AT BOAT IN THE FOREST - harbour for radical nomads, Etta Säfve and Jona Elfdahl are working with reconnection processes; to bring back the underground relationships built by fungal threads, mycorrhizal trades and microbial alliances, and above ground to reconnect us, humans, to the same inherited relationship with the microbes, to each other and the invisible communities that sustain life.
The beautiful homestead includes food forests, forest gardens, nut cultivation, bio-pools with plants and biochar purification, each of them and together forming the basis for exploratory processes, with social & land-based permaculture and “close to nature” nut cultivation courses, workshops and artists in residence. Both Etta and Jona make a living as artists, guest teachers, process leaders and from seed collecting for an online ecological seed store.
The nut trees planted here consist of a large mix of walnuts, sweet chestnuts, hazelnuts and pine, and many different varieties of each tree, to create
resilience and resistance to diseases. Thanks to the presence of the Baltic sea and the southern location, the autumns are very mild and walnuts have grown for a long time in the region.
THE SURVIVAL OF THE MOST CONNECTED IN A HUGE DIVERSITY
“I started this because my life in the city was millions of nothing. …In the soil there are millions of everything”, Jona states.
To enhance the underground cooperative exchanges that knit the living world together on their approximately 4 hectare land, Etta and Jona plant and invite as much species diversity as possible. This contributes to loosening up the soil in the “nut field”, compacted due to earlier grazing by horses. As nitrogen-fixing trees and plants have a considerable impact on speeding up succession, they have planted hundreds of small common/black alders (Alnus glutinosa), as well as comfrey (Symphytum officinale) and other nitrogen-fixers in “islands” around the nut trees.
“The field with nut trees is quite nutrient poor, you can see that from the common broom (Cytisus scoparicus) and common gorse (Ulex europaeus)growing here. They wouldn’t have come if there wasn’t a need for nitrogen: they are niched on hard soil where there is very little nitrogen. Both are considered invasive. Our opinion is you definitely shouldn’t remove what comes in naturally, as it will most likely have a positive function. Eventually our nut trees will shade them out.”
According to soil scientist Dr. Christine Jones, a globally recognised expert on soil health, weeds aren’t invaders but messengers; they show up because something else disappeared, acting as the voice of compacted soil, of imbalanced minerals and of collapsed microbial diversity. “The seeds of the weeds carry with them beneficial microbes, passed down from the mother plant, bringing in whispers of its origin ecosystem, and kickstarting the connectivity”. The more diversity of plant families, the more exchange of microbiomes, passing from one root system to another, making the community become stronger, more resistant and more alive. Jones concludes that “it’s actually not the survival of the fittest alone, but the survival of the most connected.”
“MARRIED WINE-GRAPES”
Intertwined with some of the walnuts, Etta and Jona grow wine-grapes (Vitaceae spp.). “Wine-grape is a forest plant, it needs to cooperate with the fungus, but it doesn’t do that in modern agriculture” they explain.
In nature one of the main roles of the vine is to cover and bring down weaker or older trees and allow succession to continue and complexity to increase. With the ancient technique “married wine”, vines were grown between one tree and another. Often reeds were planted below the vines to create a framework for the grapes to rest upon. Thanks to the trees to climb on, the grapes grew several meters above the ground where they could access more sunlight, dry quickly after rain and thus avoid mold and mildew outbreaks. Such a system offered natural protection against commonplace vineyard disease, and is an example of the benefits of growing a plant for production but keeping it in a semi wild form, which allows natural defence mechanisms and ecological interactions.
To promote biodiversity and wildlife habitat, Etta and Jona make their own biochar and prescribed burnings - resulting, for example in the appearance of fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium) which favors the conditions for walnut trees. They also emphasize the importance of dedicating an extensive area entirely to wildlife, to the benefit of generalist species (forest specialist species preferring continuous forest) and contributing to the extensive mycorrhizal network and connectivity in the landscape.
RESISTANCE & RESILIENCE
Etta and Jona harvest sweet chestnuts (Castanea sativa) from large-sized, wild-spread trees nearby, to dry to eat. Plenty they have sown years ago and recently grafted with varieties from friends and thanks to non-monetary exchanges of plant material.
Sweet chestnut trees need to be placed in clusters for optimal pollination. The blooming around midsummer makes them safe from frost. The ripening, as in Southern Europe, takes place at the end of October. Due to the high energy and nutritional value, sweet chestnuts have for long been grown in poor, mountain regions with little cereal production, providing a basic diet - and autonomy.
According to the 2024 updated Swedish “risk list” for possibly invasive species (SLU species data bank), sweet chestnut trees are estimated to have a “high invasive potential but a low negative ecological impact.”
We would argue that sweet chestnuts are not less “native” and not more invasive (when harvested for food) than wheat, and that a diverse system with sweet chestnuts is as much a “food field” as wheat, thus in favor of nature’s recovery, something that an annual crop can never be successful in.
While we do acknowledge the potential threat from invasive species as real, we believe the debate is out of proportion: today’s monoculture agriculture and forestry is among the largest drivers of global environmental degradation and are extremely vulnerable to climate change. This poses a more widespread, large-scale and acute threat to ecology, economy and food security, and how to reform it should be of highest priority in the public and political debate.
NEED FOR A “HUGE GENETIC VARIATION GRASS ROOT MOVEMENT”
With monocultures and monoculture like orchards, the risk of infestation of pathogens and pests arises, whether it is nut trees or cereals.
Etta and Jona stresses the need to find resistant varieties to the major fungal diseases that are ravaging European chestnuts throughout Europe, and while Asian chestnuts (Chinese and Japanese) are resistant to Ink Disease and Chestnut Blight, it is crucial to create new disease resistant hybrids of Asian and European chestnuts, by planting chestnut trees of different species together and letting them pollinate each other to create new crosses.
This
will be most effective if as many people as possible plant out trees in
different locations in the country, and when fruit bearing, plant the
seeds from these trees, looking for cold-hardiness and large nuts in the
selection - to generate a large genetic variety of productive, healthy
chestnut trees for Northern conditions.
At our visit, we had a group conversation about “societal collapse acceptance” and how to translate it into practical, long-term adaptation, looking over the number of work situations dependent on diesel-powered machines, the number of crops dependent on irrigation, pesticides and fertilizers, the size of the system and the number of animals dependent on external input etc. “The only way to real sustainability is for the masses themselves to produce their own food. A few giants who produce for the masses make the people lack resistance or ability to withstand adversity. To some extent, we expect a collapse, at least in some part of the food system”, Etta and Jona states.
SLU’s Species Data Bank: Reported finds of sweet chestnut in Sweden.
Sweet chestnut leaves and sprouts have a long history in Southern Europe as a nutritious “tree hay”.
Allowing unwanted spread of plants to become food for ruminants, we believe, is more energy efficient than other eradicating efforts. For example, robinia leaves provide crude protein for ruminants. (Slightly poisonous plants like robinia are generally doing good for ruminants, keeping stomach and intestinal parasites at bay)
Common broom (Cytisus scoparicus). Invasive plants and weeds often prefer sunny spots, bare soil and are less dependent on mycorrhiza, unlike other species further up in the succession towards a forest. When clearing ditches along roads, or exposing bare soil for planting annuals, we create favorable conditions for these pioneers.
The walnut trees get nitrogen with urine added in the water drip system.