Starting a business is not easy. Starting a medicinal herb farm is even less so.
Sometimes I wonder what has been the hardest part of building Nordiska Örter. The truth is that I don't think there is one answer. From the very beginning until today, the challenges have changed completely.
The beginning: 2023
I remember very clearly the first year I started Nordiska Örter. I was growing medicinal plants in my garden and organizing workshops around plants. At that time, my life depended a lot on waves of positive and negative.
Every purchase, every person contacting me, every registration for a workshop, every positive answer gave me a huge amount of joy. It felt like every person who joined the project was giving me the validation and confidence I was missing. But the opposite was also true. Every unanswered message, every cancelled activity, every mistake, and every financial difficulty could really bring me down.
I also had no idea what I was doing. I was testing things, making mistakes, trying again, and slowly moving towards what seemed to work best.
Around 80% of my time was spent communicating. I was using social media, which I barely knew. In fact, I created my Instagram account for Nordiska Örter. I had never really been a fan of social media or technology. I was sending emails, putting up flyers, contacting people and trying to make people to know about the project.
It was not always work I enjoyed. It sometimes discouraged me, but it never stopped me. At that stage, my biggest challenges were simple: money and being seen.
Creating the company: 2024
In 2024, I had gained more confidence in the project. My motivation was strong, and I knew that I wanted to grow medicinal plants and build a farm around them.
I started looking for help. I joined coaching and programmes, and I was lucky to meet people who gave me advice and guidance during the early stages.
But the problems were different now. One of the biggest things I was looking for was someone who could be an accountability person for me: someone who could validate my progress, motivate me, and help me keep moving forward. It turned out that this is not so easy to find. So I had to learn to rely more on myself and to create my own routines.
Then came the administrative side of creating a company: Skatteverket, Bolagsverket, accounting, Livsmedelsverket, building a website, understanding what I was actually allowed to do, and finding the money needed to get everything started. I was lucky that my family could lend me some money. I was able to pay it back quite quickly through a summer job. I also lost money on services that I later realized I did not actually need, and even some frauds. That was frustrating and, at times, quite demotivating.
And all of this was happening while I was building the first field of 400 m². Luckily, throughout this process, I kept meeting people who wanted to help in the garden. Around ten people helped me establish the first field. Then, during the first growing season, one person came to work with me for a month.
Dealing with private life while discovering the quantity of work: 2025
2025 was a difficult year for me. I was going through emotional changes, had less energy than usual, and was dealing with the reality of my first full season at a new place, with a new drying room and a growing production. At the same time, I was working at the café of the urban farm during the whole summer.
Managing both the farm and the café made the season complicated. I did not yet have the experience of a full growing season. I did not know yet how to manage a team of volunteers, and I had not understood how much the increase in production would change the amount of work.
The financial situation was better than before, but I was starting to see something important: The farm simply required more work than I had estimated. I worked almost non-stop between August and September 2025, with almost no days off. My physical and mental health were impacted. Eventually, I burned out. I understood that the next challenge was to built a proper system for administration, communication, team management or planning of the production.
The winter of 2025: rebuilding the way I work
A large part of the winter of 2025 was about resting and rebuilding. I needed to create a better system for Nordiska Örter, but also a better system for myself.
There were many things to change, but some of the biggest ones were: focusing only on Nordiska Örter and leaving the café job behind. Building a reliable and diverse garden team. Having a plan for the summer. Learning more about leadership to take care of the team including myself. Setting fixed working hours. Working four days a week in the garden, one day on administration, and keeping two days for rest. Investing in better equipment to make production more efficient.
Going back to a research job also helped me financially and gave me the opportunity to rest during the winter without carrying the same financial pressure.
The challenges of 2026
Summer 2026 has been my best season since I started Nordiska Örter. It has been the most balanced and, in many ways, the most fulfilling.
But now, as the season starts to come to an end, I can already feel the tiredness and the challenges that come with it. This year, the garden doubled in size, from 400 m² to 800 m². That meant planting everything again. The new land is also very different. We have problems with water drainage, which means that some parts of the field become very dry and the plants struggle to grow there.
As a result, our harvest is smaller than I had hoped. At the same time, the number of orders continues to grow. Once again, I realized that the production will be too low, and from now on, this need to be consider as a real challenge to solve as priority.
We also started a fresh herb CSA this year, which brought its own challenges. Some shipments arrived late or in poor condition, and finding a good system for sending fresh herbs has been much more complicated than I expected. The fresh herb CSA was also the first online course. So much years this was on the plan and never done. I am proud that I made it, but I am not completely satisfied with the result. That affects my motivation and also shows me what needs to be improved.
Some pre-orders are still waiting because the tulsi is late. Some of our harvests were also lost because they were not dried properly. And then there is the team. Managing a team, making sure everyone feels good, organizing the work, planning ahead and making sure that everything runs smoothly takes a lot of energy.
At the end of this season, all these small things and pieces of work that I am not completely satisfied with start to accumulate which affect a lot my energy.
I have been said that I am setting the bar high. Then I do like to set it high because I want to do my best for both my team and all of you, partners as customers.
I am not discouraged. I am tired.
For me, disappointment is often a signal that something needs to change or improve.
The hardest part is that during the main growing season, there is very little space to stop, reflect and make those improvements.
You see the problems. You know what you want to change. But you don't have the time or energy to do it right away. That can be frustrating. The optimization happens during the low season. It is during the winter that I can step back, look at what worked and what didn't, and build a new way of working for the following year.
What comes next?
Today, I believe that Nordiska Örter has a lot of potential.
As the farm continues to grow, I will probably need a larger and more suitable place where the drying and processing of herbs can take place in more specialized spaces, and where we could eventually host members of the summer team as well as people coming for courses and training.
At the same time, the idea of moving is not simple. Every time I imagine starting somewhere new, I also think about the enormous amount of energy it would take to build a farm again from the ground up: preparing the land, establishing the beds, creating the infrastructure, and slowly turning an empty space into a living farm.
And this is where I am still unsure about what the future should look like.
Ulleråker Gård, despite its limitations, has become a beautiful social place. I love that the farm is part of an urban environment, that people can easily reach it, and that it can be a place where people meet, learn about plants, work together and feel connected to something.
At the same time, I dream about better infrastructure and more space. I would like to have both: a farm with the facilities needed to grow and process medicinal plants properly, but also a farm that remains a social and welcoming place.
I have also spent almost ten years moving between Finland and Sweden, while always looking towards France for inspiration. Perhaps my next big challenge will be to find a place where the farm and my life can finally exist in the same place.
I have a very simple image in my head of what that place could look like: a river nearby, a tiny house, flowers everywhere, enough space for long rows of medicinal plants, a rose field and a field of elder trees. Sometime I also dream of opening an herbal store displaying the herbs from the farm in bulk.
Even if the future is unknow, it is also very fulfilling and to look back to see how much you have accomplish when you see that challenges of yesterday are today's routines and not challenges anymore. This on its own, can be a beautiful motivation to keep going.
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