Category: permaculture

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Feeding the local wildlife

It’s not all been perfect carrots and potatoes, y’know. Growing organically and without pesticides has been a challenge, and we’ve lost our fair share to the bugs and the deer. Mainly, it has to be said, to the damned deer.

Our hungry neighbours

Deer are not supposed to like garlic, onions, leeks or anything strongly scented. Ha. Ours obviously have exotic tastes. They’ve chomped through the green foliage of all three of these all summer.

Plant globe artichokes, those in the know said. The leaves are big and bristly and the deer don’t like the texture of anything bristly or prickly. Ha. They’ve been eating the yacon and artichokes too, biting out the lead shoots completely on many of our plants.

It’s also the closest bed to the common grazings on the hill , and as such the most tempting, I suspect. The rest are annoyingly close to the caravan.

The distant remains of the artichokes

Kale was always going to be a crop that we knew would potentially suffer from their grazing, although they did wait until it was of sufficient size to be worth nibbling. Thoughtful of them. Then they feasted.

Chomped kale

What the deer didn’t eat, the caterpillars and other bugs did.

This is a picture of one of my red cabbages from the raised beds. As you can see, the leaves are like lacework, having been nibbled by whatever passing insects or caterpillars we are harbouring. Companion planting helped a bit, but most of the garlic and other strongly scented plants that were supposed to deter passing devourers had been harvested long before these cabbages were, and then the fun started.

Bug salad bar

I am not despondent. I’m happy to lose some to wildlife, but am determined to find ways to minimise the damage and maximise our crops. Our soil is productive and good. I think that netting against insects for longer next year will help, as will deer fencing around the vegetable plots, if not the whole croft.

It’s a journey, and we’re learning.

On the whole this growing thing has been surprisingly successful for us, and next year with the benefit of the knowledge gained from our experimental year, more beds and the polytunnel in place, we’ll be even more productive.

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In praise of seaweed

Amazing stuff, seaweed.

It’s a good source of potassium, nitrogen and magnesium. It also contains trace elements (nutrients that plants require only in small quantities) including iron, manganese, zinc, copper and boron, not always found in other types of fertiliser.

It’s also completely biodegradable and breaks down quickly, perfect for the vegetable beds.

We could see how full of nitrogen the seaweed at the high tide line was – there was a line of nettles growing right out of it!

Seaweed at high tide line, with nettles

We plan to use this precious, free resource in two ways on the croft; as a mulch on our no-dig beds to suppress weeds and fertilise the soil directly, and added to our compost bins to add nutrients to the rotting down mix of green and brown matter.

Yesterday we explored the western side of the peninsula looking for beaches where we could collect, wheelbarrow and load a car trailer with ease. We found two great beaches, both full of seaweed, and both highly accessible.

Tarskavaig beach

We won’t take too much, as the wildlife on beaches rely upon it, but there seems to be plenty for all. Next time we have a storm we’ll bag up a few feed sacks of it from each beach and bring it back to the croft.

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Wintering

I’m sitting in the caravan on the croft sipping a cup of tea and watching the rain pelt the windows. The sea and the mountains have all disappeared and we are completely enveloped in dense, grey cloud.

Tea tea tea

We’ve had three weeks of very heavy rain and high winds to welcome the change of season and remind us that winter is but a blink away.

I honestly don’t mind the rain, and after surviving one highland winter in the high winds I’m much less nervous about the gales. I’ve learned to trust the bags of hardcore and lorry strapping that are holding the caravan down. We may rock a bit in the weather but we haven’t taken off yet..perhaps I shouldn’t speak too soon 😊.

As winter approaches though, the croft is saturated. I dashed out yesterday between rain flurries in my wellies to look at the raised beds, aware that I desperately need to weed and get the autumn garlic into the soil soon.

Rain rain rain

But it will all have to wait a little longer. It’s like a quagmire out there. There’s no fighting this weather; we just have to sit it out and grab the moments of respite when we can to start preparing for winter. At least husband can work in the relative shelter of the house on the plumbing, and is warm and dry as he solders pipes.

The composting situation is well sorted though. We visited a neighbouring croft yesterday after a social media appeal to reduce her horse dung mountain. We filled eight big feed bags with well rotted horse poo and trailered them back to shovel into our compost bins. Amazing stuff.

More trips are likely to be needed – we’ve hardly dented the dung mountain at all.. we’re so lucky to have this source of organic manure nearby. It will do wonders for our soil.

As soon as the rain slackens we’ll dress the beds and mulch the soil ready for overwintering. I’m probably going to put the environmesh back on too so that the kale, beets, parsnips, onions and garlic that will remain in the beds over winter can enjoy a bit of protection from the wind. It makes a big difference to the battering that they take.

The stags have been roaring on the hillsides for a few nights now. They do that in October as they compete for dominance and gather their hinds for the winter. It’s quite an uncanny, primal noise, and they’re clearly pretty close by. Next year, deer fencing is a must, before the trees go in.

For now, I’m embracing autumn and the imminence of winter. Tea, books by the fire, clear starry skies and warming drams of homemade atholl brose in the evenings to keep the weather at bay. Yep , the oats and whisky for our first bottle of the season are steeping as we speak…

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Carrots at last

I’ve been watching the posts of successful gardeners up here with envious eyes as they cropped fistfuls of carrots from their vegetable plots.

Carrots from the croft beds

I have been pulling the odd carrot here and there from my raised bed over the last month to see if there was anything much underneath the profusion of feathery green. I’ve prodded and pulled. To date, all to no avail. Up until this week all I’d found were a few pencil thin offerings.

Checking the beds a few days ago I noticed that some of the carrots were going to seed! Horrors. How could they go to seed on me without delivering as promised?

Armed with my fork I resolved to find edible carrots or else dig them all up and return the space to something more productive.

I’d sown two types from Real Seeds in the spring – the gloriously named Manchester Table carrot and the equally exotic yellow French heritage variety, Jaune D’obtuse. Surely one of them should have produced something by now.

I knew that I hadn’t thinned them very well. When the time came in early summer, something in me just baulked at pulling out young, healthy plants, and much as I understood that it was needed, I also suspected that my half-hearted attempts at thinning hadn’t been nearly rigorous enough. As such I was expecting skinny, weedy specimens at best.

My delight was complete when I delved into the forest of carrot rows and pulled up some good sized carrots.

Croft vegetables ready for roasting

We roasted the first of these today with beets, potatoes, onions and garlic, all grown by us. They were delicious.

It’s just a carrot. But it’s my very first homegrown one, and it tasted all the better for that.

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Potato Musings

We planted early seed potatoes in March in one of the hugelkultur beds on the croft as part of our “what will grow here” experiment. We’d managed to get the seed potatoes from a fellow crofter, two varieties that he’d recommended called Orla and Nicola, which I promptly mixed up… 🙄

Potatoes in the bed on the right

There were several times that I thought absolutely nothing would come of them.

I watched as the months rolled around and they grew, but very, very slowly. It was a very cold start to the season and I wondered if I’d stunted them completely, never to recover. They didn’t flower, and they didn’t seem to get any bigger.

As we moved into August and we started harvesting lettuces, onions, kale and garlic, the green tops of the potato plants looked no bigger than they had in April, and I started to feel that the experiment had failed.

Husband dug them up on a misty, midgy morning this weekend. I’d decided that we really needed the space for something else to have its chance, and my expectations were low, if zero, to be honest.

When he came in with a couple of bucketfuls of good potatoes I was pleasantly surprised.

It wasn’t a massive haul compared to the harvest that we’d got from the red-skinned potatoes, but it was more than I’d imagined that they’d provide.

Either Orla or Nicola..

I washed them off and checked them over. Very little slug damage, and only a few green ones, and that because I hadn’t earthed them up. It was a decent crop of good, solid unblemished potatoes.

Washed and drying

We will store these in hessian bags in the caravan and eat them over the coming months.

Considering our experience with the reds that we harvested last month and these varieties, I think that potatoes do grow well here, despite the cold springs, so I’m planning to grow a full raised bed of them next year.

They’re such hassle-free plants to grow, and it’s true what they say, that the flavour of home grown potatoes is far superior to shop bought ones.

Lovely little nuggets of potato deliciousness. Nature keeps surprising me.

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Sweet picklin’

There’s something very primal and satisfying about preserving food that you’ve grown yourself. Crazily so. It must be somewhere buried deep in RNA, and it seems to be triggered by the first wisps of autumn or the smell of woodsmoke.

The sweet days of summer are still with us but I can already sense the onset of autumn with my harvests.

Even though there were just a few handfuls of shallots and onions from the croft that could be used it somehow felt important to mark this, our first ever crop, by preserving them.

Small Shallots being prepared

I’ve been pickling onions for years, but have never really settled on a recipe that I love. This year, watching the storm roll in across the mountains of the mainland from the comfort of the caravan, I browsed through the few preserving books that I have here and created a blend of spices that I think may work well for us.

Pickling is a bit of a time consuming exercise at times. The onions have to be harvested, dried off, then peeled and trimmed.

Onions in sea salt overnight

Salting them is supposed to keep them crisp once preserved, so into a bowl with lots of coarse sea salt overnight they went. Nobody wants soggy pickles .

This morning they were rinsed and dried ready for next stage.

Spiced vinegar being prepared

The vinegar that I’ve used is white wine vinegar rather than the usual malt vinegar that seems to be traditional in UK kitchens. It has a 6% acidity count, slightly higher than malt or distilled vinegar. It’s been sweetened with sugar and spiced with black peppercorns, coriander seeds, mustard seeds, chilli flakes and bay leaves.

All my kilner and preserving jars are still in storage so I’ve had to make do with sterilised, recycled jars. They seem to have worked well.

Recycled jars

A kind neighbour has offered me ridge cucumbers to pickle and I’m scheduled to pick them up next week. I’ve kept some dill and dill flowers back ready for this moment…

May you savour the remaining sweet days of summer, and sweet picklin’ to you all.

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Grasses Galore

We’ve had a warm, breezy day on the croft today. Twenty-two degrees and a clear blue sky. It made our outdoor tasks today so much easier with the wind keeping the midges at bay.

Grass in the breeze

The grass has grown so much over the last few months that the paths that husband had scythed in the spring had nearly disappeared.

This was making trips to the raised beds and the compost heap a daily waist-high challenge.

I wouldn’t normally worry about wading through long grass, but I’m super cautious about picking up ticks and horsefly bites at the moment, and didn’t want to have to start walking about swathed in protective netting like some sort of veiled ninja..

So husband spent a few hours yesterday and today scything swathes through the grass and collecting it up for compost. The breeze helped what was a long, sticky endeavour.

Pathway emerging

Some folk like to cut their grass neatly and very regularly. We have chosen to leave ours wild, and to see what comes up. We prefer it that way, and nature seems to agree.

We’ve found orchids, clover and wild flowers in abundance, and there are certainly plenty of moths, bees, butterflies and insects. Husband has even had to rescue a few small frogs from the path of his scythe…we want to encourage them as much as we can. Natural slug protection!

Once we have an agricultural shed to store equipment in we will need to look at other ways to manage this, though. Even with trees, six acres is too much to manage by hand with a scythe. It’s a fine line between managed meadow and bracken and bramble patches overtaking the land.

We’re thinking at least one annual cut after the summer is over to help seed and keep the rushes down.

For now we’ll enjoy the grasses and the wild flowers from our small, scythed tunnels through the abundance.

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Sudden Profusion

It’s all growing well in our raised bed experiment. Except the leeks, which are spindly little pencils so far.

I will be patient.

I’m mainly delighted and surprised by the profusion. It seems to have come all of a sudden. We’re cropping lettuces, potatoes, kale, sorrel, purple sprouting brocolli, chives, parsley, dill, mint, and rocket.

The beets, shallots and onions look nearly ready. The garlic is coming along, and the mammoth red cabbage leaves are starting to turn in. The parsnips are growing, as are the carrots.

It’s the rain, long hours of daylight and mild temperatures. Suddenly everything is leaping up as if wanting to make up for the slow, cold start of our late spring.

First crop of potatoes
Kale, beetroots, red-veined sorrel, onions
Peas
Parsnips
Endive and carrots
Uncle Bert’s kale
Purple sprouting broccoli

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Salad days

Another significant milestone. Our first salad from the croft!

For you rampant food producers out there with your polytunnels, greenhouses and fertile growing beds this is going to seem a bit of a damp squib, but we’ve just cropped our first bowl of salad from the croft and I’m doing my happy dance!

Salad leaves

It’s a mix of endive, red lettuce, red veined sorrel, Uncle Bert’s kale, mint and beetroot leaves. All grown organically outdoors from seed here on the croft.

Other things are growing too in these long, light filled days of summer. I can see a few purple heads of sprouting broccoli emerging, and the potatoes will be ready in the next few weeks.

Parsley grown from seed

The leeks have been a big fail – they’re still tiny and very slow growing. Kales, cabbage, garlic, beetroot, potatoes, herbs, and salad leaves have all grown well. The carrots and parsnips are small yet but time will tell. The globe artichokes are tiny plants, a few leaves apiece, but they seem to be surviving. I’m hoping that they’ll muscle-up and come into their own next year. The berry bushes are establishing. The borage and comfrey are flowering.

Wonderful comfrey

I’m just relieved that it hasn’t all been some monstrous failure. We’ve had one meal from the croft at least!

The key learning so far is exposure. We knew it, but just didn’t have the time to do it. We need to get windbreaks up and hedging in this autumn before the main growing season next year.

Small milestones on our journey. Forgive a woman’s unseemly crowing.

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Hot, hot, hot

The weather here on the island has been very hot over the past week. The caravan has suddenly transformed from fridge to oven..

The temperature gauge inside recorded 26 degrees centigrade yesterday, and that’s uncomfortably warm for us. Especially when opening windows to try and catch a breeze results in swarms of midges coming in off the croft…reminder to self, we must get some midge netting fitted to the windows.

The seedlings however are loving it. Uncle Bert’s Kale is growing madly, the potato plants are all greening up nicely and I have my first bean on my borlotti bean plant!

It was too hot to cook indoors yesterday and we were too tired to summon up a BBQ, so we headed down to Camuscross early to try and get a table for a cold drink and some supper. It’s so good to be able to do that again now that lockdown has eased.

There are worse places to be on a hot June evening… This time last year we were in London… I know where I’d rather be.