Late harvest

At this point I had prepared the perches in many different ways, now I was experimenting with fish-bread. First I gutted and skinned the perches, then I filleted and put a big chunk of fillets in a bucket. I mushed the fillets with a wooden musher and mixed them with flower, salt and oil. I flattened the doe and fried them in a frying pan over an open fire (during summer we had cooked food mostly outside).

The woman from the Black forest arrived, I showed her around and she liked the place and wanted to stay. We had food in abundant, every day we picked bilberries (Vaccinium myrtillus) that had been ripe for some weeks now. More mushroom started to pop up and we collected many different species Boletales (Bolete), milk vaps (Lactarius), gypsy mushrooms (Cortinarius caperatus), slimy spike-caps (Gomphidius glutinosus)as well as some more.

Finally we built the outside kitchen, it was just only a provisional but enough for now. .We used some of the metal plates we had gotten from the Scottish man to build the simple roof.

 We went up in the mountains to try out another one of the trout lakes. The lake was closer to the farm than the other one and was located between two mountains. I tried to fish with a lure and got almost instantly a trout. At the slope of one of the mountains we found a lot of bilberries and we picked about 20 kg. We also had brought a net but we did not have a boat up here so I had to swim out with the net. The next day I returned to the lake and emptied the net, I got ten trouts and a big burbot (lota lota). 

We found a road killed fox that I skinned. I tanned the skin with alum and was planning to make a hat out of since the color of the fur suited my beard. We boiled the meat as food for the chickens, they really liked it. The boiled head looked a bit scary.

I wanted to try the net in the lake where we had been last spring so we went there with bike and walked the last five kilometer like last time. I swam out with the net when we arrived in the afternoon. We spent the night in the chalet. I emptied the net in the morning but there was nothing except a lot of seaweed. It took a long time to clean the net.

The lingonberries (Vaccinium vits-idaea )and the rowan berries (Sorbus aucuparia) where now ripe, we spent a couple of days picking them and boiled them for jam. We had now many jars of jam from cloudberries, bilberries, rowan berries and lingonberrieas. We had some blackcurrants (Ribes nigrum) bushes at the farm but the chickens had eaten most of them. We also collected some crowberries (Empetrum nigrum) that we turned into juice. 

It had been some frost nights and we decided it was time for final harvest. We harvested about 100 kg of potatoes and a lot of carrots, beets, parsnips, swedes and turnips. Some of the swedes and turnips we dries and put in jars. The root cellar had to be repaired before it could be used so the only way to store the harvest was to build storage clamps. I had never done this before and had never heard anyone doing it in Lapland. I was worried that the crops would not make it but we had no choice than to try. First we dug a pit, about 30 centimeter deep with a ditch so that water could flow out. We covered it with spruce branches and dried reed that we had collected down the lake earlier in summer. On it we put a pile of 50 kg of potatoes and covered it with more reed and spruce branches. Finally we covered everything with a thick layer of soil.