The task of preparing the boat for winter is well underway. The mast is taken care of and now carefully stored away in the mast shed. It took over a week's work to get it all ready.



First, one must clean it thoroughly with an automotive cutting paste to remove the oxide from the aluminium. It is very time-consuming, dirty and fiddly work. The particular product we use leaves a water-repelling film to protect the metal from tarnishing and oxidation. Later I applied a thick coating of parrafin oil to also help avoid any water damage over winter.

While I did that, Lars-Göran was busy covering the boat with tarpaulins over a frame to protect it from snow and rain as well as working on the sanding of the hull. Of course, it wasn't all work and no play!



It's quite a relief to have that part of the work over and done with.

You know, if someone told me that I would be eating and enjoying fruit soup after living here for a while, I would have laughed at them. To me, fruit was pretty much the dessert part of a meal. Sure, I could almost accept Duck á L'Orange or Apricot Chicken at a stretch and I did eat grilled pineapple with my hawaian steaks and even applesauce with the roast pork. But soup consisted of things like chicken noodle (NOT available in Sweden and greatly missed), minestrone, pea and ham, tom-yum etc.

When we were staying with Lars-Göran's family at the summer house we were feeling a bit peckish one afternoon and my sister-in-law said (well, I thought she said) "How about if I make up some Nippon soup?" Okay, that's a new one on me, but I was curious. Nippon soup? Something Japanese? Was it perhaps some kind of miso?

I couldn't have been more wrong. When Mille suggested that she'd make some up and we could have it with icecream, I quickly asked her to repeat the name again. What she said was nyponsoppa, which translates as rose hip soup. And it is delicious. Served either hot or cold as a snack or as a normal soup. It has become one of my favourite soups.

So I was quite excited this morning when I spotted this in our back garden:



Fresh rose hips just begging to be made into soup. The rose hips can be dried and kept to use as the base for the soup. This time of the year there are plenty of them about as the rosa rugosa is a very common variety in Sweden and you are allowed to collect the fruit from plants on public property.

There seem to be a large number of autumn berries around this year. I've never seen such a profusion. Our town is full of rönnbär trees. That means rowanberry in English and they look like this:



This is one growing near the library, but there are countless trees everywhere in Nynäshamn. These are the berries of the European mountain ash (Sorbus aucuparia), which is a plant that I'm not familiar with. I believe that you can make a type of sauce not unlike cranberry sauce from them. They are a very popular winter food for those birds who are silly enough to stay in Sweden over the winter. At the moment, they are very bitter, but apparently freezing them helps to sweeten them and when you make the sauce, you are supposed to freeze them first. Most people here leave them for the birds.

Lars-Göran was upset to see so many berries. For him, it's a superstitious sign that we are in for a long, hard winter when nature provides a bounty of winter berries. He thinks that the ground containing the usual grass seeds will be frozen longer, so the birds will need the winter berries.

He was further anguished to spot an abundance kråkbär or crowberries on these bushes at the guest harbour.



Again, this is a berry that only improves with freezing, so it looks like there will be plenty of food this winter for the birdies. Perhaps people won't need to supplement their natural food sources with extra food. It's very common here for people to leave out food for wild animals. At first I saw this as interfering with nature, but now I can see that a harsh, cold, snowy winter kills many wild birds and animals, so perhaps there is an argument for leaving out a little extra for them.

It's another glorious sunny, crisp autumn day. And the town looks beautiful.



I hope it keeps up for a while longer. It is getting steadily darker and darker now, so we need all of the sunshine we get. The prospect of those grey November days don't thrill me. But that is still ahead of us. I'm going out to enjoy today as it is.