Harvest party

We had started to harvest from the farms for our daily meals, we also harvested some swedes and turnips and sliced them and put them in the sun to dry. I like drying as a method for conservation but up here in Lapland you have to start dry early. Later in the harvest season its usually to moist and to little sun to dry. If I have a sauna next year I can dry in there.

A boy from Austria arrived with a cab, he had tried to hitchhike but failed to get a ride. All three of us were now living in the log hut. The boy from Austria had a hard time eating fish, after we had treated him with fish-head soup he had enough. He said he needed meat and he thought we were eating meat everyday at this place. I suggested to him that he could eat ants if he did not like fish so we collected some ants but in the end he went to town with bicycle to buy some tin can meat.

I had invited to a harvest party and we were preparing for that. Eventually I finished the shelter, we had not used it except for a goat-house. We made the floor in the shelter, a big fireplace in front of it and benches around the fireplace. We also dig up roots and branches that were in front of the shelter. It looked good and I wondered why I had not done this before.  

I went to the neighbor village and bought a lamb for the party. The day before the party some people had already arrived and for dinner we ate the intestines and the testicles, witch were very tasty. We saved the brain for tanning. The next day we ate the sheep head for lunch, the meat loving Austrian man carved out the meat from the head and he said it was the most discussing work he had ever done.

So the shelter was ready and the fire was going and the party could begin. A friend from Dorotea chopped the lamb into pieces and we put it on the fire. We were about ten people now, and more people were o their way. The women from Swabia that had been here last winter returned. Except the lamb we ate a lot of good food from the gardens. The party lasted for several days. On the days we were working with the gardens, chopping down trees, tanning, picking berries and dug up root systems and in the evenings we ate meat and drank beer. Most people returned home when the meat and beer was gone. Some people stayed and for a month we were a group of about 5 people.   

We thought the meat party was over but then the hunters visited and gave us 6 moose heads and two moose skins. We put the skins into the river (it had to be there for at least two weeks) and started to skin the heads. We got a lot of meat from the heads and we boiled broth from the legs that we also got. Almost everyone tried to skin a head. 

We continued with the work, we constructed a new bigger woodshed and picked more bilberries and boiled jam from them. Now we had a lot of jam jars. I also got help to finish the storage house.

It was now late September and the weather were getting colder. We moved inside and started to cook there. An Irish man and a Belgian woman were still sleeping in their tentipi that they had brought.

More people left the farm and now it was only me , the woman from Swabia and a man from Götaland at the farm. We started to build a new chicken house from the spruces I had prepared and dragged from the road down at the wet meadow. The new chicken house was a little bit bigger than the old one and was situated farther away from the gardens.

We still got some eggs but less and less for every day. It was time for final harvest we harvested almost everything and put four fifths into the storage clamps, we stored the rest inside. We might have harvested about 200 kg of crops but it was just estimation since we did not have any scales.

The man from Götaland returned home and now we were only two people at the farm. I had to go to the south to work for a week. I went to Stockholm with the bicycle and returned two weeks later. With me I brought a girl from Belgium. It was sunny and warm when I returned but the woman from Swabia that had stayed at the farm said that it had been some snow and temperatures down to minus nine.