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Preparing a new pavement

20 November 2020 by Monica Björk

During summer I have been casting a lot of oriental paver stones. I’m planning to build a casting corner in my garden where I will have a working bench with a built-in sink and space for my concrete mixer and the vibrating table. Of course I need a fancy pavement for this.

This is what the tiles look like.

I bought a starter set of the very pretty concrete moulds and started casting. I quickly realized that I will need quite many of the finished stones, more than you think, so I ordered some more moulds to speed up the casting.

Casting in progress.

Every other day during summer was spent on casting these stones. Now I have almost enough for the planned area to be paved. To build the casting corner will be a fun project for next summer!

Lots of stones but not enough!

Update on the snow

All the snow we got a month ago melted after a week and then we got lots of rain. This caused our very small cellar to overflow. This happens usually during spring but rarely during fall. We got about 30 cm of water on the floor. We have a small freezer down there but it’s placed on a shelf about 50 cm up from the floor to protect it from overflowing. We had to pump out the water for some days and now its dry again.

The cellar is very tiny indeed!

Yesterday we got some more snow but not as much as last time. I hope it will stay this time!

/Monica

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Winter is here!

21 October 2020 by Monica Björk

Three days ago, winter came to us, we got almost 30 cm of wet and heavy snow and today it’s snowing again! I love when the first snow comes because everything gets so bright.

I managed to make almost all winter preparations in the garden before the snow came, so I’m quite happy about that! I still have some minor things to do, but that is fine!

Plums

This autumn has been warm and with no frost nights until late September. This is very unusual but I’m happy because then all the plums had time to ripen. This is the first year we got a harvest from the tree, and what a harvest! I have picked more than 20 kilos of plums! They are so sweet and tasty but quite small. Most of them are now in the freezer.

/Monica

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Berries, oh so much berries!

30 August 2020 by Monica Björk

This year the woods are full of wild berries. Here in Sweden anyone can go out into the woods and pick berries, they are free and you do not have to ask the landowner for permission. As I have lots of time now when I’m out of work, I decided to pick as much berries as I could. In the end of July I started to pick bilberries (European Bluberry), here in Sweden we call them blueberry.

Bilberries can be used for so much. I make juice and jam and I bake pies and make blueberry pancakes. They are also delicious to put frozen on yoghurt.

The most delicious berry you can pick is cloudberries. They can be found on peatlands and this year we found lots of them. I have never seen so many cloudberries and it was so fun to pick. Cloudberry jam is delicious served with waffles or pancakes.

The last wild berry to pick is the lingonberry or cowberry. They are troublesome for the body to pick because one has to bend down so deeply. I went out yesterday to pick lingonberry and today everything is hurting, ha ha. I make jam from these and serve it for example together with meatballs and fried chicken liver.

In total I have picked:

28 kg bilberries
7 kg cloudberries
10 kg lingonberries

In my garden there are also lots of berries that I have picked this summer. There are strawberries, red currants, raspberries and sour cherries. I’m also waiting for the apples (not so many, the tree is young), the plums and the wine to ripen. I hope the plums and the wine (newly planted) will ripen this year. They have started to change colour from green to blue so I’m hopeful. The plum tree is so full of plums and this is the first year there would be a real harvest if they would ripen.

The hardest thing about picking so much berries is that I have to find space for most of them in the freezer. It’s hard, very hard!

I feel blessed with such great access to the delicacy from the forest and the garden.

/Monica

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Garden bench

11 August 2020 by Monica Björk

Some years ago i bought a mould for casting bench legs. Since I didn’t know how to attach the top planks, I never got around to use it.

Now I wanted to do something about this. I bought some angle brackets that I was going to cast into the bench legs. I also needed to make a support for the brackets to get them in the right position when casting. I used some left over materials for this.

I casted four bench legs and it went just fine. Now to the fun part, the assembling of the bench! For this I had bought some pressure impregnated wood for the top and cut it into the dimensions I wanted.

Before I screwed the top part on the legs, I mounted a reinforcement between them. Here it is up side down so I could put the screws in.

And here is the two finished garden benches. Aren’t they gorgeous!

I think I will make more of these next summer!

/Monica

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Concrete flower ball

3 July 2020 by Monica Björk

The flower ball latex mould is finally ready and I have casted some balls with really good result. To make it easier when casting, I also made a support for the mould.

I don’t know if I will paint the balls because I kinda like the colour of raw concrete. Look how nice they are!

/Monica

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