The cinema has a library of reference books, which has been growing slowly over the years. All the books can be borrowed by the inhabitants of the village where we’re situated. We’ve discussed how to develop the library, and have looked at for example the work of seedbanks to come up with ideas (seedbanks lend you seeds, you plant them, grow something, then bring new seeds back to the bank the next year).

Some of our books, like Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard and The Resilient Farm And Homestead by Ben Falk, have discussed the replacement of annual crops with chestnut trees. Their arguments sound sensible, especially as trees are longterm traps for carbon dioxide.

From The Resilient Farm And Homestead by Ben Falk

Edible chestnuts have a hard time in most of Sweden, but here in the south there are many trees to be found – next to the entrance of Malmö Konsthall for example – and they also manage to produce nuts.

We found a tree just north of Höganäs which has survived for almost a century, and which also produces nuts of an OK size (most of the other trees we looked at had chestnuts the size of seeds). We left some of these chestnuts in a plastic bag in the fridge and forgot about them until springtime. By then they had all started sprouting.

We now have around fifty plants of edible-chestnut trees, to give away to visitors of the cinema. They’re on the shelves of the library, and if you take one home and plant it, you can bring us back a chestnut in five years time. We’ll be here, probably working on a new five year plan.