About

Welcome to my little slice of heaven in Sweden! My husband and I moved to our little slice of heaven roughly 3 years ago. We had a goal to live close to nature with our two dogs. We found a sweet little red and white house surrounded by woods by a lake with our own private swimming hole. We wanted to be as self sufficient as possible.

I invite you to enjoy reading my blog, please feel free to leave your comments or just leave a like to let me know what you think about it’s contents. I encourage you to follow my blog as well. I have chosen to write this blog while giving our family a little bit of anonymity by not disclosing where in Sweden that we live or our real names. I chose nicknames for everyone. I call my husband my Hubby and myself Honey. Our dogs are Dixie and Coco. I plan to photograph and write about our journey, lifestyle and discovery of our version of country living.

I have grown tomatoes, fruit trees, strawberries, rhubarb, and berry bushes, when we have had a garden decades ago. When we moved back to the country, my hubby said why don’t you use your green thumb to grow things that we can eat instead of landscaping a large flower garden. My hubby has wanted a vegetable patch for years. I thought why not? I regret that we had not done this years ago. Even when we lived in an apartment we could have looked into renting a garden allotment. I guess we live and learn.

We both enjoy cooking and we have always prepared our meals from scratch. It is cheaper and I believe the food taste much better and is healthier for you. Now that we both have health issues, it is even more important than ever before that we cook from scratch. The recent meat scandal in Europe, where unscrupulous companies switched questionable horse meat and substituted it for more expensive meat to profiteer from it, has placed new concerns about where the food comes from that we eat. This questionable meat was sold in supermarkets, frozen food freezers, to restaurants and only God know where else. I see adds selling horses all the time in our local area, because they can’t afford them anymore. In these are hard economic times this makes horse meat cheap and apparently too irresistible to not sell as choice cuts of meat at a huge mark up.

I am seriously concerned about why the Swedish government or the EU are not monitoring this. I think the Swedish government and the EU should stop wasting tax money on the size a cucumber should be and put that energy and cost into the quality of food we are eating. I have heard of nothing in the media about this meat scandal for quite some time. What happened to the safe guards that are in place that should have protected the EU consumers from mystery meat being served on our plates.

We need to realize how much water is wasted every year on fruit and vegetables that are considered substandard and not sold in local supermarkets. Is all that food just discarded because it did not meet EU standards? How is that environmentally friendly or sound politics? When did food have to be uniform in size, color and shape for us to buy it? If we are truly concerned about our environment, we need to re-evaluate our thinking about the food we consume. Shouldn’t the EU be more concerned about providing affordable quality food for everyone that is environmentally sound?

I have to say I was glad that we bought our meat from a local farmer and knew where it came from and was sure what meat we were eating. We know that this is ecologically grown as well. I feel the same way about growing our own vegetable garden. I know there are no insecticides sprayed on our vegetables we grow and the fruit that I pick on the farm. We don’t use chemical fertilizers on it as well. I realize that with pollutants in the atmosphere nothing is 100% free of chemical, but it is the closets that we can get with our environment being in the shape that it is in today.

My grandparents had vegetable gardens, fruit trees,and much more in their backyards and they canned their own food. Both my grandmothers sewed, knitted, quilted, crocheted and embroidered clothing. I don’t know of any of their children that carried on that tradition of being self-sufficient. I believe some people stopped gardening because having a vegetable garden and handcrafts became stigmatized with poverty. They wanted to show they were well off enough that they could afford to buy their food and didn’t need to grow it as their parents had in the past. I believe others liked the convience. Some how we all missed the point. We may be gaining convenience but with a poorer standard of food. We are consuming food that is filled with chemicals, low nutritional value, hormones that are harmful to our health and our environment. There are serious consequences to decisions that we make everyday. I do not want the family owned farms in Sweden to disappear like they have in the United States. I do not want large corporations to grow the food I purchase. I do not want to consume genetically modified food. I have chosen to follow my grandparents footsteps instead. I have chosen a simpler life. I hope my thoughts will inspire you to begin to discuss some of these subjects as well.