Prepare for spring

So when my longing for spring becomes too strong, I have a few little tricks to resort to. Painting tulips along the edges of the snow may be a little desperate, but it lifts my spirits somewhat when my social media feed shows rhubarb buds while we still have deep snow here.

Fortunately, you can grow quite a lot on the windowsill too. I usually do this: I clean empty milk cartons with the unscented kitchen soap. Always use unscented products for anything involving food and foodstuffs.

Then I fill them with potting soil and sow simple things such as peas. I use ordinary yellow peas (pea soup peas) from ICA I Love Eco. They produce lovely shoots, and since it is only the shoots we want, they can be sown very densely.

Today, we can go to a store and buy whatever vegetables and fruit we want. At any time, we can get hold of almost anything grown anywhere on the planet (perhaps not entirely reasonable when you think about it), but it wasn't like that in the past, especially not here. The inland and mountain regions were difficult to reach, and it was hard to transport goods—especially fresh produce—up here. It was not uncommon for people to carry their own goods long distances because there were no roads suitable for vehicles. Hiking trails and boots were what was available. Yet people managed to survive here, thanks to their knowledge and experience. The lack of vegetables during much of the year was a particularly “tough nut to crack,” but Gompan has saved many people from falling ill. 

Gompa was made from kvanne and jaärja (angelica and tolta in Swedish). These plants were picked while young, blanched, and ground into a green paste. You could actually compare it to pesto. In the past, gompa was stored in wooden barrels with buttermilk; the barrel was kept cool and allowed to ferment. I have heard that people ate it with milk or thick milk, but there were surely other ways to eat this green source of health as well. Nowadays, gompa is frozen and thawed when desired, but I wouldn't say it is a common dish or even a supplement; it survives as a tradition.

Preparation of Gompa.

Other things that grow well in reused milk cartons include spinach, cress, and mustard seeds.
The shoots are delicious cut into a salad, put on a sandwich, or simply served as greens on the plate. Peas and cress grow quickly, and within just a few days you have fresh green shoots to eat.

Peas—these are ordinary yellow peas from ICA I love Eco, and they work perfectly well as “microgreens”.

Cress is also quick and easy to grow on the windowsill.

Spinach is a little thinner, but it also comes up quickly and produces wonderfully crisp green leaves.

Mustard seeds are the hardest to get to germinate, but they also sprout fairly quickly.

 
The idea isn't for these to become large plants, so you can sow them densely and trim them down.
These days, they're called microgreens, and they're a bit “trendy”. I don't have another name for them, but they're a great way to get something green and fresh when spring still feels far away. 

If any of you happen to think that gompa is even trendier, I recommend a holiday in Vilhelmina, perhaps even during Settlers' Week, when anyone interested can learn really trendy things such as making gompa, playing the fiddle, haymaking, singing yodels, or blowing a birch-bark horn.