What’s with the Sunny Banks, I hear people ask. Well, Sunny Banks is a rough translation of the name of our house. In Swedish it’s called Solbacken, which is the name one of our grandchildren selected during that first summer when we more or less camped here before we had officially moved in. Like childhood, our memory is that every day was sunny that summer. Or maybe it really was so. It does seem to us that there are an unusually large number of sunny days here.
We live on a couple of hectares of beautiful Sörmland, about 100 km south west of Stockholm. Three quarters of the land is forest – we’ll never want for firewood! – the rest garden, formerly flower garden. We’re slowly turning it into kitchen garden although I’m afraid my better half will not allow me to root up all the flowers. We’re getting to the stage where we see roses as weeds!
There’s the main house, which you can see in the right hand column above – until I change it – then there’s a small cottage and a barn as large as the house. We have a huge greenhouse and, behind the cottage, an earth cellar where we store our vegetables and fruit from autumn until they are eaten. At the time of writing, we have maybe a month’s potatoes left, some carrots, onions, beetroots, and probably enough apples to last the winter. Oh, and some pickled cucumbers.
We have built a swimming pool where the old kitchen garden used to be – a paltry kitchen garden it was – and we have installed geothermal energy and cut our fuel bills by about three quarters. We have some chickens which more than provide us with eggs and some meat. We also sell to one or two neighbours. And I have my plans for other animals and maybe birds, but don’t tell my better half…