Category: climate change

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Grey, but beautiful

We’ve been struggling with very wet days for the last month. The croft is saturated and the burn is constantly in full spate.

It’s also bizarrely mild for this time of the year. Two years ago when we moved in around now there was snow on the hills and it was about 8°C colder. This week the day temperature has been hovering around 16°C , like a Highland summer, and my plants are all very confused.

Everything still growing

I still pop into the polycrub a few days each week to weed, water and harvest what’s ready even though this is supposed to be the down season.

This week I transplanted thirty tatsoi seedlings (Asian winter greens) into larger pots and although I’m horribly late with them it will be an interesting experiment to see if they still grow. The pak choi has done well and it’ll be good to try fresh new green things over winter.

Tatsoi seedlings everywhere

Even when it’s grey, it’s still beautiful. This is a snap I took of the cloud inversions sweeping across the Knoydart mountains this morning from the croft. I don’t think I’ll ever get blasé about this view.

The deer are here in such numbers now that it’s almost impossible to grow anything unprotected in our outdoor croft raised beds. We’ve been left with no choice but to fence off an area if we want to get any harvests next year. A job for next spring, I think.

The posts and wire have arrived already. When it’s built, the fence will be eight feet tall, which is far from great to look at, but is sadly necessary.

I can’t wait to curl up by the Woodburner in the house this winter and plan out the protected growing area. The orchard will have several varieties of heritage apple, pears, damsons and maybe we’ll try cherries too.

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Wilding, the book

Wilding, by Isabella Tree, is a book based on an experimental re-wilding of a 3,500 acre farm in West Sussex.

Forced to accept that the intensive farming of the heavy clay soils of their farm at Knepp was driving it close to bankruptcy, they handed the farm back to nature.

The results in terms of biodiversity, soil fertility and increased wildlife have been nothing short of astonishing.

This is a pioneering book describing a brave and far-reaching experiment. If we can achieve these results on a piece of intensively farmed, chemically fertilised, biologically sterile land situated under the flight path at Gatwick, with time and patience we can achieve them anywhere.

Books like this provide inspiration and reinforcement of the thought that given half a chance, nature will fight back and thrive.

What we do to our little six acre pocket of land on Skye will be much less impactful than the 3,500 acres at Knepp, and the soil, weather and environmental challenges will be very different, but to the local area of Sleat it will be just as important.

So many ideas and plans. We can’t wait to start.

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Sobering reading

The sun is shining this Easter weekend and most folks in the U.K. are heading to an overcrowded beach in the rush to escape the cities, or consuming their body weight in mass produced chocolate eggs. Perhaps for our generation it has ever been thus.

In this home the long weekend break is a little different. This book is on the side table pile for consumption, and I’ve just started it. I’m two chapters in so far.

It’s not a book about the science of climate change. I’m sure that we’ve all heard about that, and although it’s something that I totally believe in, the most frightening thing for me is that I see that it’s almost impossible for many others to sustain strong feelings about it, such is its’ enormity. It’s simply too large and horrific to believe it’s real.

Others won’t believe it until it affects them directly. I watch people struggling to equate the facts with their protected urban reality in their continued disconnection with nature.

This is one of the reasons that we have decided to live at the edge and grow woodland, trying in our small way to leave a small patch of the planet able to support biodiversity and wildlife.

This book is about what it will be like to live on this planet should we continue the trajectory that we’re on. It’s a depiction of real Armageddon.

The writing is clear and powerful. I’d urge you get a copy and to read it.