First meal outdoors

It was a long, hard day after a heavy week of work on the build and the croft. We decided to add a fifth vegetable bed to the growing area (remind me I said we’d start small this year? 😳) so that I could plant up my globe artichoke seedlings.

These perennials grow huge, so they ideally needed a bed of their own, which I wanted to site perpendicular to the rest to add a kind of windbreak effect.

For speed, and cost (the price of wood is crazy right now) we decided to use what we had on the croft and make another hugelkutur bed. The existing ones are working well for us, and we still have lots of rushes and soil that we can reuse.

Countless wheelbarrow loads of cardboard, rushes, soil, compost and woodchip later we had another bed ready for planting. It takes us about  four hours to build one of these, and it’s heavy, manual work.

We decided that we deserved a bit of relaxation and supper outside after all that exertion. We carried out some chairs and a fold-up table and positioned them amongst the building rubbish.

We’d recently bought a firepit BBQ which needed testing, so we fired her up and cooked supper on it. There’s nothing quite like the taste of real charcoal grilled Scottish steaks eaten outdoors… Everything tastes better in the open air, I think.

It was lovely to relax together eating, drinking and watching the incredible vista of sea and sky in front of us.

We added some building wood scraps to the fire to make a bit of a blaze after the charcoal had died down, and sat toasting our toes with a small glass of whisky, watching the rain and rainbows sweep across the Knoydart peninsula.

Such incredible natural beauty. Feeling very lucky to be here.