Tag: cold wet island

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‘Tis the season

It’s the season of evening fires, big skies, woolly socks, sleeping cats and warming food.

Winter is upon us, and although it’s not that cold yet, the trees are bare and the nights are stretching, dark and long.

It is dark now by 4.30pm and we make sure that the log basket is filled before then and that the woodburner is lit.

It’s a ritual that I love, turning the lights on, lighting candles in the living area and generally making things cosy. The crackling of the logs and the faint scent of woodsmoke are an essential part of winter.

The cats are usually in and sleeping if the weather is wet or windy, and it’s often both.

We bought a couple of extra chairs this week so that we can accommodate eight around the dining table more comfortably at Christmas. We have family staying plus friends and it’ll save us having to wheel office chairs in.

My love affair with old Ercol pieces continues. These are cowhorn chairs, as they’re called, solidly made of English elm, dating back to the 1950s. Elm is a lovely wood. Ercol are still making these today, but they’re no longer made of elm as there’s none left after Dutch Elm Disease ravaged the English forests over the last fifty years.

They join the mismatched crew of chairs from our previous lives around my old French oak dining table, made from trees felled in a French forest after the big storms of 1995.

I like that our furniture has had lives. It may be a bit shabby but it suits us.

We also unpacked my old sewing machine at last, so I’ve had a bit of a rearrange in my study to set it up and make a little space for sewing and another for reading and watching the world go by.

I can’t wait to get my easels in there and a work table so that I can also paint.

And get some art up onto the walls. It’s still all in the shed with the remaining boxes awaiting the walls to be finished. The house looks empty without art.

Soon, soon.

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Crofting cooperative day

It’s the day that we were to host the local crofters cooperative.

One Sunday each month is designated the crofting cooperative day, and a group of local crofters take it in turn to host it. The day is used to undertake tasks where extra hands might be needed on the host croft – tree planting, digging drainage, pruning bushes, scything brush, that sort of thing.

Extra help from the skies!

We had just taken a delivery of more heritage apple and pear trees so had planned for the extra hands to do tree planting. We’d also collected a few dozen sacks of seaweed after the recent storms to mulch the base of the trees to suppress weeds and add additional nutrients.

Seaweed collection

The day dawned wet and windy. No surprises there on Skye, I guess. The local crofters are a hardy bunch completely undeterred by rain and they turned up well dressed for the weather.

Supplies for the workers

After a few hours of planting and mulching we broke for hot coffee, soup and home baked bread, and cinnamon buns. And a good natter about all matters land related.

Stormy skies

This is such a good initiative. We all help each other, and it’s great to spend time with like-minded people who are wrestling with the same challenges that we are. It’s also heartwarming to share the celebration of this wonderful place that we all live in.

The trees are in and happily tucked up with their collar of seaweed. Winter is coming fast now on the teeth of the gales, but we’re prepared.

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Rain, sewing, recovery

The wet non-summer continues with rain and chilly temperatures closer to autumn.

A gap between the rain showers

We’ve had rain just about every day for months now, and I can’t help watching the blazing summer and terrible droughts and water shortages across the rest of the UK and Europe in despair. Whilst we’re drowning. There has to be a better way to share this. Somehow.

Incoming

Whilst I recover from my operation I’ve been reading books, pottering in the polycrub (which at least provides shelter from the rain) and sewing.

Rainy days

I had a sashiko panel and some threads tucked away in my sewing bag from when we first moved here, so I’ve spent many happy, peaceful hours sewing away.

Sashiko panel

Sashiko is just a running stitch, so it’s repetitive and soothing to do. I’ve finished the main panel now, but need to sew a border and frame to complete it, and to do that I’ll need until we’re in the house and the boxes are unpacked. I’ve got material and a sewing machine in storage that will finish this nicely. This was a progress photo from last week. For now I’ll just pack it away.

Nearly done

The floorboard laying will finish upstairs in the house today, and husband is installing the back-boxes for the sockets in the kitchen this week, so although there’s not much to see, progress still continues. We’re getting there!

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Mud, snow and seedlings

So, just as I was sowing a few trays of vegetable seeds and contemplating getting my potatoes into the ground, it snowed.

Basil seedlings under the blue UV lights of doom

It’s the lambing snow. Every year in March or April it happens, apparently, just as the lambs are born. Poor things. My seedlings have visibly shrunk back into the soil in horror at the prospect of emerging into such sub zero temperatures.

I feel so cruel tempting them into germination on a heat pad in the caravan only for them to swiftly realise the reality that they’ve been born into..

Gherkinage!

I’m hoping for milder temperatures and a break in the rain and sleet so that I can carry on preparing the raised beds and get a few hardy things out there. It’s bitterly cold out there at the moment.

Rather leggy looking tomato seedlings

The polycrub is supposed to be being installed next week, and at the moment the site that it will sit in is a bit of a quagmire.

Mud everywhere.

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The divine beast

I’ve always wanted a polycrub. As soon as I set eyes on this windswept, exposed croft I knew that it was our best chance of growing anything.

The polycrub

For those of you unfamiliar with this divine beast, a polycrub is a growing tunnel, like a polytunnel. The difference is that it is made from recycled fish farm piping and rigid polycarbonate sheeting, making it very strong.

It is designed and made on the Shetland Isles, where it was developed to cope with the exceptionally strong winds and stormy growing conditions there. It’s guaranteed for up to 120 mph winds, so it can withstand anything that the Isle of Skye climate can throw at it.

Recycled salmon farm piping

I love that it’s made from sustainable and recycled materials, and that it’s so strong. The first year of growing taught me that our biggest challenge on this exposed site was going to be the wind. We will plant shelter belts to help the raised beds, but this will provide much greater protection for a wide variety of crops.

Excitement has peaked this week with the arrival of the man and digger to level the site, and the delivery of the kit itself. The joiner will be here in two weeks time to construct it. We are installing it between the raised beds and the compost bins in the growing area of the croft.

Man & mini digger

As I write, a snow storm has just swept across the sound. It may be the last day of March but the challenging conditions continue, and my seedlings need protection. I can’t wait for the polycrub to be up and running.

Tomato babies

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Deer damage and alien life

In a short burst of mild, sunny weather this morning I rammed on my wellies and headed out on to the croft. It’s well overdue time to prepare the raised beds for the seasons growing, and I’ve been waiting for a break in the storms for weeks.

The deer have been terrible this winter. They’ve eaten everything that was left in the beds, which I stupidly didn’t net for protection. Actually, the nets wouldn’t have survived the storms anyway.

Roll on next year when we will have time to deer fence the croft. I think it’s the only way.

These are the remains of a couple of my perennial Taunton Deane kale plants. There’s basically nothing left of them, and I think that the damage is so severe that they won’t re-grow. The deer have even eaten rhubarb, spiky artichoke leaves and garlic, all things that they’re not supposed to like! It’s soul destroying after such a productive year of cropping from them.

However, despite the deer damage there are tentative, wonderful signs of spring.

The mint has started to re-grow.

The berry cuttings are starting to break into bud.

We have the first signs of rhubarb leaves pushing up through the soil like wrinkled red aliens.

I managed to weed a couple of the raised beds and get some red onion sets in before my back started to complain and I decided to beat a tactical retreat. I must remember to take it slowly at the beginning of the season, otherwise I’ll seize up after a whole winter of inactivity. And cake.

Gardening is a marathon, not a sprint. but it felt so good to be out there again.

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Stormy days

Rain is lashing down in torrents from a leaden grey sky as I write. There’s ice in it too, and a stiff north westerly wind to drive it home.

From the caravan

The badly fitting, single glazed windows of the caravan don’t seem to provide much protection against this weather as I peer out into the gloom. I’m well wrapped up with three layers, including thermals, and I’m still chilly.

We’ve had an incredible run of storms so far this year, one right upon the coat tails of the previous one. Storms Corrie, Dudley, Eunice and Franklin have rolled over the island in the last six weeks in rapid succession, bringing 80 mph winds, hail and snow with little respite in between.

We’ve had very disturbed sleep this past month as the worst of the winds seem to come after dark. When they start, the caravan rocks and shudders as if it’s alive, straining against the lorry straps that lash it down like a wounded animal.

The noise of the hailstorms is deafening. It’s impossible to sleep through. It’s as if someone is emptying buckets of marbles into a tin bath on your head. Even burrowing further under the warmth of the duvet doesn’t dull the noise.

Image Francis Yeats

I bake. I make bread and cakes to warm and sustain us. I make soups and stews and sweet, eggy puddings and crumbles.

Brioche buns. Just because.

I venture out in the small, quiet pockets of calm between the storms and wonder at the crofts capacity to hold water. Everything is sodden, soaked.

I wear many layers. Recently I’ve taken to wearing my fingerless gloves in the caravan during the day to keep my hands warm. Tea has become an important, warming ritual in the afternoons, hands wrapped around the comforting heat of the mug.

Spring is coming, I tell myself. It’s coming.

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Storm Malik

Whilst storm Malik rages, whipping the tarpaulined piles of material stored at the front of the house into a frenzy, progress inside the house continues slowly.

The wind was huge last night. It was apparently gusting to about eighty miles per hour, and it was so loud that it was almost impossible to sleep. The caravan was dancing in the wind, walls flexing and straining hard against the webbing straps that hold it down.

Piles of building material on a calmer day

Morning brought a damage assessment between the storm flurries. Nothing too serious thankfully – a few pipes blown out of place, the bin and bits of wood and building material blown across the croft, and the cover on the rotary clothes dryer totally disappeared . I suspect it’s flown all the way to Norway by now.

We have a few more days of this predicted so we will be battening down the hatches and riding it out as best we can.

On the house front, we have an almost plasterboarded corridor and hall now. Progress.

Corridor

It makes such a difference to see walls inside rather than just spaces. I’ve been struggling with the kitchen design and colours, unable to tell how much light the room will have, but over the next few weeks I should be in a position to see exactly what it will look like. Then I will need to get my skates on and get finalising selections..

It’s true that these days we almost have too much choice. Although having said that, I can never find quite what I have in my minds eye. I seem to have a remarkable ability to love what is not trending at the moment, making it difficult to source. I will slap myself into decisions soon.

Kitchen still awaiting plasterboard and the light well

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Plastering, wiring, ducting & kebabs

Now is a really busy time for the build. We have two guys (the two Dereks) busily and speedily installing battens and erecting plasterboard panels, with husband wiring and ducting alongside them.

It means long days and not much in the way of breaks. He’s shattered when he collapses in front of the fire each evening. A good tiredness, I think – one born of a long days manual labour and visible progress, but certainly tiredness. We’re neither of us as young as we were!

The best I can do is provide tea and food as it’s needed, and finalise the many remaining decisions on bathroom and kitchen finishes from the caravan.

When I’m not browsing tile sites and bathroom fittings catalogues, or calling Home Energy Scotland for advice, I spend much of each day making flatbreads, cake, quiches, stews and soups.

My latest attempt at urban food is kebabs! Sliced leftover roast lamb, shredded red cabbage, garlic and mint yoghurt, harissa paste and baked soft flatbreads. When you don’t have a takeaway on the island, you make them yourself. Probably much healthier too.

I’m not even pretending that the pear frangipane tart was anything other than an indulgence…we need yummy things right now.

I’m also reading this. An excellent book, if slightly terrifying. It’s about the disappearance of insects due to pollution, pesticides, chemical runoff, changes in farming practices and climate change, and is written very accessibly and compellingly. Dave Goulson is well qualified to write about this, being a Professor of Biology, an expert on insect ecology and an Ambassador for the UKs Wildlife Trusts. Get a copy if you can.

So progress on the build is steady as we move through the highland winter. I’m starting to think about seeds and have ordered seed potatoes, onion sets and garlic. We’re still eating red cabbage and kale from the croft, at least what the deer haven’t eaten.

Soon, now. Spring is coming. Not long now.

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Fuelled by Tunnocks

Watching a film recently, cosied up in the caravan on a cold winters evening, I couldn’t help but notice that there were over 15 minutes of film credits at the end of the footage.

It got me thinking how complex things have become in life (as well as how every single person involved in the film in any capacity now gets a mention).

It also made me smile when I thought of what the credits reel would look like if our house build and croft regeneration were a film. I’m saving up most of the honourable mentions for my long suffering husband, but there is one outlier that I think also deserves a shout-out.

Tunnocks wafer biscuits.

There is a caramel wafer biscuit made in Glasgow, Scotland, a part of daily life here and every bit as Scottish as porridge, haggis and single malt. It’s just called Tunnocks locally.

Tunnocks is an institution. I always have a packet of them in to fuel the day with a strong cup of tea.

The plasterers shun the dark chocolate variety as too sophisticated for their tastes, and go for the milk chocolate ones with their tea and two sugars every time.

Husband likes the dark chocolate ones best.

I think he’d smile at being thought dangerously sophisticated…😊😘.