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.