FAQ TALASBUAN
We get a lot of questions so we decided to make a Frequently Asked Question video. We also put it down in text here and we have answered more questions here than we did in the video, we are also going to keep this list going and answer new questions that we get by updating this list every now and then.
See the video where we answer most of the questions by follow this link. We answer your questions
How did you meet?
We met at a school for old handicrafts/practical archeology in 2011. The schools name is Bäckedals Folkhögskola, and they have a lot of interesting courses. We learned blacksmithing, leather and hide tanning, pottery, wood carving, preserving food, wool techniques, needle binding and so on. The first day I (Tova) walked in and saw Mathias and thought he looked like someone very special, after a while we were together and after the Christmas holiday we moved in together in a Yurt we build during the fall semester.
Where did you learn everything?
Mathias have attended a one-year school (Sjöviks folkhögskola) in how to build a log cabin. We have also attended a school for old handicrafts (where we met), where we learned the skin tanning some blacksmithing and lots more, a kind of school I’m not sure exist outside of Sweden, it’s called "Folkhögskola", Swedish folk high school. Then not long ago Tova went to school to become an artisan cheesemaker and Mathias, a year later, attended the same school to became an artisan charcuterie (Eldrimner). So yes, we have gone to some classes and courses to learn some, and we are learning more every day by ourselves now trough books, youtube and friends. The knowledge about livestock and animals we have taught ourselves by trial and error, and much of all the other things too, like building the earth cellar and so on.
About Swedish folk highschool here and here.
Why have you chosen to live this way?
Mathias: For me it has been a long journey in search of true sustainability and resiliency. As time went by the search lead me through different paths, conclusions and blind alleys. When thinking about these things, one comes to the insight that a city for example, can never be truly sustainable. What one eats is one big part of these thoughts, is the food I am eating regenerative? How can I eat nutrient dense, local and regeneratively produced food every day? As it is now, one has to either live as neighbor to a regenerative food producer, or start producing food oneself. Even though we live like this, there is still aspects of our lives that is not sustainable. The making of these videos for example require a degenerative industry in order to provide the tools we need. But I have come to terms with the thought that I can’t do everything. Even though we would live a totally sustainable life, if those around us do not, our struggles mean nothing in the end. Maybe we can ignite some thought through this not so sustainable content that we are producing.
Tova: I have always, or for as long as I remember, wanted to have a fäbod. Live there at summertime with my animals and make cheese and butter. I have been on kind of “internships” on different fäbodar, learned so much, and from my perspective it looked like a life full of freedom, fulfillment and hard but nourishing work. Then I met Mathias and after a while we thought, why not live like this year around? To come closer to nature and feel the shifts in the seasons in a deeper way. Feel the calm and be away from all the things that beeps and make a sound in an ordinary home. We have surely made it harder for ourselves, we could probably have bought a place with electricity and so on. But keeping this fäbod tradition, and guarding traditional skills is important to us, and so is the satisfying feeling of living a very resilient life
What is a fäbod?
There is no good English word for fäbod. A fäbod is a place with a few houses (a living space, a cow/goat shed, a cheese cellar and a cooking house) or a tiny summer village in the forest or the mountain away from the main villages. The cattle’s feed could be sparse and the villagers wanted all the grass around the village to be saved for winter. They herded the cattle to the forests and mountains to let the cattle graze there instead, and therefore save the food in the villages for winter. On the fäbod they took care of the milk and preserved it in the form of cheese and butter, which they took with them to the village in the fall when they walked home with all the animals. Transhumance is a word we have heard been used in some books.
What does Talasbuan mean? Tɑ:lasbʉ:an
It means sort of Pine Ridge Summer Homestead, there are no good word for Buan in English.
Do you have Electricity?
We don’t have any electricity from the grid, we have a small solar panel and a battery so we can charge our stuff, it works OK, but it isn’t optimal. When we move to the bigger cabin we are planning to have a somewhat bigger solar system so it’s going be easier for us to charge things. We do not think we will have electricity wired in the bigger cabin either, just solar for charging in a designated place. If we would not make these videos, the small one we have now would probably be enough since we try to always find solutions to everything without electricity. The biggest problem is a freezer. It takes some skill and knowledge to live without one. Or very good planning and infrastructure, winterfeed, butchering the animals when needed. This is an interesting topic, but for now we have a freezer for our meat in the closest village.
Where do you get your drinking water?
We fetch our water from the nearby stream. In northern Scandinavia we can still drink from the streams and the more north the cleaner the water. In spring we sometimes fetch water from the village due to much residue in the water from the snow melting.
Where's your shower and bathroom?
We have an outdoor toilet around the corner of our little cabin, in Sweden we call it “Dass” or “Utedass”. Summertime we are bathing in the stream and for now in the wintertime we are showering up in the village. One of our many projects is to build a sauna so we can wash ourselves year around at our place.
How do you wash your clothes?
We are considering different options for washing our clothes in an easier way off grid, so far, we are doing the wash up in the village until we have figured something out. The cloth diapers we wash with the help of buckets, the stream and warm water we heat on the stove. A big part of the solution is to limit the amount of clothing we have so the washing project won’t be so overwhelming.
Excuse me! yOu ArE nOt OfFtHeGriD....
This comment we get sometimes. Don’t really know what to say except, our homestead is not connected to any grid. Not the water grid, nor any power grid. We have cellular internet only. But it would be here even though we would not have any phones. We do make use of the grid elsewhere for some aspects of our life until we figure out how to get everything we need for our basic needs at our place. It is also a question of funds. If we would have a lot of money, we could hire people to build everything for us fast and get a big solar system. But we don’t have that kind of money. And we also think the journey is important and that there is a value in making and understanding stuff yourself. It’s an ongoing project and someday we will have our sauna and our off grid “washing machine”, one step at a time. We don’t want to hurry and make things we will later regret, taking it slow and figure out the best solutions are our way. If this kind of slower transition into this lifestyle is possible, we would say it is advisable. Going all in immediately can lead to burn out and failure.
You talk a lot about the village! How far from the village do you live and what kind of village is it?
We live about 2 km from the nearest village with about 40 inhabitants, this is where Tova grew up. There are no stores, postal offices or any establishments like that in this village.
How do you clean and wash the dishes?
We always have a big pot with water warming on the stove, summertime we have a bench outside in our outdoor kitchen and in the winter, we have buckets and a tub inside, using the kitchen table as wash bench. It’s going to be nice in our new cabin with a real bench for the dishwashing.
What kind of lights do you have in your cabin?
We have a kerosene lamp over our dinner table and we use candles, we also use our headlamps a lot during winter.
How do you store your food?
For now, we have two “holes in the ground” that we use as a fridge. Wintertime we have a cupboard inside that keeps around plus 8 degrees and our Farstu has the same temperature as outside so we use that as a freezer. We are currently building an earth cellar that will be our new fridge, we are also going to use that for the aging of our future cheese.
What do you eat a “normal” day?
For breakfast we most often eat our homemade “långfil”, sour milk with a very stretchy consistency and homemade milk kefir. With some fruits and berries. Tova also add grated coconut, Ceylon cinnamon and ginger powder to her långfil.For lunch we either eat scrambled eggs with bacon, crème fraiche, feta cheese and some sauerkraut or just cold cuts and cheese.For dinner some kind of meat with something to it. We drink a lot of homemade kombucha and we love our daily pot of tea.
We mostly follow the Weston A Price foundation and their food philosophy.
Here is a great lecture of the principles of a healthy traditional way to eat:
Part 1 | Part 2
Where do you get your groceries?
The closest little food store is 16 km away. The bigger city is about 100 km from us.
What about hunting?
In Sweden you have to have a hunting license and also a weapons license, it’s quite expensive to take the test for the hunting license but we want to do it someday. It’s also a quite expensive yearly fee to be a part of a hunting team. You can hunt smaller animals like roe deer without being in a team, so that is an option. Someday hunting wild game will be a part of our life.
How much land do you have?
It’s complicated, the land we live on belongs to my family (Tova). We take hay from both our land and my grandmothers land and the free ranging animals walk wherever they want to find their food, because ancient Fäbod traditions in this area states that herd animals like goats, sheep and cows are allowed to roam free regardless of who owns the land. This rule is quite unique to this area. The rams that we move away to the village every autumn graze here and there, where the owners are only glad to let their land be “tidied up” by the sheep.
When will the bigger house be ready?!
This is a question we often get, and more often than not it is asked with some kind of disappointed tone. We are just two persons working on this, and sometimes with the much-appreciated help of family members and friends. Our visions are grand and this project is never going to be ready. The house will someday be. We think people today maybe have a lite skewed view on how much work goes into everything when they are used to watch projects being made and done on television. Many hire people to build things and with skill, tools and experience they get it done much quicker, they can also spend their time wholeheartedly at that one project until it’s done.
What breed of sheep/chicken/rabbits do you have?
Sheep – a Swedish heritage breed called Helsingefår
Chickens - a Swedish heritage breed called Bjurholmshöns
We used to have Rabbits - a Swedish heritage breed called Gotlandskanin
What is the Name of the animals?
Right at this moment, fall 2021
Chickens: We had names on the first group we had and also on the first couple of batches of chickens, now they are too many. But the rooster that remains from our starter group is named Borka and the hen that remains is named Coco.
Dogs: Malva the siberian husky and Mysak the karelian bear dog/finnish lapp hound. Mysak is no longer with us.
Cats: Frasse and Krösamaja, no particular breed.
Sheep: Elsa, Selma, Signe, Greta, Dolly, Doris, Disa
Humans: Tova, Mathias and Ivar
What do you feed your animals?
Sheep - They graze summertime and wintertime we give them dry loose hay. We also give them supplements in form of salt stones and minerals.
Dogs – a biological appropriate dog feed, quite expensive but it’s good for them.
Cats - a biological appropriate cat feed, quite expensive but it’s good for them. Mice and birds that they hunt themselves.
Chickens – whole grains of wheat, barley and oat. Seashells and eggshells for the calcium, dried nettles during winter. Bugs, grass and leftovers.
Pigs, when we have them – Grazing, crushed barley, yellow peas and leftovers
What do you do with the wool?
The nice and clean wool we save and are planning on using for felting and making our own thread, when we have the time. The dirty wool we have been using in the garden, put it under the berry bushes and strawberry plants to keep the moisture and prevent weeds from growing.
What did you put on the sheep skin while tanning?
I was fat tanning them with egg yolk and vegetable oil, we are going to do a video about the sheep skin tanning process as soon as we are able and talk more about it there.
What do you throw on the hay in the barn in episode 42?
It’s salt, to prevent the possible still moist hay to mold, and it also gives some extra minerals to the sheep and rabbits.
Do you eat your animals?
We sometimes get this question. There is an epidemic of disconnection in the human world today that leads to a very simplistic view of life and death. Some people are so disconnected, that they have a hard time understanding that one can care deeply for animals, and still eat them.In nature, nothing lives without death. There is no hierarchy - we are all in an interconnected cycle of which death is a completely normal part. We simply cannot have life without death. I think this is easier to grasp when you are trying to produce a year’s worth of food for your family.
What birds do you have there?
Some of the most common around here are:
Blue tit (Blåmes)
Bullfinch (Domherre)
Crested tit (Tofsmes)
Coal tit (Svartmes)
Great tit (Talgoxe)
Nuthatch (Nötväcka)
Chaffinch (Bofink)
Willow tit (Talltita)
Gray-headed woodpecker (Gråspett)
Woodpecker (Hackspett)
Blackbird (Koltrast)
Raven (Korp)
Swan (Svan)
Crane (Trana)
Black woodpecker (Spillkråka)
White-throated dipper (strömstare)
Swallow (Svala)
Thrush (Trast)
White wagtail (Sädesärla)
Golden eagle (Kungsörn)
Western capercaillie (Tjäder)
Rock ptarmigan (Fjällripa)
Willow ptarmigan (Dalripa)
Black grouse (Orre)
Different kinds of hawks, owls and other predator birds.
We recommend Collins bird guide app, though it costs. It’s a very good app if you are interested in birds. For recognising bird sounds we recommend BirdNet, its free. Record the bird and the app may tell you what it is.
What Predators do you have?
We have bears, wolves, wolverines, lynx, fox and bird predators. The hawk has taken some chickens and for the sheep the bear is the biggest threat, but we haven’t seen any near the homestead yet. We don’t have many wolves, only those who maybe are just passing by. The fox visit us frequently but have so far never taken any chicken (that we know of), our chicken coop are well made with thick fence made for dogs and we have also dug a ditch around it and put rocks in it, so the fox (or stray dogs) won’t be able to dig themselves in, we also have a net roof over the pen, both for the fox and the birds.
Why do you have the Dogs in a pen?
We have to have the dogs somewhere when we are working, both have a lot of hunting in them and we have a lot of free-range reindeers here, the Sami people who cares for the reindeer would not be happy if our dogs would scare and scatter the herds. We also have a lot of regulations in Sweden when dogs can or cannot be loose and so on. They sleep inside with us and we walk, ski, run and bicycle with them and in between they have their outside home.
How do you earn money?
In the beginning we worked ordinary day jobs away from home, and therefore worked a lot, at the homestead, with the videos and for money elsewhere. That was a hard time. Right now, Mathias earn a small living from making these videos and can be at home thanks to all the kind patreons. Tova have been working outside the homestead until her maternity leave and will now have a small income from the government for some months. Someday we hope that we can earn the money we need and both be staying home at the farm, by making the videos and selling handicrafts and artisan food that we make.
Do you sell anything?
Right now, we don’t sell anything but we want to and are planning to do it in the future, things like woodcarvings, tanned sheepskins and whatever else that comes into our minds. We will investigate and maybe open a web shop at our webpage.
Can we come and visit?
The hard truth is, probably not, we live like this for a reason. We are so happy that so many would like to visit us but we have so much to do every day and we would not get anything done if we needed to be hosts to guests regularly. We have some vague thoughts about renting out cabins for a limited time of the year, sometime in the future. But no idea when that is going to happen and no promises.
Can we come and work?
It’s amazing that so many of you have written to us with the wish to come and work for food and housing. The problem is that the only house we have is our little 15 square meter cabin, and we are sorry, but its cramped as it is. Maybe in the future it will be possible for us to have some kind of woofing arrangement (work for food and lodging), but not as it is now.
What is the name of the music in the videos?
We use music from a service, all their songs should be on Spotify, if you can, use an app like shazam to identify the song, then you can find it on Spotify. This way we can be sure there are no copyrights to the music we use. If you still can't find it we can try to figure it out from our side.
What is Elimination communication and do you really potty your baby?
Elimination Communication is a gentle, non-coercive way to respond to a baby’s natural hygiene needs, from as early as birth. Like all mammals, human babies instinctually resist soiling themselves, their sleep space, and their caregivers, and they clearly communicate about it from birth. With EC, we learn baby's signals and natural rhythms and assist them with this process until they naturally gain independence (usually by 9-18 months of age).Text from https://godiaperfree.com/elimination-communication/
Will you homeschool Ivar?
Unfortunately in Sweden they force all the children to go to school from 6 years of age, it is mandatory.
Fika, there's more to the word than just a snack!
Fika is something sacred in Sweden, we can take a fika with friends, at work they often have fika. Fika can be just tea or coffee, or something more like lunch, it can be sweet or salt. Often fika is tea/coffee and a cinnamon bun for example. But there is more to the word fika than just a coffee break, or snack time. Otherwise we would just say coffee break or having a snack.
Are you going to write a book?
We have thought about writing a book about Talasbuan and our journey, recipes and photos. So Yes, it’s under consideration and it would be great fun!
What will you do when you get old and tired?
That will be a concern of the future.