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.