On a farm you get to build stuff.  You find any old piece of wood laying around and start sawing.  No need for rulers or work benches – just a saw and an old coffee table will do.

There is always extra help around (mostly passing of hammers or nails)… [Read more...]

“På ferie” (on holiday) is one of the first phrases you learn at Norwegian language school here in Norway and there is a very good reason!  Norwegians love going on holiday – it is Norway’s biggest past time.  Come Summer and practically the whole country shuts down to cater for all the Norwegians taking their Summer vacations.

The Summer season is always made the most of and many Norwegians travel out of country.  It is very popular to go to Sweden or Finland to soak up some rays.  And we are no different!  Every couple of years our family has a reunion/holiday and this time it was in Larsmo, Finland.

Crossing the border into Finland from Norway is very uneventful.  If you blink you will certainly miss it.  In Norway reindeer are on the coastal pastures so it is rare to see them hanging around the roads.  However, as soon as you go into Finland reindeer are everywhere.  They love the grasses by the road.  They don’t seem to be too bothered by cars as they plod along the road until you beep them off.  They can add a lot of time to your trip.

On the way to Larsmo we stopped off to see Santa and his post office at Rovaniemi. [Read more...]

Lingon bread is typically Finnish.  Much of Farmor’s baking has been passed down by her Finnish mother.  This bread is called Lingon bread as it features the ‘lingon’ (cowberry).  (In Norwegian it is called tyttebær.)  Lingon berries are a tart little bush fruit that grows in the Arctic regions.  The berries can be found growing wild all over Alta and every Autumn we go picking to stock up for the year.

As Farmor doesn’t follow recipes and doesn’t measure quantities, I found myself snapping every move she made.  Here is a guide as to how to make Lingon bread.  I’m sure you could use another berry bread recipe as a base and just adapt the ingredients if you are eager to try this delicious bread.  (If you don’t have lingon berries you can use cranberries instead.)

In a steel bowl Farmor put a collection of seeds – linseed, sesame seed…. and a couple of raisins.  They were soaked in a little water.

Next she put in some lingon berries straight out of the freezer.  (Usually she thaws them first as to help the bred raise faster.  Putting frozen berries in meant she needed to let the bred rise for about six hours as the coldness slowed down the yeast.)

When we go berry picking Farmor puts the berries into plastic bags and flattens them to go in the freezer.  This is very typical in Norway as times when berries are needed, like May 17, they are not readily available.  In the past the berries would be jammed but since the invention of the freezer the berries can be preserved without additives.  We freeze cloudberries, blue berries, strawberries, lingon berries – everything. [Read more...]

You can’t have a chicken coop without chickens!  After cleaning out the coop we were excited for it be become a lovely home for some nice little chickens but there was only one problem – there were no chickens to buy.  We looked in the usual places like the farmers market pages in the paper, finn.no and the local store boards.  Family and friends had no chickens either and we very quickly discovered that Alta doesn’t really do chickens.  We were very disappointed.

We soon found a place online near Oslo that could send us up some chickens (via airplane) but only next year in April when the breeding season started.  But luck was on our side.  Big Uncle performed at a little function house just out of town.  There Farmor saw some chickens.  She asked the owners about them and  it just so happened that they were looking to give away a hen and her chicks as they had too many.  This seems to be a usual way to do anything in the country – face to face barter.  The next day we picked up a hen and her five (big) chicks – (for free even!).

The chickens is a mixed breed of Brown Italian and Cochin .  These are considered “Norwegian” as they have been in Norway since the early 1900s.  However, it is the Jær chicken that is recognized as a true Norwegian breed.  We certainly want to breed Jær chickens for our Norwegian living heritage farm, however, because hatching has been bred out of the Jær it is necessary to hatch fertile eggs in an incubator.  Even though this is a very common way to breed we prefer a more natural approach.  Some of the other Norwegian breeds of chicken are still good brooders (mothers).  In fact, they are so good that they are likely to adopt other eggs as their own.  So our ‘considered’ breed of Norwegian chickens will do the hatching for us.  They will also teach the Jærs how to be chickens and hopefully we can get them to reestablish the Jærs brooding natures.  Our goal is for our Jær chickens to once again be chickens.

So we are very happy with our ‘considered’ hen and her chicks.  Once in the coop she went straight to scratching up the grass and picking out all the good bits.  She is a very good teacher as her chicks were also keen on their new grassy habitat.  For a treat we put in some weeds from the potato field as they love to eat the seeds.  When the seeds are gone we will put the rest into the compost.  True symbiosis.

The chicks are having fun running around the huge pen and the hen even lets us pat her.  We have left the carry cage in for the moment so they can have a cosy place to sleep until we build a box for them.  Another job on the list.

And here we have a lovely pair of gardening gloves that make a perfect addition to any back pocket…

I never leave the house without my gloves now.  Even if I’m just going for a walk, I always make sure to bring them as it is guaranteed that I’ll be stopping to dig up some weed or move some wood along the way.  When you’re a farmer you are always farming – even in your sleep!  (I dreamt about our strawberry plants last night.)

Alta is a town you go through to get somewhere else.  We get a lot of travelers passing through.  Many take the opportunity to fill up on petrol and food before the long trek south.

The town centre is a favorite stop for bikers.  Right in the square there is the most popular cafe-restaurant that has an unconventional outside dining area.  It’s perfect for a Sunday lunch for the bikers (as usually nothing else is open).

It’s fun to go tourist watching, to try and pick what country people are from.  We find them just as strange and interesting as they find us.

Norway is really big on recycling.  We have green bags and red bags, yellow bags and inside-out bags.  The easiest to remember is the milk carton recycling.  We open them, wash them out and then fold six into another empty carton.  If you write your name and telephone number on the outside carton you go in the draw for a chance to win some kroner.  If they pull your packed carton out from the local recycling plant you can win kr10,000.  Then you go into the national recycling draw.  If your compact milk carton gets pulled out again then you can win kr.100,000.  Not bad for throwing your rubbish in the bin.

The folding of the cartons have now become an art form in Norway.  The winner of the most cartons squished into one carton made it to 40, but he had the help of vices and bricks.  Me, I’m struggling to try and get six into one carton.  But now I just hand them over to Big Uncle who folds and packs like a pro.

I’ve been making a lot of boller lately, so I’ve had to become creative with Norway’s little sweet bread to use all the surplus.  Boller make fantastic french toast.  The cardamum and cinnamon already in the bread make them fry perfectly.  We picked up some fresh nectarines (something that I’m only used to having at Christmas time coming from Australia).  I sliced them and caramelized them in a sugar-butter with maple syrup.  Topped with some vanilla ice cream, cream and the caramelized sauce from the pan – lovely!