Welcome to Raven Croft Skye

The purpose of any croft is for its tenants to make productive use of the land. That can be achieved traditionally through the raising of livestock, or less traditionally by growing and selling produce from the land.

Up until now any real crofting endeavours have been on a rather limited basis for us whilst we’ve been building the house. We’ve deer fenced part of the croft, planted hedging and a small orchard, but still have much to do on the tree front that we’d planned.

From this year onwards we will be growing herbs and salad leaves to sell, as well as baking cakes using croft produce for local outlets.

We’re starting small. And probably staying small, to be honest! I’m enjoying the stress-free living of not having a schedule that dictates my life.

I’m supplying three local businesses (the Selkie Collective, the Stables restaurant at Armadale Castle and Armadale Stores, our local community shop) with freshly baked buns and cakes. That takes up most of my early mornings, leaving the rest of the day for croft growing and other normal life stuff.

We’ll be offering salad leaves and herbs grown here on our croft to local restaurants and the local community stores. We love the idea of supplying the local community with what we grow.

Packaging for the stores needs some sort of recognisable branding and for those of you that are Gaelic speakers or who have been around long enough, you’ll remember that we named the house after our pair of resident ravens, Taigh an Fhithich.

In line with this we’ve called the Croft business Raven Croft.

I’m researching suitable bags for salad leaves and am starting to get the branding up and running. We won’t have a website as all of our business will be truly local.

It feels as if we’ve reached another milestone in our lives here, and that feels good.

I’m still working out how many croft beds need to be dug to work off one of those chocolate hazelnut cakes, but the less said about that, the better. Balance in all things!