I'm constantly on the look out for new things that we can try around the farm to try and make a difference one way or another.

One issue that has cropped up is that we need to improve our composting. Over the winter it has become very clear the composting heap is in a far from ideal place, as it gets flooded when the snow melts...

As part of this, and after listening about it quite a few times on the Wiggly Wigglers Podcast, I have spent quite a long while mulling over the idea of EM Bokashi - or Effective Microorganisms - as a method of helping with "composting" waste, and improving the health of soil and animals.

We've just done our first environmental audit, using the "Saving the Planet Without Costing The Earth" book by Donnachadh McCarthy, a well known environmental author, campaigner and sometime Grauniad contributor.

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Here are the results...

One of our aims when we moved here was to reduce our energy and carbon footprints. The energy footprint is going very well!

Carbon... as predicted , this is difficult. We set ourselves a target of 4423 kg of CO₂, or about 369 kg of CO₂ a month. In the UK we were responsible for 4692Kg of CO₂, but only because we'd moved to green electricity. The vast majority of that CO₂ was from our gas boiler for heating and hot water. Reducing our CO₂ output by 6% as a target for the first year in Sweden doesn't sound a lot - it isn't - but it was a planned step in the right direction, especially in the light of the bigger distance I have to travel to work. 

How has it worked out so far...? 

Today was the day for checking whether our home cured bacon actually worked.

The results are in...