Replacing weeds with garden beds.

A Finnish-American couple put urban idealism to test in the backwoods of Tavastia.

For the first time in four years of living in Finland, I can say good riddance to summer and embrace the darkness and cold. On the shores of a lake inauspiciously named Regret (Katuma) is a wild plot of land hugged by forest, at the heart of which lies a pretty, yellow cottage named Nut (Pähkinä). A year ago my husband, Janne, and I moved here from a Helsinki flat by Mätäjoki, the “rotten” river. It’s hard to say if we’re moving up in the world.

Pähkinä belongs to our friend; for decades it served as the family summer cottage, but had fallen vacant in recent years. It had recently been renovated for year-round use and environmental friendliness when we jumped at the offer to become its new tenants—a decision that had everything to do with carpe diem and very little to do with planning or grand life schemes. We were young with flexible jobs, a sense of adventure and a soft spot for sustainability. How could we pass up the opportunity to live on a lake and grow our own organic vegetables?

Labour and loos

Transplanted to the woods of Tavastia, Janne and I spent spring and summer willing a jungle of virulent weeds into a productive vegetable patch. We chopped down trees, hauled dirt, sowed seeds, manhandled caterpillars and rearranged ladybugs, waged war against weeds, and nurtured seedlings like newborn babies. This was followed by a harvest season of foraging, cooking, canning, and freezing. Winter has brought along new, but fewer, tasks: snow to shovel, wood to chop, and daily heatings of the wood-burning stove.

But after the lake view, it’s neither the garden nor the cosy fire that attracts the most attention from guests. Instead, the star of this show is the toilet. Affectionately nicknamed the “earth closet” by one friend, our toilet is really just a glorified bucket, a sort of indoor huussi or outhouse. It is a simple, custom-made system that consists of four 80-litre buckets resting on a rotating, wooden carousel located in an underground chamber. Inside the bucket chamber is a fan, which is connected to a ventilation pipe leading into our chimney. Toilet visitors sit on an otherwise ordinary toilet seat positioned directly above the bucket in use. When that bucket is full, we simply rotate the carousel to a fresh one. Once all the buckets are full, we access the chamber through an outside trapdoor and empty the contents onto a specially designated compost heap.

The job of emptying the buckets is not, admittedly, the most glamorous, but it’s also not that bad—even for the squeamish. Conventional toilets are such an expected and ordinary modern convenience that it’s no wonder we seldom question the logic of defecating into gallons of precious drinking water every day.

Good enough for frogs

The wood stove, composting toilet, and garden are all part of an effort to tread as lightly as possible on this planet of ours. Each has demanded of us physical labour, open-mindedness, and a willingness to adapt and learn. Living closer to our source of food and heat, and disposing of our own waste, has made life more labour-intensive, and also, in many ways, more gratifying. But the thoughtful inclusion of a composting toilet has not only bumped us halfway off the grid, this summer it made the cottage liveable.

The water in Pähkinä once came from a well in the garden – until July, when the last drop fell from the tap and Janne and I were left without running water for four months. Living beside a lake in the Finnish summer, this wasn’t all that bad. Daily swims, supplemented by a weekly sweat in the sauna left us (hopefully) indistinguishable from our well-scrubbed peers. Dishes were a hassle, and there was much laundry-related moaning, but our toilet, which operates independently of water and plumbing, was untouched by the drought. Had it not been installed, we would have either had to modify a bucket for outdoor use, a notion rather too DIY even for our tastes, or move out all together.

While toilet use carried on as usual, drinking water was another story. Janne and I hauled it from a communal spring down the street, trusting our judgment that cold, clear, tasty water is also by nature drinkable. Local frogs had apparently reached a similar conclusion. Tens of them communed on the surface of the spring, gradually making their way to its depths as we humans rudely interrupted their bath time. “But frogs are a good sign,” my father-in-law reassured us. “Frogs only like clean water.” It never hurts to have your conclusions confirmed by Finnish folk wisdom.

Clearing snow for a lake-top skating rink.

Embracing the seasons

As we approach our second in year in Pähkinä, water once again in our pipes, our shelves well-stocked with the summer’s bounty, I can admit how difficult much of the work and adaptation has been. We certainly carried a lot of urban-tinged idealism into this project: who knew cultivating weeds was so much easier than growing vegetables? Still, it has been rewarding work. It has left us satisfied at the end of the day with the knowledge that we worked for something good and tangible. And there was always the lake to receive us when things didn’t go quite right.

This dark time of the northern year has always meant for me gloominess, summer nostalgia, and too often remembering how comparatively warm and sunny it is in every other place I have ever lived. This year is different. The cold will bring us a well-earned respite from garden labour and plenty of time to sit by the fire with homemade jam on toast.

MICHELE SIMEON - HT