Well our time at Nordvoll farm is drawing to a close, and I can’t believe how sad its going to be to leave this place. We will leave tomorrow morning for our new farm about an hour south, and I thought on our last night, I could give a little summary of our time here.

We arrived on August 31, nervous but excited at what we were about to experience and learn. I think the number one thing I said on those first few days was, “We live here?!” Everything was beautiful and new and different. The Strawberries themselves were unbelievable.  

But we fit in easily here. The people were kind, helpful, and funny. We laughed a lot. We worked hard, and believe me, the work was hard. Days off were typically not relaxing, because we had to play! Swimming…

   
Hiking insanely hard mountains,

  
Sometimes at night, 

 
Fishing,   

Staying up way too late to enjoy the view,  
 
Plus a million other things that happen when crazy people get to spend a lot of time together. 

We finished the strawberries in September, and we finished making a HUGE field for new strawberries, the biggest on the farm with a whopping 2,248!

The month of October was consumed with the harvest. We finished the carrots, potatoes, beans, and currants. we sorted, and sorted and sorted them. Then we started winterizing the farm, which involved cleaning up around the fields. But a warm spell in the middle of the month thawed the ground and we were able to dig the rows and plant an entire field of raspberry canes. 756 to be exact. 

 
November was the quiet month. It was just the three of us at the farm, Tyler, Matteo and myself. Although we had a visitor named Jeremy (who has the coolest job in the whole world, and lives an hour away now) for about half of the time. We started doing a lot of work inside during November, the guys constructed crosses that will be used to keep the rasperry plants in the new field up. This was an incredible amount of work, as each tree had to be stripped, sharpened, and the cross-poles screwed in. Oh, and we needed 120 of them. 

   

I did a few jobs in the big house, slamming the concrete wall, painting the doors inside, and then the walls, trim and bannister of the upstairs of the house. It was warm all the time, and I got to listen to my book, so no complaints from me!

   
We still played hard though, lots of sparking,

 Visits from beautiful friends (Jeremy and Alex, who came all the way from Nottingham for Thankgiving!),
 
Insanely dangerous hikes around stupid, huge mountains,

   
Playing with Herman, the ermine who lives in the wood shed,

And rolling giant snowballs down the mountain. 

In summary, these three months have been entirely amazing. Hard working, hard playing, and hard laughing.  We are really excited to see our new farm tomorrow, but for right now we are mostly sad to say goodbye to Roger and Nordvoll. The only reason Im not crying right now is because I know deep down that we will be back here again. 

Skål to Roger, and to Nordvoll!