Sillegarden Update. We need your help!

Welcome back to another video, folks. I thought it's high time that I gave you a little bit of an update. What's been going on behind the scenes? Planning to get Siligorden, our new farm and restaurant venue, open and ready for the summer. So last summer, as you know, we bought this restaurant which has been sitting empty for a couple of years and it's got a long, colourful history. We've launched the website now so you can read more about the history and what we're planning to do at this place. We're bringing some of the farm up to the farm here and we're opening in the summer for local people with incredible concerts and music. And then four times a year we're running these big farms, feasts where we get to eat the farm. And I guess it's come around for two main reasons. One, we couldn't stand the idea of this place just falling into ruin. It's too special a place in our local village to let that happen. No one else was going to develop it or do anything with it. And then the second reason is I've spent my entire career talking to farmers and been thinking a lot in the last years, like, it's really chefs and people in health and fitness that have a bigger voice to the public about food. So if we're really trying to change the way farming and ecosystem management works, I think we've got a much better chance doing that through chefs and food experiences with people. So all through last summer, I was just excited by the potential and possibilities here at this incredible location. But I think over the winter, to be frank, it's just been overwhelming and a bit too much. And I've already got enough work to do running Ridgedale and the other things I do around that. But I wanted this long term to be a very collaborative, community based project, creating cultural experiences that are really missing here. Living out in the rural countryside, there's not so many places I would want to hang out other than my farm. So I decided I'll take on the challenge of creating that kind of place that I want to hang out in. It turns out it's not as simple as that. There's a huge amount of bureaucracy in terms of the legislation and regulations around Food Farm hosting people and concerts and the way this has had to work specifically for the alcohol license that we need to apply for for the restaurant. I've had to put this entirely on my own company because the other people involved in the core team are not Swedish, do not have Swedish personal numbers, and therefore it Just overly complicates things to have them on the initial registration. But that sort of puts me in the uncomfortable position of being somewhat the boss. And that is not the intention of what I wanted to set up here. I guess I'm really excited to just get this place open this summer to bring people and life back to this place. It's an incredibly important historical venue that people have been coming to for well over 100 years. And it's got this beautiful paintings and furniture created by the original artist family owning it. We want to pay respect to that and not change a lot. The only change we've made here is a fresh liquor paint to sort of lift the warmth of this space. It's not heated and it doesn't have water in the winter. So it's a summer only venue and warmth and life is what it's missing right now. Having sat abandoned for two years, we're mainly going to put attention into building up a stage and the beautiful garden spaces, as well as an incredible sand garden in the car park, and just lift the energy of the place by bringing back plants and animals and people. And that's what I'm really excited about. So one of the first things we had to do was register this place as a food preparing area again and then apply for alcohol license. Now, it's very strict here in Sweden around alcohol licenses. I had to show all kinds of documents for the business. I had to take an alcohol knowledge test to show that I'm proficient in understanding the legislation here. That means I'm responsible for the serving of this area. Now part of that is that we want to serve in the restaurant on the two storeys as well as in the garden space. So something that's changed since the old days is we are required to put up a fence around the garden space to be able to keep people in the serving area during concerts. So we're having bigger concerts here, up to 300 people, and that requires communication to the police, the fire department. So we had to create a whole updated fire plan for the place, which already had a fire plan in the old days. But every time you start a new thing, they maybe bring newer legislation into play and there's always updating and a lot of paperwork. We've had meetings with the commune where people from the environment, waste, garbage, water, fire department, police, building inspectors, building controllers, all of these people present and we're going through talking about the things we want to do and where restrictions may lie. And it's a little complicated. For example, the area for serving Alcohol is the restaurant and the garden space. But the big feasts we want to run are out in the actual pasture. But then we have to apply for temporary license just for those events. We also want to use the jetty that goes 100 meters out into the lake Freeken here, which is not actually part of the property. It's owned by the communication. So we've had to apply to the commune to be able to get special exemption for those kinds of things. Sweden is a country of regulation, so just to turn the car park that's already existing as a car park into a beautiful sand garden to make more use of the space and to beautify it requires planning permission. This is the car park space that we would like to turn into a beautiful sand garden and make it a more beautiful, functional space. But as with all these regulations, it's so many little details. Like, for example, to renovate a car park now in Sweden, if It's more than 20 car parking spaces, you need to install electrical charging points for electric vehicles. Now, obviously, for a startup where we've got old buildings to take care of and a lot of investments to make in both the farm, the kitchen and the spaces, we can't afford to be putting in charges for cars that don't even turn up here yet. So we found little hacks around that, like, if we only have 19 official parking spots, then perhaps we don't need to actually put in those charges. But it's little things like this that consume so much of the time. And it's just been a lot of meetings, email back and forth, and a lot of new territory where sometimes the sort of questions that we bring up don't have an answer because it's not something necessarily navigated in more traditional businesses. So you can understand it takes a lot of time and waiting for responses, etc. That's what's taken up most of the wintertime. We also want to have a floating sauna out at the end of the pier. That will be for the community's benefit. They can rent it and use it too. But that requires shore water protection acts and planning permission too. And all of these things just take months. And what we found in this process is everything relies on on one step being completed. And so it's just been months and months of going round and round in circles waiting for these different permissions and regulations to come through. It's going to be quite a long stretch to be opening already in this summer. But we're confident and we're working hard to try and prepare Everything. Something really exciting is the concerts that we're going to be hosting this summer. If we look out from the upper terrace here into the garden space, we've actually cleared a big tree here and a big tree here that was blocking the view from up here, which was a terrible shame. Now, we don't take it lightly, cutting beautiful trees, but it was an obvious decision for us. And so you can see the temporary fence posts are marking the edge of the serving area. So we're going to have this little room as a sort of green room for the artists coming. And we're going to build, hopefully, a beautiful grass roof stage with the backdrop of the lake behind. We're going to lift up this old decking and remove this old fountain and have this lawn space manicured and nice again. So Nora is a key person in the team and is the events manager responsible for hiring and hosting artists. Now, something about living in the countryside here is people typically travel to Stockholm or Oslo or Gothenburg to go and see one of their favorite artists play. What we want to do is really bring that kind of energy back to the countryside. And what we can offer here is this incredible backdrop of this venue and small, intimate concerts, up to 300 people. But we're aiming to bring artists that are far bigger than would typically come and play in a rural setting. So it's super exciting. And as we confirm different artists, they will come up on our website, which you can find in the links below. And that's going to be super fun and a really nice way to come and spend the weekend, visit the farm, see an incredible concert and get to eat the farm, too. Another key person in the team is our chef, Ben, who has been a chef at the farm in the past and has chefed at some of the top restaurants in the uk and is an expert forager of wild foods and crafts. Incredible food. He's also been key in the Ridgedale Farm Cookbook that some of you will have read. You can find all those books in the links in my bio. But he's going to be crafting incredible food out of whatever's in season, both for the feasts and for the concert nights throughout the summer. Now, as you can imagine, a place like this is very expensive to maintain and run, and I feel like I've bitten off a little bit more than I could chew. It took scraping the barrel to make the purchase possible, and I've had to borrow very heavily that I feel a little vulnerable and a little worried as this is all building up to opening up. We've had to let go of some plans. For example, the sand garden in the car park is just not the highest priority. What is a high priority is investing in tables and chairs and fencing and the farm components out on the land, as well as the kitchen, the restaurant and spaces. The dance hall are beautiful, but the kitchen is very, very outdated. It's not been used for years and it's, to be honest, probably built 30 years ago. With looking at the equipment that's in here, you could throw money at a place like this and not see where it's really gone. But we've had to narrow down the investments that are really essential to be able to open up. Those of you that have followed the farm over the years on YouTube or through coming on our trainings or reading our books, etc. Will probably understand what a significant and bold step this is in the evolution of the farm. I'm excited to bring elements of farm up to the land here and to really invite a lot more people in. And as I said before, the intention is to really bring the public and people into connection to farming through food. And we really want to make this a collaborative and community based project. We decided it would be quite fitting, given my history with Kickstarter campaigns in the past, to run a Kickstarter and invite you in as a way to celebrate the farm and food and each other and network together. I feel like I really need to ask for help and support to get this project up and rolling. It's a little bit too big to do alone or as a small group and I hope that it inspires some of you who have followed the farm over the years and have taken value from our videos and books, etc. To come and participate and be part of this. It's a really special place. I think you can see the character and feeling of this place and we really want to bring it alive again and can't think of a better way to do that than with the people who have supported and helped all of the work I've been doing to grow and flourish and influence people all, all around the world. That's the way that would make my heart sing is to see a lot of you here feasting on the land from food grown at the farm with people telling tales about farming and regeneration. And so we've decided to put on the Kickstarter campaign and put on a whole weekend of hosting one day at the farm, touring the farm and having a little lecture series on regenerative agriculture, making sure we network with everyone there to connect each other together. That's always been a very fruitful part of what we do at the farm. And then having a five hour midday feast at the land here followed by party in the restaurant until late for those that want to stay for that. And we'll be serving breakfast and lunches and dinners from the farm. So it's a great opportunity to spend all weekend with like minded people in this incredible place whilst helping us Kickstarter the funding to get the restaurant kitchen as well as some basic furniture in place to be able to host events well into the future. It's been several months of hard work with the bureaucracy so far and there's more months of work to go to be able to open this summer for you. We'd really love you to be involved. You can help by liking and following the silly Golden Instagram page. Check out our website, see if there's any concerts coming up that you'd love to travel here for. And if you want to join us for any of the epic feasts, they're special events that we're running in collaboration with Selma Spa. If you want to make a weekend out of it, you can come and stay the whole weekend in a luxury spa hotel and come here for a five hour feast representing spring, summer, autumn and winter. The Kickstarter campaign has gone live. Now you can learn more about it as well as read some more about the history of this place and you can find that in the links in the bio. Thanks so much for watching folks as always and I look forward to an update from the Farm very soon.