Dream Valley or Drømmedalen is a farm in Sollia, Hedmark, about 45 minutes away from the closest town. Tina Buddeberg lives there with her family: 15 horses she relates to through the principles of natural horsemanship. During our PBL we lived and worked with Tina to help make the place ready for winter.
Among other things we built a sturdy fence around her front yard, to keep the horses out in winter; we partially rebuilt and prepared a barn and its surrounding for hay storage and fixed the roofs of a couple of rustic structures the horses use to shelter from storms in winter; we organized Tina’s firewood stores and cleared a camping area nearby; since in previous years some of the water pipes running under her house have frozen, we came up with an insulation system consisting of burlap sacks filled with straw, which we piled up around the pipes in the gap under her house. Then we built a skirt of wooden planks to stop the wind and snow from getting in there.
Finally after Tina mentioned in passing that she cleans up her outhouse once a year and that she would be doing that after we left, our gang decided to do it for her. It turned out to be a surprisingly positive experience: she uses a composting method with wooden chips that keeps the place very hygienic and odorless, and we got to think of and deal first hand with the waste management process, something that is usually completely out of our minds in everyday life.
In the five days we spent in Drømmedalen we worked hard, learned a lot about horses from a different, more humane perspective. We took some wonderful walks and had important philosophical discussions about our relationship with nature. We followed Tina’s strictly vegetarian diet and got to know a totally different part of this wonderful country.
All in all, an unforgettable, instructive and thoroughly enjoyable experience.
– Bernarda, Christopher, Lynnette, Mariano, Miriam, Simona & Viktorija
