A productive afternoon in the woods yesterday on the Malvik side of Solemsvåttan with my Swiss helper Julia Albrecht with a good haul of bilberries and the year’s first chantarelles! Yes, I think I live in paradise :)
I neither use sugar nor do I have a freezer. My favourite way of preserving fruit is drying and the quickest way of drying fruit in an oven is by making fruit leather…simply boil the fruit to sterilise and mashing as you boil, then pour into an oven tray and dry for a few hours at about 40C!
Have just finished a batch of redcurrants (rips) and raspberries (bringebær). The raspberries were both wild red raspberries, an old Norwegian yellow (gulbringebær) and a cultivar “White Russian”
See last year’s blog on raspberry / bilberry leather here: http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=13187
12th August Added pictures of leather made from cloudberries, bilberries and wild raspberries!
English:pictures from Norwegian Seed Savers visit to Njøs, an old fruit research station near Leikanger in Sogn! We saw Stein Harald Hjetnes’ own developed Celina pear as well as collections and trials of fruit including sea buckthorn, haskaps, minikiwi and others!
Norwegian:Tusen takk til Stein Harald Hjeltnes og Dag Røen for et spennende og lærerik besøk i praktfulle omgivelser under KVANNs årsmøtet i Leikanger i April!
Vi fikk bl.a se hans egen pære Celina som var et av grunnene til at han fikk plantearven pris for ifjor.
Se http://www.fruktfatet.no/artikkel/heimelaga-paere-skal-redde-norsk-paeredyrking
og https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/plantearven-prisen-utdelt/id2579094
I tillegg til pære kunne vi se forsøk på minikiwi, honningbær/blåleddved, tindved mfl.
I was asked if it is possible to grow papaws (Asimina triloba) in Norway. I don’t think it’s impossible, but I suspect they need warmer summers than most parts of Norway can offer. I have seen good size trees in Malmø (Southern Sweden) with one fruit at the end of July in Åke Truedssons garden and a good size tree in the Gøteborg Botanical, pictures in both sites are from 29th-30th July 2008. I don’t know how these trees are doing today. I’ve tried a couple of times. I’ve managed to germinate seed, but the plants hardly grow in my cold summers! See more about papaw (which is not the same as the better known tropical pawpaw or papaya) on the wiki page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba
1) In Åke Truedsson’s garden in Malmø with a fruit!
At the apple moon coring and cutting apples is a must..processed a couple of hundred apples today, now drying over the wood stove and in the oven. It’s a it more urgent than normal as -8C when I finally managed to harvest them was a bit too much and they won’t be able to be stored long this year (all have brownish blotches on the outside), a bit like the supermoon picture I just took, see below ;)
Part of the biggest flock of waxwings (sidensvans) in the garden today, around 350 birds!….seriously distracted all day by these photogenic arctic “parrots”! Feeding on yew (barlind), hawthorn (hagtorn), elderberries (svarthyll) and guelder rose (krossved) berries…
1. Waxwings in flight
2. Waxwings on the yew tree by the kitchen window
3. Waxwings on yew berries in the neighbour’s garden
4. Waxwings and sunrise
5. In this film you can hear waxwing poop falling to the ground…I thought it was raining!
Yew / barlind fruit is rather gooey….the picture is taken from the video of a flock of waxwings / sidensvans on the neighbour’s yew tree (Taxus baccata).
After our visit to the Government House garden, Solara Goldwynn took me on a visit to an amazing inspiring ecohouse, gardens and perennials nursery in the Highlands area just outside of the city of Victoria (BC) where she and husband Tayler were living in a flat with owners Ann and Gord Baird
You can read much more about Ann and Gord on their web site at https://eco-sense.ca
Good to meet Randy Gunnar Lange and Ingunn Bohmann of Eikeløkka in Hurdal on Sunday! Eikeløkka is a permaculture farm under development on the island group Hvaler in the far south east of Norway!
Randy and Ingunn are currently doing the PDC course in Malvik!