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Out and about on saturday, we were very uninspired by the lunch options that were available. So we went to the supermarket and bought brie, salami, smoked salmon, and avocados, and had a luxury picnic in a little bit of forest on the edge of Kungsbacka. The autumn colours there are beautiful just now.

Me & my new sewing machine whipped up this basic skirt a couple of weeks ago.  The fabric is wool, from a second-hand store, and cost just 50 kronor.

A couple of pairs of socks I have finished off for the girls this week.

Today I dug up the first few parsnips.  This monster weighed in at 950 grams.  It will accompany our roast chicken tonight.  Yummy!

I’m relieved, happy, emotional, proud and a bit homesick after this morning’s victory by New Zealand in the rugby world cup.

The last 12 months seem to have been a string of downers for NZ; the Pike River mining disaster, the Christchurch earthquake, and the environmental destruction that is still playing out in my hometown as a stranded container ship leaks oil and spills cargo into the sea.  No one can say that winning the world cup makes any of these things better.  But at least it’ll cheer people up for a while.

I just wish I could be there for the party.

Our neighbours have two rabbits that are allowed to roam free around the neighbourhood during the days. They stopped being cute though when we started finding nibble marks on our vegetables.

Next year we may have to issue an ultimatum: if the rabbits eat our veg, we will just have to eat the rabbits.

Photos from a harvest festival at a petting zoo that Is run by the church near us.  There were veges for sale, animals to meet and Anneli got to go on a pony-drawn carriage and a donkey ride!

We harvested 11 pumpkins this year: 4 baby bears, 5 butternut squash (from seeds we saved from a supermarket squash), and 2 mystery grey-green pumpkins, from plants that self-seeded in the compost.

A really rotten one. But, just in the nick of time, I received a copy of the brazilian sewing magazine Manequim, that I won in a blog giveaway from The Curious Kiwi. The perfect accompaniment to a hot cuppa and a medicinal whisky.

There’s already million reasons why the whole world should just stop smoking.  But yesterday I thought of one more.

In all the talk about how we are going to have 7 billion people on earth very soon, and we don’t know how to feed anybody, has anyone proposed we tear up all the tobacco plantations and use the land for food?

I did some quick math.  I found an article online from a farmer who practises small-scale sustainable farming.  He estimated he can feed 5 people per acre of land with his methods.

There are approximately 4.2 million hectares of land that are used for growing tobacco, worldwide.  That’s 10.08 million acres.   That’s theoretically 50 million people who could be fed off that land, if those farms were chopped up into small-scale local farms with sustainable farming methods.

I know the land would need some serious TLC,  since tobacco is a real nutrient leacher and is dependent on a great deal of fertiliser and pesticide use.  And I know that’s only a small fraction of 7 billion, and only a small fraction of the number of people living below the poverty line today … but still, 50 million people is a fair few.  Even half of that would be a fair few.  Even a tenth.

Of course it would never happen, because it would require action from governments, and governments belong to the tobacco and the fertiliser companies.  But a girl can dream, of a smoke-free world filled with locally produced food.