Get your hands dirty!

Ellisiv and her family started an organic vegetable farm here in Alunda, an hour and a half north of Stockholm seven years ago. Then it was just for being self-sufficient of food. Today the farm produces not only food for her family, but also for the local people.

You can’t be a perfectionist if you do what I do, you would go crazy. So sorry for all the weed, I’ll deal with that on Monday, that’s my weed day.

Ellisiv, Organic farmer north of Stockholm, Sweden

Ellisiv and her family started an organic vegetable farm here in Alunda, an hour and a half north of Stockholm seven years ago. Then it was just for being self-sufficient of food. Today the farm produces not only food for her family, but also for the local people.

Even though the water supply isn’t scarce here, she wants to use as little energy as possible and also be independent from grid power and freshwater. Therefore she collects greywater for irrigation from the roof of her barn. The pump fills up a water tank then she uses gravitation to transport the water to another water tank close to her growing beds. From there the Spowdi pump feeds the driplines.

Ellisiv tells me that she doesn’t use too much water. “Sometimes less is more and if you give the plants a little less water they actually taste better”, she says and smiles.

– So how do you know when to irrigate? I ask her.

– I get my hands dirty, stick my finger in the soil, then I know.

Organic vegetables and other products from the farm are either sold in the store in the old barn at the farm, or at Reko, a Facebook-based community. Check them out on Facebook/tunagronsaker.