Oh my! This site has been somewhat neglected, hasn't it? More than a year since the last post. The house and woodshed in that picture not even ours any more! We bought a farm outside of Östhammar this spring, and spent an awful lot of time moving and getting settled.

Taking over such a large place is no easy task, but I now get to do fun things like driving my tractor into my forest to get timber and firewood.

The farm has its website at https://www.bestbo.se and there you find the social media links, and some occasional updates.

The aforementioned freshly-built woodshed. Apart from the three old pallets that serve as floor, this is made completely from lumber that I made myself, from trees that needed to be taken down because of bark bettles.

Not sure yet, if it will get plainted in the same Falu red as the house, or allowed to grey on its own.

I spent the morning felling another four trees that were taken over by bark beetles. In order to prevent the larvae from developping into bugs and then spreading to neighbouring trees, one has to remove all the bark from the tree. This quite tedious but it helps to have a really sharp knife that is designed for that purpose.

The inside of a piece of bark with bark beetle larvae from a tree that I had just felled because of them. You can see the channel at the top where the parent bugs laid the eggs, from which the larvae then gnaw their channels perpendicularly, getting larger along the way.

A fresh drone picture of our little oasis in the forest.

About two thirds done with planting 4000 saplings on 2.5ha of forest area. The colored lines are GPS-tracks of how I walked (a bit incomplete), which is mostly determined by terrain.

I spent most of the day planting trees in the forest and I'll do the same tomorrow. This video (in Swedish) shows how it's done.

Three more YouTube-videos I enjoyed recently:

• xkcd's "Map Projections", animated
• Duct tape space suit
• Robin Hanson discusses his model of grabby aliens with folks from FHI, including Nick Bostrom.

The planting of the forest has begun. 200 down, 3800 to go.

So this is what 4000 saplings look like; I was quite unsure how many boxes this would turn out to be. They were delivered yesterday, in frozen state, and now they have to thaw in the shadow for a few days before the boxes get opened and the seedlings planted as quickly as possible. It looks like there is a rainy week coming up, which should be perfect.

A patch of fertile land in the vast surrounding forest.