem. Therefore I visited the nursery "Rögle Plantskola" between Ängelholm and Helsingborg. It is a 45 minute drive south from here, just on the other side of Hallandsåsen.

The apple rootstock plants (Malus domestica 'A2' and 'B9') were fantastic. They were the best rooted rootstock that I have ever seen. 'A2' is a local Swedish rootstock selection that is quite frost-hardy and gives a quite large apple tree. 'B9' or 'Budakovsky-9' is a Russian rootstock, for dwarfing trees. It is supposedly the most cold-hardy of all apple rootstocks.

The plum rootstock (Prunus cerasifera seedlings) were actually grown in the Netherlands and traded here. They just look good. I don't have any plum scion wood this year, so I will just let them grow out and beef up.

Apple trees are supposed to have the most attractive and delicious roots, in the taste of water vole rats. Therefore we plant all the rootstock in net baskets:

12mm steel net cages for the roots.

Filled in with our sandy soil.

We planted the trees together.

Here the rootstocks are in place.

I was happy to get the trees in the ground.

Weather is variable in the spring. One day sunshine, next day snow.

In the summer, the baskets will be full of little trees.

We had some rains after the snow, and some snowmelt that is puddling in the hayfields down the road.

Here is also photo of a grain field nearby, that illustrates the erosion of spring-bare fields in the rain. The bay in the ocean out here is all brown these days, of all the soil particles. How could this end well?

Typical erosion gully in the sandy soil.

One advantage of tree culture is that the soil is kept in place.

2023-02-19 Airtime

2023-02-19T00:00:00+01:00

Airtime for the chestnuts

Now that the polytunnel is up, I can plant the chestnuts in a protected environment, without hard frosts and no wind chill.

The best roots develop when you plant a chestnut on the location where the tree will stand the rest of it's life. However, most people want to purchase a grafted tree to replant into their garden or agroforestry system. Therefore, I want to grow trees with lots of roots in all directions, so that they have a high success rate when transplated.

The best way I know is to use "air pruning beds" or "air-pots". The principle is that the roots grow down onto a grid, where it encounters free air. This makes the tap-root stop growing and the seed starts to shoot out new roots in different directions. After a year, these trees can be planted out in the ground, to gain more strenght, and one or two years later be re-planted by the customers at the final location.

This year, I built an air-pruning table out of some leftover lumber.

The leftover lumber and some steel mesh

The frame was screwed together.

The table, in the high tunnel. Ready to be filled with soil and chesnuts

The chestnuts have been stored in buckets with sand over winter.

Some of the chestnuts have already sprouted, here K. is helping me to plant.

The chestnuts are covered with 5 cm of soil and lightly watered.

In the summer, the table will be full of little trees.

2023-02-04 Chipper

2023-02-04T00:00:00+01:00

New Scary Chipper

In the end of the fall, I purchased a wood chipper that works as an attachment on the 2-wheel tractor. It is a sturdy wood chipper that uses the engine of the 2-wheel tractor in stand-still mode. Instead of servicing two engines, one for the tractor and one for the chipper, I can use the Honda engine that I already have on the tractor.

The power take out is called PTO in the farm business. There are a few standards and all of them have in common that there is an outer shaft that is fixed and an inner shaft that is rotating.

Today, I finally had a sunny day and time to test the machine.

I had some pruning branches from birches, beeches, rhododendron and sorbus trees.

The chipper is out

It took a while to figure out how to operate the engine without holding on to the safety clutch of the tractor. Had I only read the instruction manual, I would immediately understand why a velcro band was supplied, that snugly fit around the dead-man-grip.

The chipper was a scary beast of 100 kg steel, most of it rotating at full speed. It pulled branches into the shredder with a passion that I have never experienced before. I realized the power of the pull, and how risky a shawl or loose fitting clothes could be.

All the different kinds of woods were devoured without hesitation. The most difficult were the rhododendron branches, since they are both dense and curvy. The beech was hard, but the machine was harder.

The chipper is actually a two-in-one-machine. From the top, I can put in small branches, up to 3cm/1", and these pieces are completely shredded.

From the side, I can insert slender branches up to 6 cm/2", and they are chipped by a classic chipping wheel.

Therefore, depending on where I insert the branches, I get a different kind of output.

Trees are cannibals. They love eating other trees' chips.

I use the wood-chips as soil amendment to increase the soil carbon and to share the nutrients from the bark. According to organic apple-grower Michael Phillips (see his excellent book - the Holistic Orchard ), the small branch woodchips (a.k.a. ramial woodchips) are a high-nutrient booster for all fruit trees.

Since I have most experience on sandy soils, all wood chips help to improve the soil structure. Also at our new place, we have a very sandy soil.

Winter Propagation

We have also started winter propagation of berry bushes. Cuttings of red and black currants are placed in sandy soil, watered and with a little electric bottom heat, they make new roots in a few weeks.

Current (Ribes) cuttings - with a hood to keep heat and humidity inside

The cuttings already start to bud out, partly thanks to the bottom heat. They will stay here for another week or two, then I will switch to gooseberries and then mini-kiwis.

Cuttings are starting to develop beautiful buds

2023-01-15 Protected culture

2023-01-15T00:00:00+01:00

Protected culture

I have always been interested in cultures. In the past, I travelled a lot, and contributed an inordinate abount of carbon to our common atmosphere. Everywhere I came, I tried to learn some language, customs, traditions, norms and values. In some respects, people are people everywhere, but there are intriguing differences in how we see the world and our mythologies. Meaning of life.

These days, my interests have narrowed to the place I live and the soil I steward. Maybe I look a bit further than the length of my nose, but not much.

Growing stuff is the main culture I practice, and one specific branch is "protected culture", i.e. growing with weather protection in greenhouses and tunnels.

In August, I started the dialogue with our municipality to get a green light to raise two high-tunnels (Rovero ECO600) for veggies and trees. However, the building department was internally conflicted, whether or not these were buildings, but this week Thursday I had a breakthrough. The friendly and creative lady I got hold of had managed to navigate my application past the other bureacrats by calling the structures "Growing Tents". For which no permit is needed.

The weather is strangely mild, so the soil has thawed and we started right away to make holes and fix the anchors.

M is making holes and then screwing the anchors deep in the ground.

Today, our new friend P came over to help us to assemble the big-boys-meccano structure. We sorted out the right beams and bows and pored over assembly instructions, like boys who had received a mega-box of LEGO. This time the tast was to assemble a 6x20m structure.

M and P celebrate the first side standing.

It is important to celebrate the small wins, so we took a photo to celebrate the raising of the first gable/side face.

I am very happy with my new friend P.

We have a lot in common with P, who lives on the other side of our town. They are 15 years further in their homesteading journey, so we can learn a lot from them. P was also an organic farmer in the 1990s, so he has quite some experience to share about cultures, both protected and in the open.

The skeleton is standing and it is plumb, level and square.

Another couple of work days are needed to finish the build. We need to wrap the plastic cover, assemble and mount the doors and arrange ventilation windows. It is great fun to build and I really hope it will survive the storms here.

2022-12-27 Reflections in snow

2022-12-27T00:00:00+01:00

Cold and dry

We have had two weeks of splendid weather. Cold and dry and beautiful.

Some days the mercury dipped below -15C, which is quite unusual here in Southern Sweden. Therefore, we have taken every opportunity to enjoy the freshness of the snow and the silhouettes from the frost.

Sunlight is scattered in every direction and these short days are a good time for reflections.

It has been an intense year, both physically and emotionally. Our boys moved out, into the world, on their own adventures, and I do sometimes feel phantom pains of the emptiness of our weekdays. We moved house, to this place, near the beautiful medieval town of Laholm. We have changed jobs, closed down our old enterprises and started new ones. We have wrestled with bureaucracy and jumped lots of hoops. Fortunately, we are doing it together, M and I. Now, it seems like we have got everything in place, so that we can take on the world in the new year.

Our home. Warm inside.

We are lucky to have a good shed full of dry wood, and our supplies from last year are curing in the sunshine. Our woodstove is running from early morning to late night when the temperature is below 0, and we are getting better and better at controlling the fire.

In the beginning of the winter, I failed several times with getting the fire going, which filled our living room with smoke and unprintable words. However, now I think that both of us got the knack of using enough splinterwood and adjusting the levers in the right position for a slow but steady start.

Cooking flat bread on the woodstove.

In the short days, we take walks outside to get to know the surroundings in a new way. The snow covered fields are silent and bright. Occasionally, we meet a neighbour who is also out for a walk. Most of the neighbours we meet on our walks have dogs, who force them out of their cozy domiciles.

Maybe we will also be dog people in the new year?

The snow reveals that other animals are moving around, not only domestic cats and dogs. Passing over our land the other night, a fox (?) has left his footprints, harbinger of future chicken havoc. We will have to make a secure cage for the birds that we want to start out with coming May.

Footsteps of the fox.

To the south of us, is a geological ridge, the Halland Ridge, and we can barely make out the beech-wood forest that was planted two hundred years ago. We live in an area with very young soils, full of minerals and with lots of variation every few kilometers. There is still quite a lot of knowledge about which vegetables grows best in which field, even though the fields are also here growing, through consolidation of into larger and larger farms.

The Halland Ridge is a bit over 100m high, and stretches from deep inland out into the sea.

Our umbillical cord to civilization, the bike lane on the old train track, is swept by the municipality quite well. Only during the first days of snow, they were behind on the maintenance and it was a bit of a mess. However, now it is almost as good as always.

Until ten years ago, trains were moving here. Maybe one day in the future, the train tracks will come back.

The cold nights make the air dry. The remaining humidity crystallizes on all surfaces, and make things visible that we could not see before. Apparently, our whole house is covered in spiderwebs.

Spiderwebs everywhere.

To conclude, we are full of hope for the year to come. We are getting to know the place better and better, and look forward to the first gardening season in the new veggie beds. We know more and more people in the area, and slowly figure out how to work together.

Wish you all a beautiful year to come!

2022-12-17 Bugger for the bottle

2022-12-17T00:00:00+01:00

Bottle madness

Being back in Sweden after 20 years living abroad, I notice some things that have improved and others that have degenerated or decayed. One of the disappointments flew in my face when I biked off to buy beer.

I realized that almost all beer in my local supermarket is packaged in either aluminum cans or in single-use glass bottles. Only one out of 25 beers was available in a re-fillable deposit glass bottle. This is a giant leap in the wrong direction.

What a decadence to destroy every bottle after having had a drink! It feels like throwing my plate on the ground instead of washing up. Or re-melting my cutlery and forge new knives and forks instead of rinsing them.

Only one of these beers is packaged in a refill bottle.

When I was a student in Sweden, back in the last century, I consumed commensurate amounts of brewed barley. In those days the beverage was packaged in standardized 0.33 liter glass bottles, that were returned to be washed and refilled. I now cherish my quaint memories of a more resource-wise age.

I travelled through Germany a month back, and there almost all beer was sold in refill bottles. What a relief to be back in a civilized country. You can imagine my joy as I walked up and down the ailes of assorted lagers and weissbier, all in multi-use containers. Each bottle has a hefty deposit that incites even the laziest beer drinker to bring the empty bottles back into business.

The top shelf kegs are not refillable (yet) but all the glass bottles and crates are part of a national deposit scheme. When shopping for kellerbier, you also learn the useful German word mehrweg, which denotes something that can be used many times. Reusable.

Even juice and sparkling water is available in refill bottles. What a wonderful place!

Why bother?

Why do I think that refill glass bottles are better, you might ask?

In my opinion the main advantage is that we save energy and resources. Every time I crush a bottle in a recycling bin, I feel like I am losing 1 kWh. That is one man-day's equivalent energy. It is a waste on an epic scale. (I don't how exactly how much energy it takes to melt the glass and make a new bottle, so if you have data on this, please let me know!)

I feel just as broken every time I smash a perfectly usable bottle. photo by ChutterSnap/Unsplash

It is much more energy efficient to wash a bottle before refilling, instead of making a new bottle from the cullet (jargon term for crushed glass). Some claim that that 93% less energy is used for a system where bottles are refilled 25x on average, compared with single-use glassware.

Typical single-use bottle (left) and a slightly thicker refillable (right). The right one also comes from a regional brewery 30 km from here.

Why are we wasting all this energy and all those resources?

There are numerous players in the value stream who prefer single-use bottles. Bottle makers have more business. Supermarkets don't have to handle crates of stinking bottles. Beer makers (a.k.a. "brand owners") can design more special bottles to make their particular bottle seem more attractive.

I guess that in a time of energy abundance, the percieved "value" of using virgin bottles every time drove decision making in the wrong direction.

(Cut out the cans. I don't want to talk about aluminium cans right now. However, I have recently visited an aluminium smelting factory, and I just want to share that the situation is not all rainbows and unicorn farts.)

What do I want?

I want a society living and thriving within planetary boundaries. Therefore I want to live with a minimal ecological/energy footprint. And I like beer.

In my dreams, I would pick up a crate of locally brewed beer at the Sofiero brewery, 3 kilometers from my house, and bring the crate back when finished. I could easily do that with my bicycle with a trailer. I really would like to do the same at an organic dairy farm, like we did when we lived in The Netherlands. Possibly I would do a pit stop at an apple-wine maker's workshop too.

Call for action!

I think we need a two-pronged approach:

Contact your favourite beverage producer and tell them to re-introduce refill bottles. Tell them how much you love their product, and how much it pains you to destroy the bottle.
Pressure your politicians to improve legislation to ban single-use glass and to force supermarkets to accept refill bottles for deposit.

I am convinced that we need both commercial and a legal pressures to drive change. What do you think? Or will the refill bottle come back on it's own when energy costs rise?

Some links

Here is some good info on the US situation, and how deposit schemes works well in certain places, thanks to a combination of brave politicians and wise business leaders:

ContainerRecycling.org

Case reopened

Reloop analysis of refill/return and deposit systems for beverages. Great graphs

I dream of one beautiful summer day, when we can toast, each of us holding a refilled beer bottle. Then, let's celebrate and start scheming for a revolution to replace single-use glass jars for jam and vegetables. Of course they also deserve a refill/deposit scheme!

2022-12-03 Planting Trees

2022-12-03T00:00:00+01:00

Pre-planting surprise

To grow healthy trees, it is good to remove rhizomatic weeds like quack grass before planting. I tried the method of "tarping". In September, I put large plastic sheets to cover blocks of the newly fertilized and tilled field. The plan was to solarize (block sunshine) the soil to get a head start over the quack grass and seed other forbs like clover around the trees.

However, before planting the trees, I wanted to check how the quack was doing, and I got a lesser shock. I removed one of the tarps and found the ground completely penetrated by vole tunnels.

The holes in the ground were massive, much larger than mice or mole tunnels. My glove as comparison:

I started to read up on the ecology of voles (Arvicola amphibius) and how to manage their population. I had heard of tree planters who lost most of their apple trees to vole damage. The voles make underground tunnel systems and eat the roots of fruit trees. They love apple trees, but most other fruit and nut trees are also appreciated. I don't need to mention what happens to trees when someone eat their roots...

The tree planter and food forest expert Philipp Weiss has written about vole safe cages for tree planting.

We started right away to make cages for the most important trees, that I want to plant right away:

The long term solution will involve owls, netting and a dog. Maybe a rat terrier? I have never had a dog before, so I am humbled by the challenge to taking care of one. For the last year, we have had a cat, and that was also a first for me, and I like it more and more. My life is developing in a good direction. Less computers and more animals every year.

Planting day

We planted out the forty most important trees into the nursery, and the rest we planted in the indoor sandbox system, where they can wait until I have solved the vole issue. The trees we planted out are the trees that I will use as "mother trees" later. (I cut branches off these trees for grafting new trees.) And some hazel bushes that I will "layer" to make new trees.

The hazel bushes look healthy and strong:

We removed the plastic, but did not plant any trees in the area where the voles have had their party...

A whole group of family and friends came over to help out with the tree planting. It is great to plant trees together.

We planted the trees in cages made of 19mm mesh, which was the only size available at the local hardware store. Philipp recommends 12 mm nets, and I have ordered two rolls of that size, for the next round of vole protection.

We had a good day with many friends working together. Planting trees for an abundant future is one of the most meaningful things that we can do in these strange times.

2022-11-30 Getting Trees

2022-11-30T00:00:00+01:00

Going back to get trees

Now that the days are getting shorter and Nature is slowing down, trees are losing their leaves and go into winter rest. The trees suck nitrogen from their leaves, and shed the empty hulls. All the nutrients are stored in the roots and in the bark, waiting for Spring to arrive, to unleash a green cascade of new growth.

Therefore, the early winter is a good time to move trees. The trees can take quite some rough handling when they are in hibernation. I had been impatiently waiting for the leaves to drop, to be able to go back to Holland to get the trees that were waiting for me there.

The day before I left Sweden, we had quite some snow, which would make it a bit tricky to plant the trees upon return. The weather forecast suggested that the following week would be milder, with better tree planting weather.

Back in Soest, I was happy to see the trees that I grafted during the last couple of years. Most of them are chestnut trees, but also different apple varieties and linden trees with edible leaves.

The nut tree nursery will continue in Soest, managed by the wonderful tree friends Maja and Marcel. They will continue with sales via the webshop.

Maja was collecting fig cuttings from all the different "mother trees" that I had been growing out, so that she can continue with these varieties.

Marcel helped me to dig out a thousand trees, mainly one year old grafted trees.

We bundled the trees and heeled them in, to have everything ready for the departure day.

I also took the opportunity to drive to Antwerpen to deliver forty trees to the organic veggie-and-fruit cooperative Pomona. Stéphanie is a friend who was also part of the Agroforestry Network. I am sure that the trees will be happy in her loving hands.

We loaded everything into the rental truck and set off to Denmark for a delivery, and then north to Sweden. My friend Vince joined as co-driver on the journey and we had a good long talk about life and about the decline of our civilisation.

I left Soest with a lot of great memories. We did live there for fifteen years... I am especially grateful for the years together with my friend, farmer Joop, who made it possible for me to start the nut tree nursery.

2022-11-13 Pathway to a better future

2022-11-13T00:00:00+01:00

A pathway...

Sometimes, I wonder how a pathway to a better life after the ecological transition will look like. I dream about the "RetroSuburbia" world that Holmgren has depicted. I fantasize about the "Local Futures" of Helena Norberg-Hodge. And sometimes I see a fragment of a better future, that has already materialized.

This week Thursday, I was biking another way to town and I found this beautiful bike lane:

I think you would be as happy as me if you stumbled upon a path so elegantly curving, with nut trees on both sides!

It has 20 or so nut trees that all look 10-15 years old, and I arrive a month after harvest, so next year I will go there every week, starting in September.

It is hard to identify trees without leaves, but I think that this one is a classic walnut:

This one is clearly a Chestnut, easy to identify thanks to the remaining leaves:

These ones look like "Cinerea"-walnut trees:

What do you think?

Another toy, or tool.

This week, I got another tool for the two-wheel-tractor. A rotary plow. It is an implement that Jean-Martin Fortier has popularized through his videos about small scale commercial vegetable production. I want to use a permanent-bed system with raised beds for the seedling trees, for vegetables, and for chestnut trees that are extra sensitive to wet feet.

It worked like a charm:

But I was quite scared of the orange food-chipper that was shredding everything it touched, so after a small test plot I was exhausted. I hope it gets better when I get more experience. These testbeds are 7m, but my main fields are all 20m long.

Tree bane - the hare

One of my fears it that the hares in the surrounding will eat the bark of all our trees. Yesterday I found one hare chilling out next to our wood shed.

I need to put up a mesh net around our whole property to keep these hares out. I hope it will be enough with a 50cm wide net, and staple it to the bottom rung of our fencing, but I am not sure.

Do you have any experience with hare-fencing? What would you do?