Two lovely hotels... on either side of the Atlantic pond

I have two hotels that are my absolute favorites, and they are both alike and so dissimilar that you wonder what do these really have in common.  Neither is cheap, so save up first for a fantastic experience. So, on to the reviews and reminiscences:

The first is Sigtuna Stads Hotell in Sweden,just northwest of Stockholm, where I stayed maybe 10 years ago with PP.  It is a hotel from 1909 that has been immaculately renovated, cared for, and preserved while being updated to modern standards.  It mixes old white and unpainted wood with modern chrome and clean lines.  It is a blessing for tired eyes, and tired bodies.
      It also helps that they have the best Swedish breakfast buffet I have had in a long time.  It really impressed my husband-to-be at the time, he still talks about it. Take a visitor here from another country and they will really 'get' what Swedish breakfast is about.  Hardboiled eggs, many kinds of cold cuts, cheeses, Kalles kaviar, musli, yoghurt (several kinds), homebaked bread, real butter, jams, and on and on.  It might be changed now but I doubt it.
     Their dinners are also amazing, and all based on local, sustainable food. I have no memory of what we ate for dinner only that it was exuberant, memorable, and plainly amazing.  You sit in the old dining room and look out over Lake Mälaren, not far from the island Björkö that was one of the first Viking cities and trading places (named Birka by the vikings). In these areas history goes deep, as does the sense of nature and responsibility.
     The early 1900s components melds here effortlessly with 1950s,. 1960s, and 2010s both in design and food traditions. (Note how I left out 1970s and 1980s?  That was totally on purpose.)  I love this place and want to go back. (More photos via Google of this hotel here.  Worth googling and oogling and longing for. )


(Images borrowed from Sigtuna Stads Hotell website)


The second place is a recent discovery - Hotel Vermont, in the city of Burlington in the state of Vermont in the United States of America. Burlington sits on the eastern shore on Lake Champlain, and on the other side of the large lake is the Adirondack Mountains, blue shades in the distance on a clear day.

(Images borrowed from Hotel Vermont's website)
 Hotel Vermont is only a year or two old, so brand-new really and they have incorporated sustainable, beautiful and functional design throughout.  As much as possible they try to promote local food, local artists, and local artisans.  The soap is made locally, the mugs are from a local pottery, the artwork is local, and even if the glasses with cows on them are Italian, they are imported and sold locally in Bennington.  We know because we bought the same glasses in Vermont a few years ago, and I think they are gorgeous.
 
(Images borrowed from Hotel Vermont's website)

The artwork behind the check-in desk in the lobby, a large wooden collage of reclaimed wood, has a very special story.  It was designed and constructed by Duncan Johnson by wooden pieces from destroyed houses after hurricane Irene which destroyed large parts of Vermont villages in 2011 through massive, and I mean MASSIVE, flooding.  Hundred-year-old covered bridges were washed away, people were disconnected from the world by non-existent roads for weeks, and houses filled with mud and water and fell apart. Hurricanes don't always have the worst effect along the coast, which Irene showed.
 
 (Images borrowed from Hotel Vermont's website)

But back to the hotel - our room had understated art, a very smart bathroom solution where one person can have privacy on the toilet and the other can take a shower - all arranged through frosted sliding glass doors.  There is free sparkling and mineral water in the hallways (which are very quiet!), as well as many kinds of coffee and tea.  The bed, oh the bed.  It is alike a dream sleeping in that bed.  Just perfectly soft.  Amazing pillows too.  A hotel with bad mattresses kills a good visit.  (OK, worst mattresses ever?  OTS research station in Palo Verde, Costa Rica, takes the price.  Then there is a big gap, and unfortunately Hotel Latchis in Brattleboro comes in second.  If they changed their mattresses their hotel would suddenly get 4 stars in my book - I love that art deco hotel but the hard old mattresses are killing me...).  Someone at Hotel Vermont really cares about sleep quality. Thank you!
 
(Images borrowed from Hotel Vermont's website)

The breakfast is served at Juniper, a small restaurant near the well-designed bar, which in itself is a great treat.  Many local beers and other liquids there too (at the bar).  Back to breakfast, which was amazing and not too expensive.  Mushroom ragout on homebaked bread with a soft-poached egg on top, and I was in heaven.  PP had grits with a sunny-side up egg and young pea shoots, and he was in heaven too.
    A few days earlier we had paid $11 for breakfast at an inn in southern Vermont, for food that was about 5% of the value and experience of this food (moldy, uncooked, tasteless), and this food was not much more expensive.  How can that be?  "Could it be a whistlepig?" [That latter quote is a somewhat internal Vermont story, which involve groundhogs, a bike, and Whistlepig whisky, and now is a family quote here at home. Sorry, couldn't help myself. ]

(Images borrowed from Hotel Vermont's website)

So, we stayed at this hotel and I failed to take any photos.  How is that possible?  I don't know. Whistlepig, maybe? :)  Actually, I didn't have any whisky, but I did have an amazing elderflower drink.  Vermont knows their elderflowers, it goes in their lemonade, beer, and even rum.

(For the record, all reviews on this blog are voluntary, and do not include ANY kind of marketing or money from any commercial companies.  It is just my own personal opinions of places where I have paid to eat, sleep, walk, think, shower, and be for a little while. Just so we are clear on that. If I win a million dollars on a lottery someday, you'll find me at either of these hotels for a little while :)   )

Philadelphia Flower Show - expectations and omissions

Yesterday my friend JL and I went to the Philadelphia Flower Show, this annual, glorious, giant event of artificially designed horticultural plants and gardens. This was probably my 5th visit, and I am getting used to the feel now.

The show is divided up into three parts, broadly speaking.  The first part, where you enter the show, are giant installations focused on some theme, this year it was 'Britain, Brilliant'.  Don't ask me how Britain is brilliant, I have no idea who came up with that non-brilliant slogan.  Anyway, there was a giant Big Ben clock, the gates to Kensington or Buckingham palace, things associated to London Fog, spring bulbs, royal crowns, and red and purple.



In my humble opinion, this year's theme was a total miss.  I don't think these designers even know much about Britain.  And Britain isn't just London and its vicinities.  Where were the rolling hills, the hedgerows, the fossil-rich cliffs along the English Channel, the little tiny front gardens, where were Kew Gardens and their greenhouses, where were the amazing British botanists of times past (Hooker, to name just one).  Instead it was gold, crowns, red, and some stone castles.


The throne from the War of the Roses?

The second part are smaller installations of gardens from invited groups and companies and also a large area where amateurs bring in their best and most fantastic specimens of plant cultivars, and then compete against each other in different classes.  For example: "Best cactus", "Cymbidium orchid", 'Hanging fern", or "Miniature plant". Each category is judged and they give out awards, 1st prize, 2nd prize, etc.  It is fun to see these plants, but it is just like a dog show.  People pamper their plants, brush the hairs on the cactus, and obviously treat their plants with lots of nutrients, hormones, light or darkness, to get them to behave and look their best on their big day.


The succulent winners. 


A basket case design.
In this area are also the floral arrangements and botanical art made with pressed plants.  This year all art had to do with royalty.  I wonder how school children in the Republic of the United States feel about making a royal crown out of pressed flowers for display at an American show?  Maybe I am the only one that finds this strange?  The total obsession with royalty in this republic, in this day and age? 

The Philadelphia Horticultural Society, who are the ones that arrange this show, seems to be stuck in a previous century where ladies that had nothing better to do tended their roses and potted their geraniums.  Ok, maybe that is a bit harsh, but that is a feeling I get.  Conspicuously absent from the show (except from the commercial booths) was any displays that focused on the whole home-gardening and home-growing trend that is huge in USA right now. How to grow your own veggies, how to make your own food, how to be more sustainable, how to have gardens that can manage climate stress, storms, heaps of heavy snow in the winter, invasive species, native species, wildlife habitats, and so on.


This species is classified as an invasive species.  I doubt many knew that. 

Instead there are exhibits that are empty when it comes to ideas and messages.  Many exhibits felt like (as usual) "OK, lets put something yellow over there, and some red here, and then some rocks, and then we need something whimsical and a blue light, and some funky garden chair".  Nothing really designed.  No plants that go together.  Sarracenia next to daffodils?  Give me a break!  They would NEVER survive together, nor flower at the same time.  Everything is planted in straight rows, equally distant from each other, and it is the same plants over and over. Totally unnatural.  Where are the true designers?  Where are the people that understand plants' requirements, understand that simplicity and clear lines and naturalities are better than rainbow mess of botanical chaos?  Oh, it is so depressing.  And then the old ladies say 'oh-ah', and love it, and I think - well, this would never work in real life.


Spraypainted plants, plastic fence ties, and shredded paper.  Why?  What is the idea?  What does this mean?  It just looks ugly. It looks like spraypainted plants with plastic fence ties and shredded paper strips.


The hodgepodge table.

I have this idea that artists first come up with an idea and then the thing is how you present this idea, this message to the world.  How to you communicate via your art, communicate feelings, needs, information, thoughts...  Landscapers and horticulturalists also like to see themselves as artists of living things, they design, 'paint with flower colors', create beauty.  But the message or idea in these exhibits were totally lacking.  I have no idea what they wanted to say.  Many times there were no statement or not even a sign on who had created an exhibit either.  It just turns into a giant hodgepodge (a name that was used for one exhibit, in fact, very appropriate).

And many florists and garden designers seem to think that just throwing some glitter, neon plastic, or metallic beads into something makes it instantaneously better.  It doesn't.  It makes it look cheap. It makes it look like the designer went to Michael's craft store during their sale.

One great exception to this disappointment was Bartram's garden by the students from The Williamson Free School of Mechanical Trades, who always have great exhibits. They put their exhibit, about 18th century plant exchanges between England and USA, in a great historical perspective and both educated and enjoyed the viewer.  Wonderful!


The final area, in the back, are hundreds of small booths from commercial sellers of horticultural products.  From jewelry to cut flowers, deck furniture to best cutter to cut up the tree that fell in the superstorm, seed packets and bulbs, and lots of items designed with garden themes.  This area was a lot of fun, and actually, this is where the modernization is taking place. 

OK, and now over to some interesting things we saw:

Michael Michaud's Botanical Jewelry


A lamp made by puzzle-piece shaped vinyl, by Infinity Lightning.  Really cool, and comes in many colors and shapes. 


Fantastic handmade clay tiles made by pressing live plants onto the surface.  Here is a fantastically beautiful weed, a thistle. The tiles are made by Symmetry Tile Works (Epping, NH)


This was probably the most beautiful thing, a simple line of birches.  

More things we saw will come in a later blogpost on new trends in the plant world...

PS.  My husband asked me yesterday 'since you are so upset and annoyed with this show, why do you keep on going?".  Well, because there are little gems here and there, and it is good to see bad stuff so you can identify the good stuff.  And also, so I can write about it, and hope that the Philadelphia Horticultural Society at some point decide to enter real time, with real world issues, and not just live in some romantic past with princesses, perfect lawns, and rich people's gardens. There is still hope!

Would I would like to see is a theme like 'Gardening and Climate Change - Plants under the weather', or 'Urban Gardening, plants for food and soul', or at least one little installation garden that is a little bit different and unexpected.  How about a garden just in blue or white, a garden just with dead plants, a garden based on Japan, a garden that looks real and is doable, a garden for tired parents and happy kids, a garden for touching plants and smelling them (there was one like that a few years back, it was great), or simply, 'McMansion gardens for sustainability and survival' (hehe!)).

So, dear PHS members, if you read this, please do something... try to shake the dinosaur skin and pearl necklaces off your bodies and do something different.  Just inviting school kids to grow geraniums is not really doing it...  even if it is a good first step.  Oh, and invite the person that made this garden to your show.  (Wij Gardens, a must-visit)

Click on a photo to get to the photo stream with more photos. 

Book review: We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich

I had heard about this classic book first published in 1942 and never out of print since then, as a must read for people that were interested in sustainable living and organic farming. When I started reading it, I immediately realized that this wonderful gem of a book doesn’t really have anything to do with sustainable living and organic farming, however, it is a great and fun read about how to survive as a family that lives partly isolated among the mountains and lakes of northwestern Maine. They lived on a 5 mile long road that connected two lakes that functioned as waterways.  Every fall and every spring they were totally isolated while the ice on the lakes froze or unfroze, until either a car on the ice or a boat on the water could again connect them to the ‘outside’.   

Their life is content, but not sustainable in our sense that you can live on the land without anything from the outside – they get their income from transporting tourists and logging supplies along their 5-mile road, they need to ‘import’ most food and all other supplies like gasoline, engine parts, and kerosene, and only get deer meat, fresh fish, and some corn locally (their back yard).  

Louise moved to ‘the woods’ when she got married, and subsequently had a baby during a winter storm (without problems), and at one point didn’t leave the ‘neighborhood’ of the few neighbors within a couple of miles away for a few years.  But people came to them, timber workers in logging camps in the winter, tourists looking for wilderness in the summer.  She describes her life, her practical problems with food, storms, clothes, and cooking, and her love for the nature and culture of the local people with great love and humor.   

You smile when you read it, and the writing is suffused with common sense that is ever more important in even today’s world, 70 years later, and eons away from a cottage without electricity.   It is a wonderful read, and Louise puts life in great perspective, looking out from a mountain top in Maine onto the world and its stresses and overabundance of things we don’t really need to thrive. So read the book, it is great!

And of course, in light of the recent horrific hurricane Sandy, an experience that will taint our lives in the future more than we expect, I think, a book like this is even more relevant.  What is important in life, really? What do you need to survive, to love, and to be happy?  It certainly isn’t instant gratification through fast food, expensive clothes, or pretty, but useless things.  Recently I have been very happy over having a non-damaged house and a safe family after the storm, over the incredibly orange sunrises we have had, and the fact that great books work without electric power of any kind.  That is, real printed books on paper, my favorite kind of book.

Some select quotes from this book to illustrate these points, and remember, this was written in 1942, not 2012:

“Christmas in the woods is much better than Christmas on the Outside. We do exactly what we want to do about it, not what we have to do because the neighbors will think it’s funny if we don’t; or because of the kids, who will judge our efforts not by their own standards but by the standards set up by the parents of other kids. We don’t have any synthetic pre-Christmas build-up – no shop window displays, no carol singers in department stores, no competition in the matter of lighting effects over front doors.”

“Here I can be a rotten housekeeper, and it doesn’t make much difference.  After all, this is the woods. People don’t expect quite so much in the line of shining silver, polished glass, and spotless woodwork. […] Now I am learning to spend my time wisely; and I don’t think it’s very wise to spend two hours waxing the living-room floor on a lovely day when I could be out fishing. “

“We went up the road and across Pond-in-the-River Dam just as the sunlight struck the tops of the trees on the ridge. The valley was still in shadow, with steam rising white from the churning water and turning to a lovely pearly pink as it reached the sun-shot air above. I knew how fish feel as they swim about in the depths and look up to see the light of day above them.”

Tomatoes! Hundreds! What to do?

Warning, this is a very RED post. 


Last week at our pickup of the weekly ration of vegetables and herbs from our CSA (Griggstown Quail Farm and Market, thank you!), we were allowed to take unlimited amounts of tomatoes.  Nice, red, big, firm, juicy tomatoes, rather enormous and perfectly fine.  So, LA and I packed up two giant boxes of about 20 lbs (c. 10 kg) each.  We also had plum tomatoes Roma and San Marzano) at home from our own garden, about 15 lbs, and some heirloom tomatoes for slicing in salads, and 5 liters of small plum tomatoes from the CSA.  So what do to with so many tomatoes?  Well, this is what we did (and we still have tomatoes left).


For good spaghetti sauce, you take your tomatoes...


Cut a cross in the end with the stalk and throw them in boiling water for 2 min, then dump them in ice water...


...so you can peel them easily and remove the seeds.  (This is not an absolutely necessary step, but if you do this then you don't have to run the sauce in a blender to get rid of skins, and all the liquid that is around the seeds don't need to be reduced down to get a thicker sauce.)


Boil sauce.


Boil sauce more. Hours. Add herbs.


Can. Result: 5 liters (10 jars of 2 cups each) of vegetarian spaghetti sauce, from peeled and seeded beefsteak tomatoes, canned and sterilized so it can be stored at room temperature.


We also cooked 3 liters of seeded and peeled Roma and San Marzano tomatoes for canning (which failed, the large jars didn't seal, so we froze this instead).


We also made pizza sauce from fresh cut up tomatoes with fresh basil for our Friday night pizza.  Yummy.


Putting sliced fresh tomatoes on pizza instead of sauce.  Next time, put the tomatoes on top of the cheese, or the pizza will be too soggy.  But it tasted fantastic.

We also had tomato salads, made sundried tomatoes in the dehydrator (hint, it takes longer than normal if you do it on the rainiest day in 100 years!), made grilled sandwiches with tomatoes and cheese, made tomato soup... and we still have more tomatoes to go, and will get more on Thursday. What a treat!  And these tomatoes taste so good, not like the store-bought long-distance ones that taste nothing or wrong.

So, what now?

I guess I'll start with saying hi to all the readers of this blog.

Hi! :)

I am one of the relatives and I said to LS this spring that I felt like starting to write on this blog - I had so many ideas and things I wanted to share. Well, summer got the best of me and my login got left unused in a dark corner of my computer. But LS latest blog about the future and now really got me thinking, so here goes my first blog entry. I guess the next one will be a proper presentation of myself.

So, regarding the future. I recognize a lot of the same patterns, problems and attitudes here in Sweden that LS describes. And from a lot of the countries I have been visiting too. But what strikes me is that this is only true in the Western countries. If you go to Asia - China, Vietnam and even the really poor countries like Mongolia or Cambodia - you will meet a huge optimism, big beliefs and hopes for the future and lots of ideas for how the world will evolve.

I believe that this is natural in many ways. The 20th century has been marked by a huge increase in living standards in the West - we have moved from large families and low life expectancy to smaller families and a very high age. This has been followed by a rocketing in economy and growth - and with this comes of course optimism, dreams and thinking about the future for humanity.

This is what is now happening in Asia, in South America and in some parts of Africa - they are all moving towards a much better life and feel as optimistic as the West did 50 years ago.

The West on the other hand have in many ways reached a plateau of living standards and we also have to face that more and more people reach the same plateau, thus losing the feeling of having a superior life. With this also comes problems of environment and food for everyone - problems caused by us spending a lot more of Earth's resources than we should.

Our economies and societies also seems to be shaped after always growing. They are made to becoming bigger and when we reach the plateau of economical growth we start facing a lot of problems. This can be seen in US now where a lot of tough decisions has to be made and perhaps even clearer in Greece. The politicians in Greece are heavily pressed by the rest of the world to take some very tough decisions and also extremely pressed by their own people who are pissed off - pissed off by having to lower their standards, their salaries and their way of life, due to no fault of their own. But perhaps that's what it takes when a country suddenly reaches the plateau and is no longer growing? In that case, US and many other countries have some very tough times ahead...

So, what will happen? I believe that we will live with this despair for a while. Until we either come up with a way of society, a way of living and an attitude that can handle not growing and not becoming better - or until the next explosion in living standards. What will trigger this? My guess is when we solve the energy problems for good by really getting fusion to work - and when (not if) that happens I also hope that this jump in living standards will reach the whole world within a decade, rather than waiting more than a century to spread over the continents. And with this I also think we'll restart space flight and start having other dreams for the future of humankind.

So it's really a bright future ahead - as long as we learn to deal with living in the now for a while. :)

Free green things

A great article about guerilla gardening in Tokyo, including planting broccoli outside major banks...  It is also about design, food politics, and life philosophy, in the words of David Duval Smith.

In St. Louis, they play on your guilt...

Recycling or landfill, your pick., originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

Recycling or landfill, you decide where the trash should go. Seen at the campus of Washington University. I love it!

Stamp of the Day: Can you see the stars?

Maybe not, it depends on where you live.  And soon you might not see many stars in most places, due to light pollution.  There is a great article about this on Design Observer: Starry Night. The most stars I have seen recently were in Costa Rica.  It is amazing to think that all those thousands of stars are here in New Jersey too, but we flood them out with lights.  Our township, for example, have parking lights on at the highschool even in the evening when nobody is there.  Neighbors sleep with floodlights on.  Princeton glows with a pink haze some nights. Imagine how many northern lights are being missed because of our electricity obsession. Most of those lights are just wasted electron movements created by coal, oil, gas, or nuclear power.  The article is great, and a good read, so take a look and check out the maps too (Europe included).

 

Stamp of the day are two Swedish stamps from 2009, a star map with the Crab Nebula and a polarimeter.  Nice designs as usual from the Swedish postal service. (Information in Swedish about these stamps)

No more stinky Wettex!

When you watch old episodes of the classic TV series Law and Order on instant Netflix I needed to have something to put my hands to work with. There is nothing better than mindless (well...) knitting so many cotton kitchen dishcloths being knitted up. You can make make about half of one during one evening, so pretty fast too. This is the old classic Ballband pattern (more examples here, not mine; pattern here).

They are made in 100% cotton, so throw them in the washing machine when they start to be dirty or smell bad. No more self-disintegrating, sour milk-smelling Wettex dishcloths in our kitchen. OK, I admit, I used to love Wettex, but not any longer. I hope I will never have to have a slimy Wettex cloth in my kitchen. The Wettex wipes kind of take on their own (microbial) life after a while, and these handmade knitted dishcloths works a lot better!

If you  blog reader know who I am and want one or two dish cloths, send me a note and they'll come in the mail (well, depends on how many of you that respond). Which color combination is your favorite?

What if.... the Change happened?

PP is listening to a book, Dies the Fire (spoiler alert about the book if you follow link), about a sudden event on Earth when technology suddenly drops back to bronze age level.  No electricity works, no engines, no telephones, no modern conveniences.  The cars, buildings, stoves, etc., are still there, but do not work.  What would you do to survive?

Money is worthless, but what is worth something is knowledge, things that can no longer be made (medicines, ball bearings...), and food.  Power too of course.  But you get power not from money but from brute force or access to things that others want.

The book is the first in a series about how two groups of people try to manage this change in northwestern USA, and what happens when you no longer has access to modern technology.  This has led to hour-long discussions here at home.  Would we manage?  What do we have that is useful?

We probably would be far better off with our knowledge and old hand tools than most people. Plus we have many books, including topics such as food preservation, homesteading, and old techniques.  I could tell people which plants are edible, which heal, and which ones that kill. PP actually has two long timber saws in the barn.  We might have more axes and hand tools than all our neighbors combined.  They love things like giant SUVs, leaf blowers and cordless phones, which would be pretty useless in a situation like this.

Which store would you raid first to get things you can barter with or need?  We settled on the pharmacy, hardware store and local farm co-op in our discussions, but how to get there and how to get things back?  They are miles away. We have three bikes, but that is nothing you can carry heavy things on.  We need chickens and some goats.  You need a way to get water up from the wells, without pumps that need electricity.  People would starve, people would kill for food, people would marauder...

How do you protect your food crops?  How do you protect yourself?  I realized that if you have a lot of important knowledge in your head, then you most valuable alive.  AREA's horse knowledge would be very useful.  Suddenly, in this perspective, so much of what we can do and want to do today seem so useless when it comes to the survival of the human species (sorry, race, :) see post below). Seriously, how many of us could really, really live off the land without modern technology if we have to?  Not many. Could you survive a week? A month? A year? Where would you go?  Who would you hook up with?

Only 100 years ago people knew so much more.  Just imagine - thrusting someone from the 1850s farming communities into this situation would not have been such a disastrous thing as dumping a New York stockbroker into it today.  Or a teenager from the local high school, or.... We are so far removed today from the real things (production of things, knowledge of nature).  If The Change ever happens, it will not be important if you know how to use Excel or make a great cappuccino (even if those things are perfectly important today in our technology-padded lives).

Today, many people can't tie a knot, read a map, plant a seed, or milk a cow.  In the perspective provided by this book, it seems like the survival of humans is really, really fragile.  We are up in Babel's tower, dependent on electricity, GPS, satellites, internet, gasoline and oil, telephones, and stores where you can buy food.  It might not be gone tomorrow permanently, but it sure could be gone temporarily after weather catastrophes.  What would you do?  Could you make it?  It is an interesting question, and we are still talking about it.... and I haven't even read this book yet.

Gorgeous: Sheets

drying laundry, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

Simple things can be really beautiful, like line-drying white bed sheets in the setting evening sun in Costa Rica.

The most gorgeous seed packets ever

At the Philadelphia Flower Show a new little start-up seed company had the nicest booth and the nicest seed packets. Hudson Valley Seed Library, I love you!   Every seed packet design (ArtPacks) is made by different local artists in the Hudson Valley and adjacent areas. Hudson Valley is that wide valley along Hudson River that stretches north from New York City up towards the state capital Albany. The packets are unique, gorgeous, personal, and artsy.  You can even buy the packs and use them as nice gifts, or frame them as art to put on the wall.  Wonderful.

All their seeds will soon be locally grown, while many other companies buy seed in bulk and repackage it.  Look at this corn package, isn't it marvelous? Or the spotted trout lettuce above. Things like this makes me happy. A nice thoughtful design for a nice thing based on ethical concepts that involve both nature and culture.

Their showbooth had nice wooden shelves with old rusty tagholders on it, like items reclaimed from an old grocery store or pharmacy.  The whole exhibit and design, from the seed packs to the metal tags on the shelves, looked more northern European than American to me. It was a wind of fresh design air at a show that mostly otherwise was about the biggest, colorfulest, and boldest combination of colors - and that is not usually the best thing.  More design and thoughts like this please!  Thanks Ken and Doug!

Rainbow laundry

clothes pins, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

This photo from KV's laundry rack in their backyard in Sweden was just selected as Sweden picture of the Day by the Swedish government. Fun!

How to find food at the supermarket

It is easy, just use this chart... (courtesy of Darya Dino at the Summer Tomato blog)

I love these...

Good design and thinking is wonderful - we need these ie tags for our cookbook marks! They are made from recycled paper too, and are perfect for marking spots in books, much better than regular post-its. Smaller, smarter, and friendlier.

Some amazing and cool Scandinavian style fabric designs can be found at this UK website, Fabric Rehab.  I love this owl print, and it reminds me of late 1960s early 1970s things I saw when I grew up (or maybe it was early 1960s and they were still in style in my part of Sweden?).

How about this dandelion fabric? OK the color is a bit mustardy, but otherwise?


Kristen Kimball, of The Dirty Life fame and hard work, has written an essay on the Oprah website - worth reading.  There is also a great interview with her here, which I don't think I have linked to before from this blog.  More about living off the land locally, on this blog.

And while you are reading all these great things, often building on shared resources and shared commitments and responsibilities, here is one woman who's research is famous for studying this, everyday life around the world and how we share things ethically and honestly: Elinor Ostrom. She got the Nobel prize in Economics for her research, which is pretty remarkable, when you realize that:

"Ostrom’s key idea is that neither the state nor the market is the best manager of our collective resources—it’s us, we the people. The commons concept is catching on in a big way as we look at how to lighten our impact on the earth, live within the means of our natural resources, and navigate the ownership issues of a new digital era."

Read more here, and there is an interview with Elinor here.  I met her last year through work, and the best quote from her that day was: "Shame can be a most useful feeling."  She was talking about shaming people into doing the right thing, like when they had mock trials along the Rhen River accusing big companies of destroying the water of the river with pollution.  It led to the clean-up of the river, quite voluntarily, by several companies who wanted to be known as the ones that do the right thing, not the wrong thing.  The same process can be used when a village manages a common forest, grazing land, etc., but it only works if you have democratic processes in place and if all people care about the outcome.  Her research is most fascinating, and have implications for how we don't manage common resources today like the air, oceans, water quality and quantity, and carbon dioxide pollution.

Book review: The dirty life by Kristin Kimball

Another name for this memoir, The Dirty Life by Kristen Kimball, could have been The inconvenient life or The unexpected happiness in a ditch or under a cow belly.  Kristin Kimball is a New York City journalist when she shows up at an organic farm in Pennsylvania to interview the youngish farmer, Mark.  He was too busy running the farm so he put her to work, weeding, to begin with. During the second day she finally managed to get some answers to her questions, and by then she also had her old interest in farming come alive again (she was always interested in food).  

This book describes the development of her passion for farming, and first her relationship and then marriage with Mark, who is a somewhat crazy hippie-like man.  She is brutally honest, funny, and writes eloquently about everything from her mom's appalled face when Mark shows up with a newly slaughtered turkey in a plastic bag (with the neck hanging out) at their first Thanksgiving, to the feeling of warm, good soil that is just waiting for the spade and shovels and plows.

They move away from New York, trying to find some land to farm organically and 'completely', in the sense that they want to be a self-sustained farm that produces everything a family might need year round: grain, sugar (maple syrup and honey), vegetables, milk (and cheese and yogurt), pork, chicken and eggs, beef, sheep for lamb, and so on. That is a lot complex than to farm just one thing (milk cows or corn for example), but also much more rewarding.

They find some land they are allowed to lease in upper New York State and start Essex Farm.  Mark is a true back-to-old-times person, hating any kind of plastic and waste of resources.  They decide to try to do as little as possible with tractors and instead they buy two draft horses, which will help them to plow and weed and transport manure and maple syrup buckets around, you name it. There is a great interview with Kimball here.

The first year they work all the time, live on nearly nothing except on what they can grow and are worried because they are not sure that the neighbors are willing to become members and get everything they need from the farm instead of from the regular grocery store.  But, if you build it they will come. The neighbors, many of them retired farmers from farms that now are abandoned, help them out with sage advice, ancient rusty but important draft horse equipment from old barns, and a hand here and there when needed.  And they start to sign up as members to get part of what is produced at the farm.

Today, 7 years later, the farm has over 100 members and is thriving.  Kristin Kimball wrote her book on early mornings between 4 and 7 in the fire station, before her daughter woke up and the work at the farm started.  I really loved this book, and read it faster than most because it captures you.  Not only is the story both compelling (and sometimes disgusting) and interesting, Kimball's way with words is beautiful, often poetic.  But mixed with a great sense of humor - she never takes herself too seriously, but she also can be very serious at times.

I am not ready to become a farmer with draft horses after this book, but I sure would love to have a farm like this close-by to get great, real, local, handmade food from.  I am so glad Kimball wrote this book because I hope it will inspire both young people to become farmers and conscious eaters and 'cookers', as well as all of us to think about what it is that we really need in our lives.  Flat screen TVs and the latest world news don't seem that important after you have read this book.  A bunch of hay and a sunset and a well-cooked meal is more real.  So, read it.  It is one of the top ten books I have read in 5 years, and I mean it.  So, grade A+, 5, or *****.

[Disclosure: I did not get paid to say anything of this. :)  Better put this in here so I am not like those corrupt and greedy economy professors in the movie Inside Job, which I recommend the whole world to see, but more on that later.]

Some excerpts:

"A farm is a manipulative creature.  There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die.  It's blackmail, really."

About preparing bull testicles for dinner after a slaughter:

"I peeled off a layer of membrane only to find another layer. Maybe a testicle is like an onion, I thought, and if I keep peeling I will end up with nothing.  So I left some of the white and squiggly purple stuff on until I got to slicing them into rounds and discovered that the true interior of a testicle is light brown in color, with a fine granular texture - more prairie uni than prairie oyster, if you ask me.  I tossed the slices in seasoned flour and pan-fried them in butter, and served them for breakfast along with scrambled eggs and toast.  The taste was interesting, not too far from a very fresh sea scallop, which the slices resembled in shape and size."

"My existence, from daybreak to dark, became focused on the assassination of weeds. Before that first year, I'd filed "agriculture," in the card catalog of my head, in the same general place as "nature." As in many things, I was so wrong. Farming, I discovered, is a great and ongoing war."

"It was September, deep harvest season, days of pulling carrots, pulling beets, stacking hundred-pound bags int he root cellars.  Mark scythed the rows of black beans and kidney beans, dry and hard in their brittle pods, and I forked them, stems and all, onto the wagon, which the horses drew slowly down the row."

"The food at harvest season is so right the less is done to it, the better.  Sunday dinners were exercises in simplicity. Green salad, practically naked. Steamed green beans with butter. Beets roasted in a hot oven, sliced and tossed with a whisper of oil, a suggestion of vinegar, a bit of dill on top."

Ponderings on utopias

When I grew up I remember seeing the movie Shangri-La on TV one Sunday afternoon, and I loved it.  A hidden valley, far away in the Himalayas, a paradise away from everything else, isolated and self-sufficient. Last night PP showed me an old movie by Lewis Mumford called 'The City", which shows another kind of utopia - a village where workers live in nice houses without industrialization's horrors and pollution. It is worth watching, and you can find it here, in the Prelinger Archives of ephemeral films.

What struck me after seeing this movie is that there aren't any utopias anymore.  We can't realistically dream about paradise islands where you can live away from the rest of the world.  Everything is connected, affected, even if you want to be isolated.  Every hidden valley, little town, or tropical island is affected by the global climate change, atmospheric pollution, radiation, and trash and toxins thrown into the sea, groundwater, or rivers. Over you satellites are watching you or give you connectivity to anywhere else in the world.  All economies are linked, and what happens at Wall Street or in Asia's stock markets affect a country and village across the world.

So, the idea of Utopia has changed.  Now we wish for small Utopian things, like affordable health care for all, toys without lead, and cleaner streets, while in the past you could dare to think big and dream away... I think this creates a kind of hopelessness and apathy in the new generations - it is much harder to change anything, the problems are big, global, and enormous.  Even if you plan a small better village locally, you run into global and national problems and forces, since so much is controlled at a higher level, not locally anymore.  Here in New Jersey, there used to be several local villages (like Roosevelt) built and based on Utopian ideas of fairness, sharing, and ethics.  Now they are all just regular places like any other (with a few exceptions, like Free Acres).

Who even wishes for World Peace anymore?  I do, but who really works for it?  No big masses of people...  I think the whole world view has changed since the hopeful 1960s, and gone downhill since then.  The only way to change global things is for all of us to work together in all countries, and that seems pretty much impossible, sometimes even within just one country (US for example). Sad and depressing, unfortunately.  Now the only real Utopias are new planets somewhere out there in the universe.

Maybe Utopia is just an impossibility, because humans are too selfish and competitive, and that all goes back to evolution and competition over scarce resources for survival?  Still, I like the thought of better places for all...

Links for more information (to avoid the breaking up of your reading* I put these at the end)
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Where does the stuff go?
Utopia
Prelinger Archives: Lewis Mumford: "The City"
Shangri-La
Free Acres, New Jersey : Roosevelt, NJ

* Researchers have showed that reading online text with a lot of links in it breaks up the thought process and you get distracted and don't learn and think so much.  At each hyperlink in the text your brain thinks "should I click on this or not", and you loose your thought and memories of what you just read.  So even if you don't click on the link, you are affected, without knowing it. So, links at the end on this post.  (Link to more about this here and here.)

Why is it...

That most commercial lemonade drinks are made with artificial lemon flavoring, but some dishwasher detergents contain real lemons?

Stamp of the Day: Garbage pickup

I have to admit that I never thought there would be stamps about garbage disposal ('sopor'), but there is.  And from Denmark of all places.  Relevance to this blog?  There is garbage pickup at our house tomorrow, and since LA is at Astronomy Science Camp this week it fell on me to get the garbage can to the road. I took the opportunity to wash about 8 waste baskets and garbage cans from the house with the garden hose, a step in the right direction of getting a cleaner house. I found these stamps while I was looking for stamps on the theme 'sweat', because we are having a horribly humid day here in New Jersey.  Did you know that we sweat calcium and magnesium, and even small amounts of lead? Hot and humid weather... not fun. I can feel the metal being excreted through the pores...