Seasonal pre-season video update by Richard Perkins (uploaded Apr 13, 2017) from his Swedish small farm at ~59°N. He describes an unusually mild winter with late snow but warns of "iron nights" (frost risk into late May/June), outlines incoming international crew arrivals and on-site accommodations, and shows last-minute farm preparations: cleaning, converting spaces (sauna removal, barn door), simple washing/dehydrating setups, feeding pigs, and early crops (peas, garlic, spinach). He highlights propagation activities — blackcurrant cuttings (Ben Lomond) — and a major vineyard shipment: five cold-hardy grape varieties (30 plants each) from a specialist breeder in Estonia that cost about €5 each; he notes past losses (~20%) when vines leafed out during shipment and his plan to pot them up now.
Questions this video answers
25th of May (average last frost).
Mexico, South America, Denmark, Switzerland, Canada.
Five varieties; 30 plants of each.
A specialist grape breeder in Estonia; about €5 per plant for named varieties.
About 20% loss.
Chapters
Well, we're having the earliest spring and a very mild winter. But just goes to show it's nice amount of snow coming this morning. Probably won't settle and hang around for long, but you never know. It's why we stick to our garden planning, because we get what's called Iron nights here in Sweden where even in the first week of June or so you can have several days below zero which can kill your sensitive crops. So we always follow the planning based on those previous experiences. Even though the, the average frost here is about the last frost would be 25th of May average. So it can be middle of June some years. So you need to take that into consideration. You just, you never know with the weather around here.
Exciting times. The core team are arriving in the next couple of days and the season really begins here. We've got a big team this year coming from Mexico, South America, a lot of people from Denmark actually and Switzerland as well as Canada. And it's really exciting time to have the team arrive. We've heard from Omar coming from Mexico, he's got on his flight to Chicago en route here already and we have a couple arriving tomorrow and the rest arrives Saturday. So we'll be having a busy few days showing people around here at the farm. Misa, you're very happy to meet lots of new people, aren't you? She's a very amazing dog. And everyone loves Misa a lot, don't they? Yeah, she loves hanging out with people. Well, the snow went as quickly as it came and we're doing a lot of last minute jobs around the farm, clearing spaces for people that are arriving this weekend. Everyone's going to be here pretty soon. We have little accommodations in our magazine. This is the old grain barn. Just simple, nice cozy rooms. I think Matt's going to take this room and yeah, we've just been clearing out the storage of stuff over the winter and cleaning, lots of cleaning. Our neighbor's been amazingly helpful actually and has been cleaning all the windows for us, which is a real blessing. A lot of work goes into having so many people here and we create these amazing learning opportunities from people from around the world and we have a lot of fun. We love having a lot of people here. This is our winter wood storage. It becomes our washing up station. We use a simple three bucket washing station like I learned in Thailand, where you have hot soapy water and two rinses. And it's amazing. Thai people can keep them clean all day even with a lot of oily, greasy food, whereas westerners tend to Take a little bit of time to learn how to use them. This is a dehydrator. It's an old coat drying rack and we just made some simple and netted shelves for this. It's important here. It's very hard to rely on things like solar dehydration here because the weather in Sweden is so unpredictable. The week of summer is very short. And herbs. To keep the medicinal quality of herbs, you've got to dry them at the right temperature. They can't get above about 37, 40 degrees and they got to dry quickly to preserve the oil. So we use this for that purpose. And we still have jars full of herbs from the summer. Goodbye to the old sauna. We're taking it to the neighbour who can get a bit of use out of it. I've been making holes in the barn, putting in a door here for fire escape, so we can use this as a day space. This is coming out into the yard where the sauna is now installed. Got the first direct zone crops of the year. There's peas in here now. And growing many beds of snap peas. Really nice garlic crops coming up nicely now. We've got about eight beds of garlic this year. This is spent brewers grain from a local organic brewery in the village, which we use mostly feeding our pigs with this and some other supplements. But to be honest, I think today they're not even going to bother sniffing at it. Matt's just putting some outer grace over there. But they're going to be very happy digging around today that they don't even look at it. I think despite the cold weather, things are putting on good growth. Matt's just watering in here. The baby salad leaves. The gentle germinating nicely and the spinach is ready to crop. And whilst growth has started in the grasses, it's still just starting the first buds on the trees. This is tilia here behind me, but it's still very early in the season. Some cuttings here. These are cuttings we took from best blackcurrants called Ben Lomond and I brought them over from the UK and they have amazingly delicious blackcurrants with berries the size of my thumbnail. And I've got quite big thumbs. So excited to spread them around and propagate them further. Something I'm really excited about is all my grape vines have arrived and these are from a specialist grape breeder in estonia. I've got five varieties. 30 of each have come. I've got Zilja and Gunnar and we've got Sikrib, Somerset Seeless and Kuzminsk Sinai. These are all varieties selected for our latitude up at 59 degrees north, where there aren't really many vineyards around. These are all varieties that we have in the vineyard above our pond already, and we're putting in the other side of the vineyard this year. They're just coming as rooted cuttings. They cost about €5 a piece for name varieties and these need potting up now. They just came in the post today. Last year or two years ago, when I bought from this supplier, they had leafed out in the post. They took a long time to get here and they really suffered. We lost about 20% because they had to put on new leaves again that season. So it put them back quite a long way. Whereas these are just starting to bud. They're in really good condition. I was getting a bit nervous about where they were, so I'm going to spend the evening potting up my grapevines. So that's it. Just a quick update today and you'll get to meet the whole crew in the next couple of days. Thanks for watching our videos. Click subscribe below if you haven't already and you can find out more about the farm in Making Small Farms work. Links below. See you next time.
