 It's funny, it's Anne scrolling on my computer here, it's a good thing. Eat them! Later! So I'm going to... There's been a lot of very nice presentations today, and most of them have been from a very big perspective. We talk about the world, and changes that need to happen, and changes that are happening, and changes that should happen. But I'm going to mainly talk about what I do at my restaurant in the north of Sweden. And I'm going to start with telling you a little bit about how my year of vegetable looks like, and then I'm going to continue with just a little bit how we grow our vegetables, and how we forage, and so on. And then I'm going to spend most of the time talking about how we store them for the winter, because at five weekend there's basically six months of the year where there's nothing to harvest outside. There's no wild vegetables, there's nothing growing in the vegetable patches, there's just a lot of snow. So I tried to show a little bit what we have to work with in different times of the year. You see the blue line, which is on the bottom, that's forage stuff. And in May and June, where our vegetable year actually starts, for me, we work mainly with wild plants, wild herbs, and wild vegetables. And we do that because what we harvested last year and stored during the winter is normally running out then. And May and June is the month in Jämtland, the region where Fabriken is, when the forage stuff is at its peak. It's nice, young, tender, very good. Then we take a little break in the end of July, end of June and most of July from foraging when the plants grow up and become bitter and tough, we don't use them that much. And we concentrate on fresh produce from the vegetable gardens because they start to produce or start to be able to harvest in early July. And then in August we continue with more foraging, there's mushroom, there's berries, and a few other things that we concentrate on then. And then, this time we are a bit later actually, in the middle of September, we start harvesting for the winter, we start preparing for the winter months. And we pick a lot of berries and mushrooms and wild things that we prepare in various ways. But the bulk, what we mainly use, is vegetables that we grow in our vegetable patches and that is harvested before the winter comes and then prepared in a lot of different ways. And the green line on the top, that's the time of the year that we have storage vegetables as the base of what we do. So you can see now in early September it's like a magical moment when we have everything. That's a very nice time of the year. Wild vegetables and plants, as I said, it's very important for us because when we run out of storage stuff in May, there's basically nothing else to serve. And this is our main foraging grounds, this is from the top of a hill and you can see there's a little valley towards the lake which is very, very lush. And most of the grounds at Faviken is limestone and it's a huge variety of different herbs which normally you don't find that high up but we're also very affected by the Gulf Stream in a positive way. So we have a little bit nicer climate, it's more even than that far to the north normally. And this is just a few of the most common wild vegetables, herbs and mushrooms and various stuff we use. In total there are several hundreds that we forage and use. This is the most common ones. The vegetable gardens is something I'm going to talk a little bit more on and it's something I'm extremely proud of because at Faviken our climate is more or less subarctic. It's very far from the north and luckily we have the Gulf Stream to help us a little bit but it's still the summer isn't that hot, it's quite short as well. And the one thing we have though is a lot of sun which is a good thing. The days are very long. Here you can see the vegetable gardens in two different seasons. That one on the left is early spring, it's May and the one on the right is early December. This is just a few weeks ago actually it looks a bit different and it's also a different angle but this is just besides the restaurant and this is a view of the vegetable gardens with two people working it. This I also made myself, it's very bad, it's Google SketchUp. I just wanted to show you a little bit and explain how we work with the garden because I'm pretty new to gardening. I made the first vegetable patch about three years ago and I started to learn and I started to investigate how you do it and I started talking to people and then two years ago I employed a gardener who is very passionate, her name is Magdalena and she's very passionate and very knowledgeable, very curious. We choose a nice southern slope and at the top there are trees protecting the garden a little bit from the western winds which is the most common wind in Favik and there's always cold western wind from the sea blowing in. Our philosophy when it comes to gardening is that we want the best possible quality. We don't look that much in high yield and so on so we choose varieties that we feel give us the maximum taste that we want. We also try to take very good care of our soil. We don't want to deplete our soil so we try a few different, as I said this is still a learning process so we try different techniques in different areas. I'm going to start to talk about the first one on the left which you see there is marked four-part crop rotation and it's basically three different kinds of crops from different families that take different nutrients out of the soil and then the fourth field we grow with something called green manure and it's plants that bind nitrogen from the atmosphere and then you just sort of turn them down into the soil in the autumn night it gives back nitrogen to the soil. We also add a little well-rotted cow shit and things like that but there's no chemical fertilizers besides anywhere. The crop rotation is also important for us because we don't want to use, as I said, any herbicides or pesticides and it's good for disease control to move the plants all the time. This is a little photo from the first section of the four-part crop rotation and this is a pretty like traditional garden there's nothing really special about this. This is early in the spring and what you can see here something we use a lot is the little textile we put on top, it's very common most of you probably recognize it and most of you probably know what it's for it's to make the climate a little bit hotter and a little bit damper underneath the textile but it also has an important function that we found is very, very important for us at least and it's that if you keep this when the seedling the plant is young and vulnerable you will prevent it from getting different diseases in the form of insects because they can't really reach it because the only insect control we have later on is that we have to take them away one by one and that's tedious, that's not nice So, the other part the most productive part of the vegetable patch is the middle part it's a six-part crop rotation and it's basically the same system though there's two surfaces which is planted with green manure and it's also a little bit more technical kind of farming it's raised beds which means that you make a wooden thing that would like a huge box to make the bed where you grow the vegetables a little bit higher up and we also cover the soil with a dark dark cloth and every plant has a little hole to grow in and this is to benefit first the temperature in the soil gets a bit higher and mainly actually for us it saves a lot of time on taking away unwanted unwanted plants this very disturbing new crop and there is also a drip irrigation in this part it looks like this this is early June and as I said this is the most most productive part of our vegetable patch and the one we actually started with we could help from a university in Sweden to implement this technique and was very happy with it but we are actually going to stop using it from next year because what we find is that when we analyze the soil in our vegetable patch which we do every year is that we do not succeed in replacing what we take away from the soil with this method it's too productive for us so we're going to either change it or stop using this exact method in any way last part is the polytunnel which is like a little very cheap very simple greenhouse and there we grow our seedlings which we then place out in the vegetable garden and on the far end on the right side it's a three part rotation we try another technique which looks like this where we cover the soil but not with not with the tissue the black tissue but with the grass clippings and things like that and as I said before this is a learning process for us we're trying different techniques and trying to see what affects the soil in the best possible way and what gives us the maximum quality of vegetables this is the herb gardens which is just besides the restaurant the red building in the back the herb gardens are therefore partly because they're beautiful we often serve the aperitif before dinner they also give us all the herbs that we use in the summer the herbs that we dry and save for the winter storing vegetables is always about making a choice to kill the plant or not this is something I came up I thought about myself a while ago while working with this and deciding how we're going to store all the different vegetables we need for the winter because and I think this is a nice way of categorizing the ways that you can store vegetables because I'm going to tell you sorry so some of the techniques they kill the plant and they kill all the harmful bacteria too or it makes the environment difficult for them to live in and other ways of keeping vegetables for a long-term storage often includes using built-in mechanism in the plants to make them keep for a long time and I'm going to talk a lot now the 20 minutes I have left about all those different techniques that we're going to use but one thing that is important to remember when storing vegetables and when preparing vegetables is that they are never better than they were actually in the beginning the storage is not a way to make the vegetable better it just makes it different and there is no technique which is better than any other technique the non-killing techniques are not better than the killing techniques, they're just different from each other and they're good for different things and different is good often actually happy chef I start with this one because this is not actually a technique for storing vegetables this is just me last year being very lazy and not harvesting everything in time and the winter came and I actually found that a lot of things you can harvest even if they are still covered with snow and still standing in the vegetable gardens and I knew this could be applied on a few different plants but I found that it's possible many more than I thought actually the one that we use this most with is broccoli because we harvest the first big nice broccoli flower we harvest that one and then afterwards we have a secondary harvest of normally three small broccoli flowers sprouting out in edges and we take those and in the end we just leave the plant, leave the plant with all the leaves still attached and then we go out there in December or even later and we harvest those leaves a little goat dish and that's a broccoli leaf that photo is taken in December and I don't have the scientific explanation to why this works but it does the plant is basically you can't tell the difference between that and a fresh broccoli leaf it also works very good with the kale for example in cabbage and Brussels sprouts and things like that this is clamping is one of the oldest techniques especially root vegetables and it's good technique to use if you don't have the time or to build your own root cellar or the money or the place to use to put it and it's basically you need very ripe very ripe root vegetables this is one of those techniques that uses a function which is built into the actual plant and what you need is a very ripe root vegetable as I said and that root vegetable it needs to be set to hibernate it needs to have already felt that the autumn is coming and prepared itself for a time of very very little growth and just waiting for the spring so you harvest you harvest your root vegetables and this has to be done in a pretty cold weather because otherwise they don't realize it's actually autumn and they start growing inside the clamp later you make a few like drainage trenches one on each side and on the little mound between them you place a layer of straw and how thick that layer needs to be it depends on the climate where you are and how you meet this and a lot of things you have to just try yourselves and find a good thickness you place the vegetables on top and it shouldn't be too small you can't do like a little very narrow thing like this you have to be in order for this to work really really well you cover them with straw and then you add more soil on top and you also make a little ventilation chimney somewhere in the clamp too to get excess moist out and storing vegetables like this it keeps most root vegetables sorry it keeps most root vegetables really fine until spring actually so they can be kept for like six months and what can be dangerous with this is that you put everything together and if they start going bad the process can spread from one vegetable to the other and you don't since you can't just open up the clamp and just take out one vegetable and then close it again it can be difficult to to know if in one end you have a bunch of rotten vegetables destroying the others if you are in the wrong end harvesting them this is sort of a more modern way of using the same function as the clamp what's important with the root cellar is that it's very well ventilated and that is stable in temperature over the year storing root vegetables in a cellar we do so that we use big crates of sand and then we put all the vegetables in there and we bury them in sand and sand helps to control and to even out differences in humidity and temperature over the year we can keep them like this for a very long time and of course they change there there will be a change in the vegetable and for the first months it will look practically the same but then it starts to shrivel a little bit and often in the spring especially with for example carrot carrot, parsnip and beets they will sense that they are thriving and they will start to sprout and that usually marks the end of the storage period for those vegetables so when that happens you just have to take them out of the sand and be sure to use the little sprouts because those are very good they are like the essence of a vegetable and use the rest as well of course this has been standing in a storage place in the farm in the estate there's a lot of other people besides the restaurant staff working at Fabric and this is how much the other people use my equipment I read a study from Swedish Agricultural University SLU a while ago about how to store vegetables and especially leeks and apparently leeks if you put them in a low temperature and the proper amount of air humidity they can keep for a very long time and this is manifested by the fact that you can harvest your leeks in a piece of soil outside of your door and you can keep them there all through winter even if it's below zero and so it doesn't matter this is very difficult at Fabric because there's so much snow so you can't really get down to them so we built this we bought an ordinary household freezer we tinkered it with the thermostat so it keeps exactly one degree below zero we filled it with sand in the bottom and then we just harvested leeks in late September or early October and then we put them down the sand and we also moistened the sand a little bit because the humidity should be between 90 and 95% and this way the study said that you can keep them in about 90 days but we've been trying and it keeps fine for around 120 days and in the spring if you put them outside again in your vegetable patch they just continue growing it's very fun actually drying of onions and garlic in the autumn we harvest our onions and garlics and we just leave them lying outside as on the picture to the left until all the leaves have become brown and dead and then we just take them inside we store them in a dry and room temperature space and dark they keep for a very long time all winter pasteurizing this is a technique that kills the plants in that can there is tomatoes those were put in a very light brine in 2009 and then kept at 85 degrees in a steam oven for about 10 minutes and they keep very well at that this is a technique that most people use at home like 50 or 60 years ago it was very very common but nobody does it almost today and this is a technique that you have to be a bit careful with because since you kill most of the normal bacteria and certainly all the lactic acid bacteria there is a danger if you're not very meticulous with the hygiene and things that you can have a clostridium botulinum which is not very good it's a bacteria that can grow and can kill people pickling in vinegar in Scandinavia it's something that we use a lot for herring in vegetables and a lot of different stuff it's a good technique for condiments I find and it preserves the plant material mainly by changing the pH level to somewhere where most microorganisms can't actually breed or grow pickling by lactobacillus fermentation it's a technique that uses it's basically the most important part of this is the same as pickling in vinegar it's the change of pH level to a level that most bacteria and either microorganisms don't like but this is different in the way that normally you just take the plant in this case a cucumber and you put it in a brine two and a half and two percent of salt and you let the lactic acid bacteria present on the skin of the vegetable grow and produce lactic acid which preserves the plant and this is not possible to do with vegetables that has been farmed with herbicides and pesticides for example because the levels of lactobacillus on them are far too low so it does pretty work very well with this you also have to be very careful with the hygiene because and also we have to be very careful with following the process and getting the fermentation started very quickly because if it takes too long or if the hygiene has been poor it's also a risk of clostridium botulinum in this drying herbs and mushrooms we dry a lot of herbs every herb we serve in the winter is either dried or in the form of herb salt and it's actually very very simple you pick the herb at the peak of its maturity on a day when you can really feel and smell when you touch it you smell the aromas you harvest it and you place it in a good place to dry and for me it's in the washroom the room where we do the laundry actually and we have this magnificent little machine here which is dehumidifier and that's the industrial one it can take away about 20 litres of water every hour from a closed space so we can dry if we make 10 hotel trays with herbs and we spread them out in the room we can dry them in about 3 hours and what we achieve by this very quick drying is nice colour and also nice preservation and the most important is nice preservation of the aromas because what you don't want to do when drying herbs is to heat them up because you'll lose the most fragile and volatile aromas you can also use antibacterial properties which are present in plants these are lingonberries and lingonberries are very high in benzoic acid naturally in benzoic acid is added to a lot of processed food as a preservative basically you take the lingonberries just put them in jars and you top off the jars with water and then you just leave them and they will keep forever sugar or anything they will keep for years and in the can you will have a very very slow and somatic fermentation so you won't be yeast cells but you can say don't like it there but there will be an somatic fermentation and you will have a little bit of alcohol around 0.7% of alcohol so you can feel it it's like yogurt when you put it on top leguminous plants this is something that we use in all stages of the plants life the first little sprouts or the seedling which we harvest and use in salads to the fresh peas which we harvest right now they are very very good right now and beans too and then finally to dried and fresh seeds that we prepare and use in the winter months and that's it thank you so much