Refrigeration

During the winter the kitchen entrance and storage entrance has doubled as a fridge, with temperatures around zero to 5 C, even when the main rooms in the house have been at 20+.  A good temperature to keep dairy, meat and vegetables. Now that it's warming up outside I'm using the Paul CD method: a coolbox which I open overnight to get down to 5 degrees and it stays down under 10 until evening as long as I don't open it.  This works while I'm working and while night time temperatures are low, but won't hold up in the summer.

So I'm looking for a good offgrid solution (I have a generator, but it's not on all the time) and have come up with the following list.  Any further ideas are welcome.

• The family who owned the property before have left me with a gas fridge, but it's big and I'd prefer to use the space for storage.  I also don't know how much fuel it uses and to be honest I'd prefer something that doesn't add to the carbon budget for the house.
• Before they had the fridge, they used to use the smaller well.  Anything to be stored was wrapped in waterproofing and lowered down.  It sounds great for beer, but the well lid is a big slab of concrete and I'd rather not be shifting it on and off all the time.
• Evaporation cooling.  This Mexican solution looks good, and there's a flower pot version looks do-able.  The question is whether I can get big enough pots for it to be useable, but this looks like something worth testing.
• Hooking up a 12V coolbox  (something like this) to a battery that gets charged when the generator is on.  I have the battery and charger already, so this looks do-able to me. 

Saving seeds

Starting a garden from scratch i a new country means that I need to buy seeds for pretty much all of the plants I want to grow.  The good thing is it doesn't have to stay that way.  As Huw Richards shows in his video on growing peas, saving seed can be easy and very satisfying.

I also rather fancy the rain gutter method of getting seedlings going - not because I'm particularly worried about mice here, but because it makes it easy to get the seeds going and then plant them out in one easy go. 

Working with firewood

There's a lot more to it than you might think.   Lars Mytting's book "Norwegian Wood" won prizes and I can see why.  It's a good mix of stories, technique and history.  A bit like learning to manage woodland for firewood from a person.

Swedish podcast about the balance between cities and the countryside

https://soundcloud.com/landet-podcast

The speakers are:

Terese Bengard: Director of "Hela Sverige ska leva"
Hans Westlund, Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Studies, KTH in Sotckholm
Göran Greider, Chief editor at The Dala-Democrat.

Soil fertility in Småland

Småland soils are short of Phosphorous and Potassium.  Urine contains both these and nitrogen and makes a good fertiliser.

Permaculture News has a nice article on using urine as a fertiliser.  It has lots of useful information on doing it well, including implementing systems at different scales.