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.

Putting the axe into the right spot and then hitting it with a sledgehammer turns out to work nicely for splitting larger logs. Small ones are easier to just chop.

The photo does not do it justice, the magical fog early this morning, when the sun was just about to break through it.

Our two new hop plants, the old Swedish varieties Grimsarbo and Olarsbo, seem to be growing nicely. For the first year, I dont't expect them to make it all the way up their respective 6m high poles, or produce any amount of cones that will be worth harvesting.

Barbecue season started last week-end.

The eggs that the stink bug (Swedish bärfis, which translates to "berry fart") laid under our new parasol literally* five minutes after I put it up.

* and I mean literally, not figuratively, as has become the more common meaning of the word. Is there a new word for literally literally?