Our Current Home and How We've Been Keeping Busy

Well we've been here at our current host stay for nearly two weeks now, and we've been busy. Given the complications of logistics and the broken toe, Lucy has decided to stay here for the full month as well, so we will not be separating. This certainly saves us some difficult decisions, such as who gets the tube of toothpaste? It's also nice to be in one place for a longer period of time as it is allowing us to undertake some larger projects.

This workaway location is the home of a semi-retired couple, Marjo and Lärken, who are looking to live a more self-sufficient lifestyle. They are pursuing small-scale food production, animal husbandry and, most significantly ecological building. They consider the place an educational center, primarily for clay building, where they host volunteers, workshops on various building techniques and offer guided tours for those interested in these sorts of projects. They have constructed a number of clay structures - an animal bayer, a chicken house, a chapel, an interior clay frame in their sleeping house, a clay-brick oven - and have a variety of ongoing projects as well. In terms of cultivation, they have a small area of raised beds with vegetables, a berry patch, and plans to create a food forest garden with perennials, fruits and nuts. They also have chickens for eggs, pigs as living tractors, and sheep for wool and meat to sell. And then there are the two cats, three family dogs, and one guard dog for the sheep.

Making rhubarb crisp in the barrel oven!

There are quite a few structures at the property besides those mentioned already: the couple has two private houses, one for sleeping and one for daily use, a large barn, with an upstairs room where we are staying, a prefab sauna being used as a guest house, and four trailers: one for eating and hanging out, one kitchen, one bunk room and one workshop space. Then there is a large pasture for the sheep. All told, they have about three hectares of land.

Reading before breakfast by the mini greenhouse (a fixture in backyard gardens here) with the lunch wagon in the background.

Our first few days here were spent weeding and planting in the raised-bed gardens, which had been neglected for a few weeks. There isn't much to harvest at this point except for mountains of radishes. Some earlier volunteers clearly went crazy with the radish planting! So we've tried them raw, sauteed, in soup, and pickled. The other vegetables are coming along, but cultivation does not seem to be a high priority right now.

Marjo had quite a few projects that she would like to complete this summer, but she gave us free rein to pick what we would like to work on. So, along with Greg, the volunteer from England who arrived the same night as us, we decided that we would like to build a reciprocal roof for the clay oven and outdoor kitchen space that they had created. For a sense of what this type of project entails, check out this video (just the frame part): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgjY7CGLy9U
Thibaud, a volunteer from France who came a few days later, also liked the idea, so the four of us created a plan and began to put it into action. There are also three men who work here during the week through the unemployment bureau, two of whom are from Africa and receive Swedish lessons from Marjo. So we had plenty of muscle to put to work!

The initial setup: six posts around the barrel oven and outdoor kitchen space.

We spent the next week working with full dedication on this project. The kitchen ring already had six vertical posts erected around the edges, so we planned to build a roof with six poles. First, we cut beams from an old barn that had been torn down to create a ring around the top of the poles.

Adie and Abdi, a Somalian refugee, placing the first horizontal beam on top of the posts.

The horizontal ring is complete! Lärken later sawed off the ends of the beams.

Lärken used the chain saw to cut the beams to size and make notches for lapp joints. They were rough cuts, but we drilled holes and pounded in pegs to connect them to the posts.

Drilling holes for the wooden pegs.

Marjo felled suitable trees for the roof poles, which we de-limbed and debarked.

Lucy using a scraper to remove the bark from a pine tree.

The guys struggling to carry a seven meter tree from the pasture to the building site.

Then we built a five-meter high tripod to use as scaffolding during construction. We lashed the tops of the poles with rope, then screwed boards on to the sides to serve as added stability and steps. We positioned the tripod inside the ring so that it would fit through the hole that forms at the center of the reciprocal roof.

Lucy, Greg and Thibaud admiring the tripod.

Unfortunately, we suffered a setback when we created a model of the roof on the ground. We set up the poles in their approximate position, lashing the joints for temporary stability. When we put the last pole in place, there was a small gap between it and the first pole, which has to sit on top of it. We decided to try pulling out the support prop (called a Charlie), hoping that the first pole would drop on to the last one and hold.

Adie, Greg and Eric, straining to yank out the Charlie (the thick square posts under the poles).

However, when the guys yanked the Charlie away, the sudden force of the entire ring dropping onto the last pole snapped it in two. Thank goodness this happened on the ground and not five meters up in the air! Nevertheless, it forced us to reconsider the whole plan and brainstorm alternatives to make the process safer.

The central ring after the crash - the broken end is in the middle.

First we decided that we should double the number of roof poles, from six to twelve, because most of the examples we'd seen had about that many. This meant cutting down more trees that were at least six meters in height. Also, because one of the problems we'd encountered was the flexibility of the green wood, we decided to cut and debark them, then leave them to dry in the sun for two weeks before constructing. So we undertook a feverish afternoon of cutting and debarking seven hefty pine trees. Then that evening, we had a neighbor bring her horse and Marjo's pony over to drag the trees back from the edge of the property to the barnyard. It was quite fun to watch the horses easily pulling the trees across the pasture!


However, after a weekend of rest and discussion, Marjo and Lärken decided that they would rather not build the full roof without having the input of an experienced builder first. So instead we've decided to create an outdoor shower with a smaller reciprocal roof instead! There is only a shower in the private house right now and the spring does not provide enough water for daily bathing, so the opportunities for getting clean are very infrequent. Lucy had inquired about the possibility of an outdoor shower, knowing how wonderful they are, and Marjo decided that the time is right to build one. So plans are already underway for the new project!