Photos from my summer
Aug. 15th, 2021 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaHere are some photos from my pandemic summer. I've spent it with my parents, either sailing or being at the family summer place.
This is my parents' boat. My dad grew up with lots of sailing and we did it all through my childhood as well. The west coast of Sweden is LOVELY for sailing; it has a multitude of large and small islands where you can just go in and lie whereever you want on the uninhabited islands, or on the inhabited ones, as long as you don't do it too close to someone's house. This is the beauty of Sweden's tradition of public access to land! Or you can lie in a town harbor when you need to fill up on things like electricity, freshwater, and food. This summer we spent about two weeks going up the coast from Göteborg and then back down again.
Here's the inside of the boat, also featuring the family dog. I sleep in the space in the front which you can just see through an opening; it is called "förpik" in Swedish, which apparently is "forepeak" in English, heh.
This is the family summer place, which is also a perfect place to be during the pandemic. I am the fifth generation in that house; my mom's maternal grandparents and one generation before that were "torpare", that is, tenants on a larger farm. My maternal grandmother went out and worked on other farms, but then came back and got married to the man who took over the main farm. So she moved up in the world. And then in 1974 my mom took it over, five years before I was born. That combination of red walls and white corners is very typical of Sweden (red paint being for hundreds of years a byproduct of the copper mine in Falun). In front of the house you can see part of the vegetable garden.
Here is the lake close by, where we go swimming.
Things I picked in the nearby woods! Those are pretty much the only chanterelles we've found so far, but the blueberry harvest is reliable.
Everything in this dinner is from the garden or the woods nearby, except for the bread and cheese and butter. Which admittedly make up most of the calories! We do have dairy cows grazing close to the house, and grain fields not that far away, but obviously they're not ours... Besides the squash, red beets, and spinach, in the garden we also grow lots of potatoes, onions, Jerusalem artichokes, peas, gooseberries, currants, rhubarb, various herbs, this year also a pumpkin plant which seems be giving us one pumpkin. The salad, dill, and beans failed for various reasons (eaten by slugs, diseased, and eaten by deer respectively).
One of the two monster squash plants which are thriving in the new vegetable bed we made last year from old silage. They produce squashes faster than we can eat them, despite our best efforts...
And now I'm going home in a couple of days, since I got my second shot a week ago (Pfizer, no side effects whatsoever except a slight soreness in my arm) and will unfortunately need to start working soon. Meh.
This is my parents' boat. My dad grew up with lots of sailing and we did it all through my childhood as well. The west coast of Sweden is LOVELY for sailing; it has a multitude of large and small islands where you can just go in and lie whereever you want on the uninhabited islands, or on the inhabited ones, as long as you don't do it too close to someone's house. This is the beauty of Sweden's tradition of public access to land! Or you can lie in a town harbor when you need to fill up on things like electricity, freshwater, and food. This summer we spent about two weeks going up the coast from Göteborg and then back down again.
Here's the inside of the boat, also featuring the family dog. I sleep in the space in the front which you can just see through an opening; it is called "förpik" in Swedish, which apparently is "forepeak" in English, heh.
This is the family summer place, which is also a perfect place to be during the pandemic. I am the fifth generation in that house; my mom's maternal grandparents and one generation before that were "torpare", that is, tenants on a larger farm. My maternal grandmother went out and worked on other farms, but then came back and got married to the man who took over the main farm. So she moved up in the world. And then in 1974 my mom took it over, five years before I was born. That combination of red walls and white corners is very typical of Sweden (red paint being for hundreds of years a byproduct of the copper mine in Falun). In front of the house you can see part of the vegetable garden.
Here is the lake close by, where we go swimming.
Things I picked in the nearby woods! Those are pretty much the only chanterelles we've found so far, but the blueberry harvest is reliable.
Everything in this dinner is from the garden or the woods nearby, except for the bread and cheese and butter. Which admittedly make up most of the calories! We do have dairy cows grazing close to the house, and grain fields not that far away, but obviously they're not ours... Besides the squash, red beets, and spinach, in the garden we also grow lots of potatoes, onions, Jerusalem artichokes, peas, gooseberries, currants, rhubarb, various herbs, this year also a pumpkin plant which seems be giving us one pumpkin. The salad, dill, and beans failed for various reasons (eaten by slugs, diseased, and eaten by deer respectively).
One of the two monster squash plants which are thriving in the new vegetable bed we made last year from old silage. They produce squashes faster than we can eat them, despite our best efforts...
And now I'm going home in a couple of days, since I got my second shot a week ago (Pfizer, no side effects whatsoever except a slight soreness in my arm) and will unfortunately need to start working soon. Meh.
