Building

The girl from England had arrived and she helped we with a lot of different tasks. We got more fish than we could use since we only were two people at the farm so we put the cages on land, and fished with rod instead. We were out fishing many evenings and one evening I got a big trout in the Perch lake, that was the first trout I had seen in that lake. We barbecued the trout over fire but, it did not taste as good as the trouts up in the mountain lakes, it tasted a bit muddy. We tried to make sashimi with the raw pike and perch, it tasted very good with soy and ginger.

We went to the neighbor village to begin demolishing an old barn it was the same barn that I last year had taken the roof metal from, but now I was interested in the wooden planks for the storage house. We used the planks for the storage house´s roof. After that we had ailed the planks we put some tarpaper on top, now the roof was water resistance. The storage house still needed walls but that had to wait for later, instead we started to dig the foundation for a log hut (timmerkåta).

My friend who owned the goats came to collect his animals that I had taken care of. The goats had been on the farm for three weeks now. It was a little bit sad, we were going to miss the goat milk. Sometime in the future I would to have goats myself, it seemed to be the perfect animal for this farm.

A young boy from Germany arrived. He was very fascinated about the farm and how we did things. Since I had two helpers I decided it was time to collect reed for the storage clamps. This year I wanted to build at least three therefore we needed a lot. We went to the Pike lake and went with canoe to the other side since the reed were taller there. I cut the reed with my scythe and the other collected it and put it in bundles. We put the bundles in the canoe and I transported the bundles back to the shore. The canoe was filled with reed so I had to stand up in the back and paddling. We carried the reed back to the farm, after several turns we had a big pile that we stored in the saw house.

There were some old trash piles at the farm that we started to remove, it was layer after layer with shattered glass, old shoes, rusty metal cans, plastic and a lot of other things. We filled a big trailer two times and went to the recycling station.

After three weeks the girl from England returned home. Now it was me and the German boy left at the farm. He was very interested to learn about many things and I tried to teach him about wild edible plants and some bushcraft. A women from Israel visited and baked us some good bread over the fire.

The foundation of the log hut was ready so we started to build it. I had already prepares the logs and it did not take long to get the logs up since it was only four layers of logs. The roof was more difficult but eventually we managed to get it right. I covered also this roof with tarpaper. When the floor was ready we moved into the hut that had a nice fireplace in the middle. It was a bit smoky and we tried several solutions and it got less smoky.