Handnesgarden Week 4

Last Sunday the weather was really nice again. So we hiked up the mountain in the morning to pick blueberries. When we finally reached the top, we realized that there were no more blueberries there. But our hike wasn't completely in vain, because on the way back we found a few blueberries. About 5 or 6 km from our farm there is a sandy beach. In the afternoon we went there to swim and it was almost like being in Italy... except that we didn't need sunscreen and the water was a bit colder. On the next 2 evenings, Ben baked delicious blueberry cake :). On Monday during lunch break, there was a mouse weasel in the quail coop, which killed another 32 quails. My train of thought was approximately as follows: 1. ohh the poor quails 2. it's not that bad... I have less work now (because the coop was the most work) 3.Shit... someone has to pluck them

I was hoping that they would be too small to eat, because they were only about 1 month old, but we still had to pluck them :( I always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, because it's always the 3 people that Nikolai sees first who have to pluck the quails. Yeah, and there I was again in the milking room all evening, plucking quails, and listening to Jazz music. The funny thing is that now whenever I hear Jazz, I think of quails ;) Otherwise, we picked a lot of berries again and cleaned out a few stables from last winter. In the evenings, I went horseback riding on Karl 3 times. We also had 3 new Wwoofers this week (from Germany, Venezuela, and France).

This weekend there was a hoof trimming course here. (How to properly trim hooves...) But only one person came and 2 others from here, so I also participated. In the morning, there was always theory (in Norwegian, so I just looked at some horse books and the pictures on the PowerPoint) and in the afternoon, there was practice. Each of us received a hoof from a dead horse and had to trim it. Afterwards, we cut them open and looked at how it looks on the inside, which was quite interesting and Sigbjörn even explained it in English. He also had a few old hoofs from horses with various hoof diseases, such as navicular disease, and a skeleton of a horse's head. The good thing about the course is that you can always take breaks when it gets boring, because there is too much in Norwegian. Now I'm sitting by the sea writing the blog while the others are discussing hoofs in excruciating detail.

I still remember when I was in school and thought about what I would be doing at this time in a week. And it was always the same: 'In a week, I will still be sitting here in German class, listening to the same boring nonsense...' And now it's so cool because it's always something different and sometimes you don't even know what next week will bring. Today in a week, for example, I will already be in the middle of Sweden in the Höga Kusten National Park. And I'm really looking forward to it. Now I'll just tell you about the current plan (which changes quite often because we only started planning a week ago. But it's much more exciting when not everything is planned down to the last detail). On Friday evening, I will leave here and then be in Stockholm on Sunday morning. There I will meet Max and Markus (I posted an ad on the internet for anyone who wants to drive/hike through Scandinavia for 2 weeks... and they responded, but they don't know each other either) and then we want to hike on the Höga Kusten Trail. (Video link: https://youtu.be/RzwLreixn1U) With backpacks and camping somewhere overnight with campfires... We don't know yet if we want to do it for one or two weeks. We'll decide later. I'll write more about it later... Now I'm just enjoying the last 5 days in Handnesgarden with real food, a bath, and internet.

Oh and on Sunday evening we wanted to pick blueberries again and go to the lake. This time we looked at a map beforehand, so it only took us about 3 hours (we also walked twice as fast). We rode our bikes on the road until we were parallel to the lake and then climbed up the mountain. We picked a few blueberries along the way, but I think I ate more than I collected. And last time when I told you that we were on the highest mountain, that wasn't true... Yesterday I was on the highest mountain. Then we walked back down (we really walked) and rode our bikes back. It was like in a movie. We rode along the sea at sunset on these old clattering bikes and Friedgard and Gisa whistled a few songs.