Late Summer on Our Norwegian Farm — When the Season Turns Urgent | S1 EP3

When you buy an old farm in Norway, you know it’s going to be hard work to get it running again. But I don’t think you ever quite grasp the extent of it until you hit your biggest projects—and the calendar starts threatening you.

Late summer on our Norwegian farm is the busiest period of the year for one simple reason: Norway doesn’t negotiate. You never know if the first snow comes in January or in the beginning of October, so you build your year around one rule—get the critical things done before frost is even an option.

This year we set four goals:

• plant 30 fruit trees

• build a traditional farm fence

• renovate one part of the barn for chickens

• and solve the tractor problem on the property

By the beginning of August, only one of those was crossed off the list: the fruit trees.

And that’s when we realized there were extremely busy weeks ahead.

🏔️Watch the episode here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj3GMJpU0Es

What happens in late summer on our Norwegian farm

We came back after being away, and for once the farm didn’t feel completely overgrown. Fireweed still had color left in it—blooming from the bottom up, turning into seed pods as it finishes. The strawberries were done, but the raspberries were peaking in a way that makes you stop and pay attention.

I’m not sure what the numbers were, but it might have been the first harvest above a kilo.

And that’s the thing about this time of year: it’s abundance… wrapped in pressure.

Because the sun barely sets in July, and the warmth makes plants grow like they’re trying to compress an entire season into six weeks. When you’re gone for more than a week, you don’t return to “a garden.” You return to a fight with vegetation.

The fruit trees we planted right before the heatwave survived without watering. Covering the ground with cut grass held moisture better than it had any right to.

Even the forest smelled different—warm pine everywhere.

But then you go looking for blueberries and you realize summer has been too dry. Slim pickings. Thirty minutes for ten percent of a berry picker. The kind of foraging trip that feels more like scouting than harvesting.

And still, you try again in a shadier spot, because that’s what you do in late summer: you keep trying, because the season is running.

The pressure changed overnight when the chickens arrived

The biggest shift didn’t come from the weather.

It came when friends visited and gifted us our first six chickens.

Until then, the plan was to buy fertilized eggs and hatch them ourselves toward the end of the month. But once you have chicks in front of you, the timeline stops being theoretical. The barn suddenly becomes urgent—not “this month,” but now.

And weirdly… it felt good.

A little pressure is clarifying.

So we pushed hard on the chicken section of the barn: doors, repairs, tunnels, gates, windows, and the layout of the space. The kind of work where nothing goes as planned, so you stop pretending it will and just solve the problem in front of you.

A door repair that didn’t work? Replace boards. Sand it. Paint it. Move on.

A box to keep rain out where the overhang doesn’t reach? Build it.

A gate motor to attach? Finish it.

And as the barn started progressing fast, you could feel summer fading. Wetter days. Colder mornings. First yellow leaves appearing like a warning.

That shift brings two things with it: mushroom season, and the conditions to set nets on the lake.

But we weren’t ready for either.

Not yet.

Late summer doesn’t care about your plans

We still hadn’t finished the traditional fence around the garden.

The chicken yard wasn’t predator-proof yet.

And predators don’t wait for you to finish your checklist.

Foxes. Martens. Badgers. And the biggest worries: hawks and eagles.

So we kept going.

We carried materials. Measured rope lines. Worked out how to span bird netting over long stretches while keeping it high enough to move under. Two days of untangling and setup—then standing back and hoping it holds, knowing full well that no construction in Norway can ever be “too solid.”

Because Norway tests everything.

Storms test your roof screws. Wind tests your poles. Rain tests your patience.

And then the night temperatures started doing that thing that makes you pay attention: a surprise 3° night in August. Three degrees and rain is not far from zero. And zero is not far from snow.

Moose season, lake nets, and the clearest mind of the year

Every August and September, moose activity peaks around the farm. They shift their feeding out of the forest toward energy-dense vegetation, and cooler temperatures let them move in daylight again. We had several mothers and calves feeding in the same field for a week straight.

The bulls weren’t showing this year, but the message was still clear: autumn is coming.

And in the middle of all this work, we started setting nets on the lake.

There’s something about net fishing that feels like the opposite of chaos. Quiet, methodical, simple. The water is calmer when temperatures drop. No wind. A good time to do it.

Four fish in the first net. Adjust the anchor. Improve the setup.

Then: 38 fish on day two.Then: 110 trout after four days.

It was an incredible start to the day—three hours outside, before the rest of the work begins.

But every hour has a cost. And back on land, the chickens still needed to move into the barn.

The “tractor problem” (and the funny way solutions arrive)

It has been a lot of wheelbarrows lately.

Which is why it felt almost comical that we suddenly had a front loader for a tractor we don’t even own yet.

A good price. Good condition. My father-in-law happened to be in the area and could transport it.

Eleven hours north.

And just like that, a future problem was slightly less impossible.

On a farm, progress often comes like this—not as one big solution, but as small upgrades that stack until the impossible becomes merely hard.

The fence that started in spring returns in late summer

Just when it felt like we were finally catching up, we returned to the project that began months earlier: removing the old fence and putting up the traditional one.

We bought 300 poles last winter and now it looked like they might actually be enough.

We were low on diagonal connections, so we started cutting and shaping new ones—wet wood on the table saw, slow work, doable if you have patience.

And despite the effort, I was already looking forward to the payoff: the dogs running freely in the garden.

No nails in the fence. Double posts connected by wire. Diagonals held up at one end, resting at the other. Rocks underneath to reduce ground contact because untreated wood and Norwegian moisture is a short story.

One more short side left before winter.

That was the goal.

Why late summer on our Norwegian farm feels so fulfilling

Every year, the busy days at the end of summer show you how fulfilling life can be.

All the tasks are tangible. Time-sensitive. Purposeful.

You spend most of your day outside and in motion. And when you’re busy using your body, there isn’t much space left for screens or spiraling thoughts. As long as you’re physically and mentally right here, your effort turns into progress—progress that directly improves the land you call home.

There are very few things that clear your head like a good day of labor.

And at the end of it, food is seasoned by hunger.

Life in the countryside is one of the last reminders that you can still make a change. And nobody but yourself can take that away.