SOCIAL ACTIVITY. On the first weekend of September, comrades from Sweden’s Nest 2 gathered to revive one of our ancestors’ age-old traditions – the harvest festival.
Members met early on Saturday morning on the edge of the beautiful plains of Skara, Västergötland, where they were warmly welcomed at the farm by Julia Rosander. The plan for the day was to hold the Nest’s first, but likely not last, harvest festival.
Lunch was the first item on the schedule and consisted of soup served in a pumpkin, alongside bread, pork and sour cream. The saltiness of the pork proved to be particularly flavoursome when combined with the sweetness of the pumpkin.
After the tasty lunch, Julia explained the rest of the agenda for the day. First up was a tour of the farm grounds and a review of how best to cultivate, manage and harvest the various plants the farm has to offer. Everyone was then divided into groups with different areas or plants for each group to harvest. Some guests were given the task of picking apples, while others gathered vegetables and herbs.
When the harvest was complete, new duties were assigned. One group was given the task of baking an apple pie, which would be consumed later on, while another group tied herbs together for drying.
During the apple picking, it was observed that Resistance men will always find ways to make things more exciting (and increase the risk of accidents), even during a relatively simple task. A scaffold was fetched to help reach more apples, but it still didn’t allow the participants to get the ones at the top of the tree. Eventually, the comrades were hanging on to thin branches to reach the treetop to ensure no apples were wasted.
When everyone had completed their respective tasks, the apple pie that one of the groups had made was served. The bakers had clearly been very successful in their task, as the pie tasted wonderful!
When the day began to draw to a close, some guests chose to head home, while others stayed late into the evening and ate a dinner of meat and other foods harvested during the day.
Regardless of the guests’ backgrounds or prior experience of cultivation, everyone went home with new knowledge about the subject and an even stronger feeling of kinship and comradeship.
