Another busy week at Allmogegarden!!
On Monday and Tuesday we continued to take advantage of the snow and drove with the horses to the forest to collect more timber for construction wood, firewood, and paper making! The weather was ideal and the driving went very smoothly. Pluto wanted everyone to see how much fun he was having so he took the camera and took a 'selfie':
Okay, he wasn't the only one taking 'selfies'....:
In addition to the on-going driving, Maria has been making progress on constructing the new slaughterhouse. Brand new doors were installed in the frame and insulating panels were situated onto the concrete walls! Here's an updated picture of the mounted panels:
As the week started to come to an end, so did the wintery weather. Signs of spring came about and a lot of the snow melted away. Although this means that the driving had to be put on hold, it's ok because the animals are outside enjoying the sunshine and freshly exposed grass!
Well, most of the animals...some still prefer to stay inside and cuddle up :)
During the last few weeks, we mainly continued the forest work: there are still so many trees fallen by the storm that need to be taken care of...
Bengt is playing the mechanic saw most of the time, we have been using the "magic wire machin" to pull the logs that are deep down in the forest where neither horses nor the tractor can go so that we can pick them up with the horses and bring them home!
The saw mill has been working a lot and many planks have been made.
Two major events also happened last weekend!!!
First, Jolinda has taken one big step forward with her training and she has pulled her first log stick :)
She was very good and it was almost as exciting for her than for us.
The second project was The Rocket Stove:
Maria has been learning a lot about these very efficient stoves and their different possible uses.
We were then ready to start practical trials and we built some rocket stoves with the aim to be able to boil tea outside.
We started by improving the 0.01 version built a few days before and managed to have it working!
We made Rocket Stove version 0.02 that worked quite well too.
A contest was then started beetween the two teams to see who could get hot tea first.
We can admire the homeless style of the German-French team.
Once everybody agreed on the winners (even if some were cheating...),
we started to build the last, but not least, stove: MISS ROCKY
After that, Maria hosted a meeting at home for a study circle about Rocket Stoves...
(To know more about rocket stoves, you may go and have a look on Maria's facebook page.
Finally, let's applaud Bengt & Maria who are learning French very fast because right now 5 out of 8 woofers are French!
Hello next Wwoofers!
Almost 3 weeks ago, Sweden had a big storm across the country, fortunately we didn't have any serious damage on the farm, although around 500 trees fell down! We have been working a lot in forest! Bengt has been cutting up the fallen or semi-fallen trees with the chainsaw and we burnt the brash in small fires, which Max and Laura (the two young Cows that wonder the forest) have been enjoying the warmth from.
We had to remove the wood from the forest and organise it into three sections: fire wood, paper wood and wood suitable for the saw mill. To do this we used the sleds that are towed by the Horses, it requires some careful planning and time. It is wonderful learning about working with the horses in this way and It shows how incredibly strong they can be. Much nicer than noisy machinery! One of the Wwoofers Helena has spent a lot of time driving Frej and they have become a very good team together.
Oli has been making boards with the biggest of the logs using the Saw Mill. These boards will be used to make shelvs, floors etc.
All the wwoofers started to make Feta cheese from the milk of our Cows. Maria taught us how to prepare it and this week we'll start to make hard cheese. Cheese making requires a lot of hygiene and care but it's so easy to make and so good!
A couple of the Foxes that were shot to control numbers in the area were skinned by Lolita and Helena and they have worked very hard to preserve the beautiful fur.
Lolotte, Lolita and Oli's dog, has been doing what she does best; running around and searching out anything smelly to roll in. She has also developed a new technique to get up onto the dining table...
