2023-12 Fourth Christmas
Pretty Snowy December was great, with lots of snow. The snow makes Christmas feel real, and the reflected light from the snow brightens up the darkest month. We saw the northern lights a few times on evening walks, and the greenhouse survived the snow without problems. Upstairs Sewing Area As a winter project, we started […]
2023-11 Winter Arrival
November sees real snow that settles and stays, with the occasional snowploughs on the main road. All our activity shifts to indoors or to winter orientated outdoor activities. Making Planned Wood We setup the basement workshop to process rough-cut timber into planed wood, and planed our first planks. To do this we used the circlesaw […]
2023-10 Winter Preparation Rush
Time off Work I took 2 weeks unpaid leave off work, as I had a big backlog of tasks to get done before winter and we had a couple of weeks without a scheduled customer task for me. Once the ground freezes certain work cant be done, and once the snow builds up almost all […]
Heap Pump Settings
This article contains the settings we used for a NIBE ground source heat pump (GSHP) in Sweden to get a compromise between lower energy use without noticeably sacrificing comfort. Moreover, the article has a description of what the settings mean and the decision behind the settings. This is a work in progress and I’ll update […]
Important Dates in Northern Sweden
The following dates are our experiences for our location in Västernorrland. Note that the Swedish often use week numbers (e.g “week 25” of the year). This works well when the seasons change so significantly because the start and end of each month can be wildly different in character. January January is when the serious snow […]
2023-09 Earthworks
This month we conducted mostly earthworks. We were desperately trying to get significant changes done to the garden before the winter with the time and resources we had. Rain made it too wet to work with the digger without causing significant damage. At one point I got frustrated and used the digger anyway, and caused […]
2023-08 Minidigger!
This month we had family to visit and later we had a minidigger arrive to help us in the garden. We managed to get out and enjoy the summer a little. The main constraint to developing the house and garden remained time, budget, and slowly building up tools and contacts. Stugga Visit We went out […]
2023-07 Overgrown Vegetables
Our first summer with the big greenhouse, things started to get a bit out of control. The watering demands were eating up all the evenings after work and the plants were getting massive in the greenhouse. The problem became that the bigger plants, like the the Sweetcorn we had planted, were blocking the flow of […]
2023-06 GreenHouse/Växthus Finish
June gets really hot, and is the peak solar-producing month. It’s also quite brutal on the plants as they’ve been weeks without rain. Watering the plants in direct sunlight can cause damage if the leaves are wet so we hand-watered each evening. It takes a long time to water each end of the garden however. […]
2023-05 May Rush
May feels like a mad rush to get plants growing and established before the intense heat in June. We also had the greenhouse to finish. Greenhouse Preparation The first task was to put in a drain and pumpout point for the greenhouse so we can better cope with next years spring thaw. Last month the […]
2023-04 Cold Spring
There are normally big changes from cold weather to spring warmth but this year had a colder spring which caused some problems. Foxes, Curlews and herons appeared, and there were deer in the field. It’s quite hard to plan for planting in May as it depends on when the last frost will be and this […]
2023-03 Snow Disasters
Storm Hits This month we learnt that a single missing storm tie-down on the greenhouse can spell disaster. All joints in the greenhouse had a tensioned wire holding them in place. The panels also overlapped and there were, screws securing the panels at the bottom, and at the top a metal cap holding the panels […]
2023-02 Planning and Study
It’s pretty cold outside Snow Clearing Last year we kept the snow away from the house. perimeter and were able to keep up with the snowfall sliding from the roof. This year snow slid off in the night before a super-cold night. This is bad because it forms into a large rock-hard pile. The snow […]
2023-01 Out of the Dark
This was our third winter in Sweden so we were a bit more prepared but January is still fairly tough. To combat the winter blues we’ve been going out walking each night to see the stars, my partner has been baking, and I’ve been working on my Swedish. There has been no building work as […]