Europe > Sweden > Stockholm > Gothenburg > Articles > Healthy living on Swedish Farms

There's something very familiar about Sweden. Its travel literature is like the publicity stills for Swallows and Amazons: the Movie, with wholesome pictures of apple-cheeked blondes making rafts, hiking across leafy glades, climbing trees and paddling their own canoe.

These are the idealised images of childhood, the acres of unsullied freedom and the lashings of fresh air - in short the sort of experiences that, as thirty-something parents, Susanne and I would like our blond(ish) winsome twosome to have.

The trouble is, where we live in the suburbs of London, "wholesome" is something you buy from high street retailers. For urban rats Thomas (aged four) and Rhena (aged two), the "food chain" is a supermarket that everyone talks about but no-one goes to, "natural" is water without bubbles, and "fresh" merely means that it doesn't need de-frosting.

It seemed that Sweden might be the place to re-invest these words with their true meanings. Somewhere where milk doesn't grow on shelves, and adventures don't just take place at the click of a mouse. Word was, too, that this was no longer the expensive country it used to be - unless of course you foolishly forget to take your own wine. Moreover, we'd already had a week in the sun.

So it was that, on a September weekend, our old Peugeot clinked aboard the Princess of Scandinavia at Harwich for the crossing to Gothenburg, and a week staying on Swedish farms.

I was hoping that the crossing would allow some digesting of the guide books, to advance my awareness of things Swedish beyond obsessions with Ulrika Jonsson and Ikea. Oh yes, and I have inadvertently abused the name of a Swedish university town - Uppsala - on surprise meetings with soap on the bathroom floor.

By the time we'd reached the other side, I'd learned that Sweden has provided more leading ladies for Bond movies than any other nation, has more inland water than Belgium has land, and that every third Swede has a mobile phone.

These are pretty slim pickings for a 24-hour cruise across the North Sea, but let me plead smorgasbord in mitigation - and bring onboard movies, disco, casino, sauna and swimming pool to the judge's attention. Moreover, it's difficult to concentrate on gutting the guide books when one child is demanding to see 101 Dalmatians and the other is thundering around the ballpool.

The children certainly appreciated the sea approach to Gothenburg, through an archipelago of salt'n pepper rocks, sprinkled with painted wooden lighthouse keepers' houses. "Like in Pipi Longstocking", said Thomas. He was right.

Skane, Sweden's southernmost province and the site of our farms, was two hours' drive south from Gothenburg, and at first sight it looked like nothing in particular - from the motorway. On the side-roads, though, we found ourselves in a gently billowing counterpane of dusky clay pinned down by farmsteads the colour of rusty nails.

This is the breadbasket of Sweden, once hotly disputed with neighbouring Denmark, and dotted with fortified manor houses. It's also Sweden's closest point to the rest of Europe, its most visited area, and where our host organisation Bo Pa Lantgard (literally "stay on a farm") began.

It has to be said that our first stop, 12km inland from Angelholm on the western coast, was not the most beautiful choice. But we had the whole old farmhouse at Headal to ourselves, complete with a playroom of toys, free-range rabbits in the garden and an argumentative flock of Skane geese in a pen just outside.

Bjarne turned out to be a beet and pea farmer, with pigs and chickens as a sideline. Did everyone speak such good English, I wondered? He was relatively typical, he said, although not many farmers are on the Internet - as he was - and have a 17-year-old daughter called Alma who stages her own poetry-readings in local cafes. Bjarne's peas were contracted to Nestle, who would announce the precise moment of the exact day they intended to harvest. Within three hours of leaving his fields they would be frozen and bagged ready for the supermarkets.

Dinner - a bargain throughout the Bo Pa Lantgard network - was a Skane soup cooked by his wife Mona, which benefitted from contributions by his pigs, peas and carrots, and a bottle of wine from the Peugeot. Pudding was a pie of apples and plums from the garden. As he dug in, Thomas farted appreciatively, whereupon a quick facial twitch ran round the table, but no-one passed comment. The guide-books hadn't been enlightening on the Swedish attitude to flatulence.

It wasn't until the following day that we had the benefit of the local sense of humour, courtesy of the fish man of Angelholm.

This quiet country town is famed for its cuckoo orchestra (squadrons of earnest-looking children playing little clay pipes) and its 7km beach of unblemished sand. It was in the marina behind the beach that we met Michael. We were growing tired of H-le Haaps, and a sign reading Lerviks Fiskchop prompted me to ask the aproned man leaning under it: did he perchance sell fish?

"Yes, I suppose I probably do," said Michael, lugubriously. "after all, I am a fishmonger." And then he announced that he was speaking only Swedish that day.

It turned out he was a Monty Python fan, and conversation became appropriately surreal: did his pan-fried herring in oatmeal contain bones? "Sure. Otherwise it couldn't walk."

By the time we left, Lerviks Fiskchop was re-enacting the highlights of Fawlty Towers, with Manuel's part being taken by a very surprised-looking dead cod. Promising Michael that we would fix him a meeting with John Cleese if ever we possibly could, we took samples of his smoked salmon, dilled mackerel and herring out for a short walk to the beach. Every last bit was gone before we'd even crested the dunes.

If we'd hadn't been in Skane in September, that immaculate strand would have merited far more than a brisk walk. Sweden's high season is June and July, although the week before we arrived the temperatures had been in the 30s centigrade. But that day it was too cold and windy to swim.

Our next farm was Mararp, an altogether more pretty, colour-magazine type place, 15 km south of Headal. Again, we had virtually a whole house to ourselves - two bedrooms, kitchen, living room and bathroom - on the ground floor of the crisp cottage-style old farm building, with a dozen hand-weaving looms upstairs. This sort of Swedish interior pre-dates Ikea: windows framed in virginal lace, smooth walnut tables and stone-flagged floors. Simple, uncluttered and very clean.

Bengt had taken early retirement from the chemical industry, and now he devoted his energies to managing titanic pumpkins, potato beds, and a garden dripping with fruit. He may have sounded a bit like Boris Karloff, but he was plainly devoted to his animals.

While Bjarne's pigs had been rather pongy, fed by machines in packed pens, Bengt only had one - a free-range Vietnamese pot-belly called Sue Ellen who had a hut of her own and liked to eat her dinner off nice clean fingers. This was the difference between the real farmers and those who were playing, and I have to say that as far as our children were concerned the more playing the better. When all the various feeding times were done, Bengt took us out for a evening ride through the fields in his pride and joy - his pony and cart.

From Mararp we spent a happy day foraging along the Kulla peninsular just south of Angelholm, diving down into the fishing harbours and paint-box pretty villages of Skeret and Arild, eating waffles and cream and strawberry jam. Then we relocated once again.

Marielund, just 3km away from Mararp, turned out to be more of an 19th century chateau than a farm. It would have been quite awe-inspiring if it hadn't been for Peter and his wife, Maria, "the wife of the castle", a red-headed Ulrika Jonsson in wellington boots.

For the children it was heaven on earth. If we'd been location-seekers for Swallows and Amazons: the Movie, then Marielund would have been the answer to our dreams.

We adults were happy to retreat into the background, bit-part players amongst the oil paintings and glimmering crystal, reading novels by the light of the chandeliers and conversing from chaise longues. The real action was played out in the cabins and treehouses in the woods, hunting eggs in the chicken run, sweet-talking the Shetland pony into the stables and probing for monsters in the crayfish pond.

Farmer Peter's heart had plainly been melted by having three young children of his own. He had had pigs, he admitted, 1,000 of them. But Ludwig, his eldest, had objected each time they went to the slaughter. "It is a problem for a farmer to have these feelings", confessed Peter. Feelings had won, the pigs had gone, and now the children ruled the day.

Marielund was a hard act to follow. We distracted our two by hacking up the overgrown tributaries of the Ranne river in a Canadian canoe which we'd hired at the Angelholm marina. "Another one coming," Thomas shouted, as he dropped flowers into the water over the bows; "got it" shouted Rhena as she picked them out again as they passed the stern. If the children had been a bit older, I'd have been tempted to have tackled more of the river's navigable 85km, staying in riverside shelters and cooking over open fires as the Swedes do.

It took an easy hour to drive east from Marielund into more abrupt country heavily tufted with woodland. En route we picnicked in a dingy on a handy lake, and while the sunlight skidded around on the reedbeds we speculated about what we might do if we met a moose. And whether it'd be a chocolate or banana one.

In this compact southern corner of Sweden, it is easy to forget that you're in a nation that stretches the equivalent of Calais to Gibraltar, although it only houses eight million people. If you can see more than ten cars at a time, you're in a traffic jam.

"For us, just stepping ashore in the UK is like going to a city" said Marie at Rosenhill, our last farm. And looking out over her swimming pool at the quiet valley lined with heather and bilberries, I could see her point of view.

Marie bred pigs, Kent was a dentist, and they were the most articulate of all our hosts. They had built a new house for themselves and converted the old, wooden, tongue-and-groove farmhouse into visitor accommodation. The pool was for guest use too.

The cosy old farmhouse was painted with the traditional copper oxide and rye meal mixture that gave all these properties their distinctive rusty colour. Wild vine covered one wall, a hop climbed up the other, and as I lay in bed at night I could hear an idle wind running its fingernail across the roof tiles.

Rosenhill was within a half hour's drive of the two most cultural experiences of our holiday: visits to the first ever Ikea store at Almhult and the BRIO wooden toy museum at Osby. Susanne was a little diappointed with the Ikea. "It's just like at home, except with an outdoor department," she said. As for BRIO, Thomas spent his time operating the model ferry port and Rhena had her nose pressed up against the display of what she called "barbecue" - Barbie dolls.

On our last night, over a copious dinner of Swedish meatballs and lingonberry sauce, we tried to pinpoint the secret ingredient of these Swedish farm holidays. The space, the freedom to roam, and the special hospitality of staying with people who are as curious about you as you are about them. "And marinated fish for breakfast" added Susanne.

The Peugeot clambered back onto the ferry laden with squash, berry jams, yoghurt, crispbread and pickled herring - fresh, natural and wholesome in all the true senses of those words - much of it bought directly from the farms.

We hadn't gone to any performances or learned much history. I had barely opened the guidebooks; with local recommendations over breakfast it hadn't seemed necessary.

Instead we 'vuxen' had learned about pea-harvesting and pig-breeding, and that the Skane people call the Stockholmers 'null achts - 08s - after their dialling code. Moreover, 'My Hi!' with multiple exclamation marks could virtually pass me off as a local.

Meanwhile our 'barns' had driven tractors, fed geese, picnicked on lakes, gone canoeing, and met a pot-bellied pig called Sue Ellen. And when you've got growing barns to entertain, mountains of fresh food and lashings of fresh air are as important as deeply cultural experiences.

• More from Andrew Eames