Spruces turned into firewood and building materials

The land around the farm had not been used for a long time, and therefor a lot of trees and bushes were growing where old meadows and fields once were. Only a small part of the land where still open land. Some spruces (Picea abies) where quite big since the land had not been used for at least 60 years.

We decided to take down some of the spruces in a first attempt to open up the lands, we started with some spruces around the house and the old root cellar. (The root cellar had no roof and the stones had to be fixed before it could be used, but that was a project for later.) We also took down some spruces around some big goat willows (Salix caprea) to give them more spaces. The Goat willows would be important later on if we would acquire some beehives since that tree bloom very early and are a very important source of nectar for the bees in spring.

Most of the fallen trees where chopped into firewood. The winter in Lapland is long so we knew that it would require a lot of firewood. Some of the spruces were debarked and the thought was to use them as building material for some kind of outside kitchen.

Now there was several piles of chopped firewood laying around the farm, left outside to dry in the sun. Still there was snow everywhere but the sun was strong during the days and snow where melting rapidly.

We wanted to get some chickens for the farm, so therefor we needed a chicken house. The old garage seemed like a good place to have some animals in, but the roof were leaking so we needed to fix that first. We removed the rotten roof and made a new roof of debarked spruce poles from the forest and some metal plates that we found laying around.