Category: summer

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Midgification

Normally the wind on this breezy hillside croft is enough to keep the worst of the Highland Midges at bay.

Midge (much magnified)

Not so this summer. These tiny insects, with the needle-sharp biting teeth of Satan, have been in full swarm on many days recently. It’s midge-geddon out there!

They’re at their worst, it seems, during early mornings or late evenings before the temperatures of the day and the winds rise. We’ve been seeing vast clouds of them in the last month.

Midge swarm in progress

They’re difficult to catch on camera as they’re so imperceptibly small, but once there are enough of them airborne you can start to get a sense of the horror that is a midge swarm.

The only thing to do is to retreat indoors until the swarm passes. And remember to keep your windows closed! They’re dispersed by any wind over 6mph or temperatures that are too high or low, so thankfully it’s not a long wait as we can usually rely on the winds to kick in.

If you must venture outside, keep as covered as possible and use a midge hat complete with netting. We also use natural repellants, such as Smidge, although I’m not sure how effective these really are.

Thank goodness we don’t live in a more sheltered area. There are advantages to being perched on the top of a wind-scoured hill!

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Extreme heat

The rest of the country is living through a Met Office severe weather warning with temperatures hovering around 40C, but Skye today is a cool 22C with balmy sea breezes.

Blue skies and sea breezes

I don’t think that we would have survived that heat if we’d still been living in London.

The house we were renting there was badly insulated :- a town house with three floors, our bedroom being at the top of the house. There was no airflow or air conditioning, and the heat would rise to the top of the house and make sleep simply impossible.

Even with fans we found it too hot to do anything, and whole months could be lost to weariness and bad temper through lack of sleep. There was also a continual sense of grubby stickiness from the proximity of the crowds and the air pollution, which was palpable.

London does not do summer well, like most cities.

I know that people think it’s bizarre but we genuinely like the cooler temperatures up here. There’s nearly always a wind blowing, and it rarely exceeds the mid 20s. That’s comfortable, as far as I’m concerned!

We’re so glad that we got out. The air is clean and cool here, and we enjoy the wide open spaces of the croft. Today was a good washing day and husband hung sheets and a duvet cover out to line dry in the warm breeze.

Washing day

I’ll take the cooler temperatures and the rain over the pressure cooker of the city any day.

Feeling so lucky to be here.

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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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Summer eating

This is the season for eating from the croft, and the fresh produce is now coming in with abundance, even from the handful of small grow beds that we have. We are enjoying lettuce, kale, new potatoes, purple sprouting broccoli, chard, onions, peas and fresh herbs.

I’m being challenged to find new ways of serving this bounty, as we can’t store or freeze any produce this season.

This is whipped feta with roasted beetroot, toasted almonds, orange zest, chopped mint and parsley.

I was so excited to try our first baby beets from the croft that I made this dish up specifically to try them. It’s adapted from one that I found that uses goats cheese.

Scooped up with oat biscuits, it was a light nibble to eat before a main meal with friends, but would easily make a lunch on its own. This will become a summer staple, I think, and I’ve resolved to definitely grow more beetroots next year!

Young onions from the croft

Tonight, kale and purple sprouting broccoli from the croft were the central vegetables in our meal. They were lightly sautéed with garlic, sesame, spring onions, lime, a bit of leftover chicken, and noodles.

Uncle Bert’s kale

Lots of potatoes… cold potato salad, fried potatoes, garlic potatoes, mash here we come!

3kg potatoes dug up this morning
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Midgification

One of the main challenges of a highland summer are the midges.

We’re luckier than most being at the top of a windy hill. Midges can’t fly in winds of more than 6mph, apparently, so we pray daily for a good, brisk wind.

Many has been the warm, sunny evening when we would have brought out the firepit and barbecued long into the night if it weren’t for the midges. Once they start flying there’s no escape and no respite. The worst of it is that we want to sleep with the caravan windows thrown open on these warm summer nights, but we can’t without swarms of the little horrors coming in to plague us.

We smother ourselves in Smidge and don our midge net hats to try and avoid the worst of them. I’m counting the months until temperatures dip enough to kill them off. By September, I’m hoping.

The other downside of the croft in the summer with the proximity of neighbouring livestock is horseflies. The locals call these Clegs. I’ve been bitten several times by these horrible things whilst working on the croft, and unlike midge bites, they’re huge and need disinfecting. They land like ninjas, incredibly softly, so that you don’t notice them until they’ve started scissoring away a circle of skin from you.

Giant Dark Horsefly

Husband took a picture of this one on the caravan window a few days ago. It was a good inch and a half long, the same size as a hornet. It was probably a Giant Dark Horsefly, and although I don’t think anything this large has landed on me, I shudder to think of this airbus of the fly world anywhere so near to hand..

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Live music is back!

One of the things that used to be a huge part of our lives and which we’ve missed since lockdown began has been live music.

Being on the Isle of Skye doesn’t mean that gigs stop. Far from it. The nature of them is a little different (we’re unlikely to be seeing the Foo Fighters in the tent at Armadale any time soon), but we are rich in local musicians and there is a very active music scene here.

I’ve always preferred small venue music anyway – the intimacy and immediacy of a band or singer just a few metres away is, to my way of thinking, a much more real experience than being part of a crowd so big that the best view is via the video stream screens.

Innes Watson and Ross Ainslie

This summer SEALL was able to restart its festival programme, albeit with social distancing and other Covid protection measures in place. Established in 1991, the name means Look or See in Gaelic and is pronounced “Shall”. It celebrates the wealth of home grown musical talent in the area.

The first of the events we attended a few nights ago was an evening concert held outdoors in the grounds of Armadale Castle. Innes Watson and Ross Ainslie, two very talented young musicians. It was so good. I love that we celebrate Gaelic culture in its music and that the next generation fuse it so seamlessly with their own creations. We have a few more concerts booked in for July.

Open Air at Armadale Castle

We also watched Skye Live via livestream feed a few nights back. An amazing fusion of traditional and electronica performed and filmed in the Mountains in Skye. I’ve copied a YouTube link to it for those of you that would like to have a taster. https://youtu.be/596iVkMGj-g

Niteworks on the Quiraing

I’m so happy that live music is back.