Our life at Karl-Tövåsen’s living shieling

Our day starts just after 5 am in the morning. There are always two of us working, one to take care of the dairy and the milk and one to milk and take care of all the animals. The first one up fires the boiler that heats the water we need for all the dishwashing etc.

The cows have spent the night in the barn and are now rested, hungry for some hay and concentrate. We start mucking and grooming, feeding and then milking.

The milk is then filtered into a milk jug. The person in the dairy then takes care of the milk immediately and starts turning it into cheese. When you make cheese, you get curd and whey. The curd becomes cheese and the whey is then used to make whey butter. Not all whey is made into whey butter, so the pigs usually get some of it.

When all the cows have been milked and the calves fed, the cows are released into the forest. The lead cow decides where all the cows go. The cows never go to graze in the same place in the forest two days in a row. The calves have to stay at home as they are easy prey for predators like wolves and bears.

Then we usually have some breakfast. If the weather is nice, we eat it outside and enjoy the sounds of the forest. If the sun’s not out, we like to have breakfast by the fireplace. We usually have some self-made yoghurt or porridge to get through the day. And of course coffee, sandwiches with our own butter and cheese, obviously.

After breakfast we start preparing for the visitors of the day. The coffee shop and barn must be swept and tables wiped. The outhouse has to be cleaned, and water filled up. Then we make coffee and prepare cookies and sandwiches. Cheeses are to be price tagged and the cheese counter filled. We want everything to look really nice!

At 12 o’clock we open our doors, and in order for everything to run smoothly we need 5 people working.

At 12.30 pm we have the first tour which usually takes about 30 minutes depending on how many questions we get.

After the tour, we usually churn butter, and some days we cook whey butter. Cooking whey butter takes a long time, usually two days.

At 3.30 pm we have tour number two, where we tell you about our life and the history of the shieling.

At 4 pm we close for visitors and start cleaning up. After that we usually have a well-deserved coffee break. We try to take turns eating lunch during the day. Now the cows usually come home, it’s like they have little watches with them, at least until August when they start moving for longer distances.

We usually try to get started with the evening milking at 5 pm. It works like in the morning so we are always two people. In the evenings we usually separate the milk. It means separating the cream from the skimmed milk (skimmed milk is like low-fat milk). We then sour the cream in order to make butter out of it later. The skimmed milk is used to make a low-fat cheese called white cheese. You can either eat it in salads or store it to make Gammelost. Some of the skimmed milk is fed to our pigs. Then there are lots of dishes to take care of. When that’s done and all the animals have been fed, the working day is almost over.

At 8 pm it’s usually time for dinner. Then it’s nice to sit down in the cabin by the fire and spend time together. If we’ve made skimmed milk cheese, we turn it over one last time before crawling into bed and recharging for a new day. We work three shifts, if you will, but the difference between this and a normal job is that here the same people do all three shifts. The body is tired but the soul is happy!

Welcome!