Category: raised beds

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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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Sunshine & seedlings

After a very long, cold May we’ve awoken to warmer temperatures and sunshine at last.

Sunrise over Sleat

This photo was taken by one of our lovely neighbours from the hill above the croft whilst out on a 5am run this week. Not a sight I’d have been awake enough to capture. Thank you, Jonny.

The sun is rising before 5am now and not setting until around 11pm, giving us long, soft, light-filled days. We have another month to go before the summer solstice, so there’s more to come. It’s already not fully dark at nights and the long, light evenings on the croft are magical, if a bit chilly up till now.

Raised beds on the croft

We have cuckoos and swallows, linnets and skylarks, bluebells and wild garlic in the hedgerows. Suddenly everything is bursting into green leaf, and it’s feeling at last as if we’re on the brink of early summer.

First day of exposure! Shallots, beetroot, red veined sorrel and garlic

I’ve taken the mesh off the vegetable beds today to get a proper look at what’s survived through this very dry, cold spring. Some things are looking very sad for themselves (leeks, lettuces I’m looking at you) but others seem to have pulled through quite robustly (full marks red cabbage, kale, beetroot, potatoes, purple sprouting broccoli and shallots).

Taunton Deane kale, red cabbage and onions

Let’s hope that summer is on its way at long last!

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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.

New veg bed

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.

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Growing beds

We had a dry, sunny, spring-like day this week and we decided to build a hugelkutur bed alongside the wooden raised beds that we’d built last month.

These are permaculture growing beds built over a core of wood or brash, with turf, soil and compost layers. They allow plants to grow where the soil would otherwise be too shallow.

The theory is that the central core of wood slowly decomposes, releasing nutrients into the bed. We will be adding to it annually with top-dressing to keep its depth consistent. This is a no-dig bed.

We built a small 4m bed, starting with a cardboard base to try and suppress the rush growth, and dragged up dead branches from the copse at the western edge of the croft to form the core.

We added layers of soil, compost and bark chip mulch until we had something about 60 cm deep. Some hugelkutur beds are much taller than this, like giant earth Toblerones, but as an experiment we figured that this was big enough.

We’ve planted up the rhubarb crowns in it and I’m eyeing the rest of the bed up for potatoes and perhaps kale over the coming weeks.

We’ll need to lay bark chip paths between the beds as it’s already starting to look like the Somme with all the wheelbarrow and wellie work recently churning up the mud.

If this works I can see more of these being constructed later in the year.

It’s a simple idea and reminds me very much of the lazybeds or runrigs on the hillside above the croft where previous generations of farmers scraped enough soil into mounds to grow food.

These ancient forms of land tenure are said to predate the crofting system, and it appeals to me that this more modern system of permaculture is really the same thing.

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Herbage and Seeds

The urge to grow new things is very strong. We have no greenhouse or polytunnel yet, so I’ve set up a small space in one of the rooms in the caravan to start my seeds off. Luckily this room still has the old carpet down so it doesn’t matter if it gets grubby.

Balanced somewhat precariously on old cardboard boxes and a heat mat, and wedged between boxes of spare clothes and the hoover, are my first trays of seedlings. The blue wands of wonder are moved around to those plants that seem to need them most. It’s not exactly a professional set up, but it will do!

I’ve tried to choose plant varieties carefully to ensure that they’re hardy for our exposed site, but this first year is going to be very much an experiment.

I know that I’ve probably started too early for these northern altitudes, but I was itching to start. If they get too leggy I’ll just have to re-sow.

I have garlic ready to plant out. We eat lots of that, and I have more to plant directly into the soil once the beds are ready.

I have seed potatoes chitting ready for planting in the coming weeks. A local crofter recommended two varieties that I’m going to be trying, with good flavour but also good blight resistance.

I also have beetroot, chard, leeks, sorrel, parsley (it germinated! Hallelujah!) and Sutherland kale sown and just starting to grow.

Husband has been working on the construction for our compost bays too, which we need to start as soon as possible. The price of good compost in the quantities we will need is eye-watering, and I’d much rather we made our own.

I’ve also just finished reading this book. A total inspiration, a really interesting story and full of very practical advice about growing abundantly, organically and using no-dig principals. It’s just come out, so do source a copy if you get the chance.

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The first raised beds

The first three raised beds are built and in place. Hurrah! Another small but significant milestone on our croft journey.

There was a short gap in the weather this morning which husband took advantage of. The timber was cut, positioned and screwed together to create three high sided, solid boxes.

The challenge here is the exposure of the site. We receive the full force of the South Westerlies which whip over the croft, with only limited tree cover to the west. The flat land that is cultivable is close to the house and right at the top of the hill.

In terms of positioning I wanted the beds close to the house for ease of access and proximity to water supply. They also needed ideally to be oriented east-west to maximise exposure to sunlight, and if possible be sited on flat land. The perfect (and only really viable) place here is going to need good wind protection.

We will put up a heavy duty mesh windbreak whilst we plan what type of hedging should be planted here, get the basis of the hedging in, and that will be it for this year. I can start with basic, small scale vegetable production in between house building.

We’re also keen to get compost piles started, so timber to construct a couple of adjacent compost bays is on its way.

Behind this row of beds I’m thinking of trying a hugelkutur bed, which I’ve read great things about. We will have wood debris that can form the core of it from fallen branches from the existing trees, and we should have home grown compost by next year.

First things first though.

Tomorrow I will line these beds with cardboard as a weed suppressant and start moving and de-stoning soil to fill them. This huge soil pile was excavated from the croft when the builders dug the parking area the caravan is sited on, and it will form the bulk of the growing material in the beds, topped off with compost mulch.

It feels good to be preparing for growth.