Tag: croft

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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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The visit

It’s been nearly a year since we saw family, with the stepsons being based in Manchester for university and work.

At last one of them has been able to make it up here to the island and we’re enjoying sharing this amazing place with them.

I’d forgotten the effect that Skye can have on someone when they visit for the first time.

It’s been over twenty years since I first came here, and although the grandeur and beauty of the landscape doesn’t diminish, its impact becomes less over the years as its mountains and seas become more familiar. You forget that first, overwhelming intake of breath when the magnitude of this landscape hits you for the first time.

Rainshowers

Much as we do our best to convey the magnificence of place through our posted images, nothing can match the sense of being here physically, the wind in your hair, the rain on your face and the spirit of the island embracing you with its rawness. And there’s been nothing BUT rain over these past few days, sadly.

Amazing skies

It’s been remarkable to watch this sun-loving city dweller suddenly “get” what has made us want to build our lives here in this remote place. I know they both think we’ve gone a bit mad, but as we’ve travelled around over the last few days the sheer draw-dropping beauty of the island (albeit glimpsed through gaps in the rain) has definitely started to take hold.

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Buttercups and Beetles

What a glorious day. The croft is bursting with weeds (aka wildflowers) and we love it. We have buttercups growing in thick profusion next to the vegetable area, and it’s just so beautiful.

I couldn’t help have a bit of an ironic chuckle to myself today too. About two years ago we sowed pignut and bluebell seeds in the little copse on the western boundary before we moved onto the croft.

Now that we live here, we can see that we have a profusion of both popping up all over the croft. There was no need to sow them – they’re growing everywhere here naturally. The impatience and innocence of townies. All we had to do was wait and watch…

Pignuts!
Hawthorn tree in full bloom

This is a beautiful time of the year here on the croft. Everything is in bloom, and the insects (sadly including the midges) are everywhere. It’s a price we’re prepared to pay. Anyway, we’ve got hats and nets…

We wake up each morning to the cuckoo, the skylarks and the swallows wheeling overhead.

I’d got so used to hardly ever seeing insects in the city that it’s been a bit of a shock to find ourselves cohabiting with so many at such close quarters. Weevils, oil beetles, lacewings, strange, alien looking creatures that we don’t know are friend or foe, but which have at least as much right to be here as us.

Google lens and plant apps are being used daily. This is richly diverse meadow and moorland, and we’re loving learning about it.

Oil beetle

The house build continues apace, with plasters and plumbers being lined up to help over the coming months, but it’s very hard not to get seduced into just being on the croft.

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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.

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The gang

As spring has progressed, the bird life on the croft has become much more visible.

As I write I can hear or see blackbird, robin, linnet, chaffinch, swift, cuckoo, wheatear, sparrow and meadow pipit. And of course our ravens, whom we think have mated. We’ve named them Floki and Helga after two characters in the Vikings series.

Ravens are generally solitary birds, mating for life and hunting and living with their partner.

The juveniles, however, live in gangs until they eventually mate and pair off. And like most teenagers in large groups they’re loud, posturing, awkward, and a bit thuggish…

We have a gang of young ravens that visit the croft daily. They’re not interested in the seed or peanut feeders that we put out for the birds, but they love the fat balls..

The fat balls are in a metal mesh container with a lid on them, hung onto the wire stock fence that surrounds the croft. They’ve learned to peck at them until they break up enough to fall through the mesh, and then they swoop on them and scarf them down as quickly as they can, squabbling over especially tasty morsels.

One particular individual – husband calls him Dare Boy – is always the first to hop up and start the offensive. And once it starts, it’s fast. We’ve gone from five fat balls to zero in a matter of minutes. It’s like watching a gang of starved fifteen year olds with a pizza.

They can’t reach the very lowest fat ball in the container, but that’s no problem. They simply nip through the string that holds the container so that the whole thing lands on the grass and they can eat to their hearts content.

It’s become a daily amusement for us to watch one of them fly over, check out the food situation, return with the gang and casually line up on the croft fence ready for the off.

Who needs a television? 😊

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Caravan food

The caravan has a tiny kitchen, with three working gas burners and a very small electric oven. It’s lack of storage space has meant that we have no room for electrical appliances like mixers or blenders, making everything a manual process when it comes to food preparation . So, meals have to be simple.

But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be good. We’re working hard on the house and croft, and we need sustenance. An army marches on its stomach!

I’ve looked back at some of the meals that we’ve produced in the caravan with our one baking tin and I’m pleased to see that we’ve actually managed OK.

The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that we seem to be heavy on the sweet treats! No apologies for that. It’s true to say that this build is being fuelled by cake…

Bakewell tart
Sourdough from the Mallaig bakery with homemade houmous
Strawberry slab cake
Lunch butties with crispy chicken
Turkish bean salad
Chocolate cake
Teatime flapjacks
Cheese and chive scones
Local rope grown mussels
Lentil, garlic & veg soup
Pear pancakes with Greek Yoghurt & Honey
Soy marinated sesame salmon
Cranachan
Lentil dhal
Baklava
Thai salmon ready for baking
Local langoustines
Breakfast of champions
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Heartbroken

We are heartbroken.

Bertie on the croft

Bertie, our 13 year old spaniel, has been getting more and more infirm as the months have passed, and over the last week has been unable to make his back legs hold his weight.

His increasing distress and confusion gradually reached a level that meant today we took the sad decision that he had been through enough, and that we should put him to sleep.

It was quick and painless and we were relieved to both be able to be with him at the end. We brought him home and found a peaceful corner of the croft where we have buried him.

Tonight the caravan will be so quiet without him.

Rest in peace, lovely little hound. Your funny, furry presence will be missed by us more than words can say. X

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Snipe in the grass

It was late in the evening and the light was slowly fading from the croft. We were packing up a few things by the house site and were on our way back to the caravan when suddenly an eerie, reverberating noise split the peace of the night.

We couldn’t see what had made the sound, nor could we identify it. It came again. We could still see nothing.

Did we have aliens on the hillside in the grass?

The sound reminded me of the noise made by one of those long, plastic tubes that we whirled around our heads for fun as children in the Seventies. A high pitched, reverberating, whining rattle. Quite bizarre.

An Internet search soon found the noise. It was the sound of a Snipe. The male of the species apparently reverberates its tail feathers as it performs its courtship ritual in the spring, making this incredible noise.

https://www.xeno-canto.org/595646

We have Snipe! I’m ridiculously excited by the discovery for me of a new bird on the croft. How wonderful.

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Bumblebee food

We ordered heather plants a few weeks ago from a specialist heather nursery here in Scotland.

The idea is to plant them on the exposed soil banks on the sides of the access track on the croft to try and reduce the amount of soil erosion. We’d noticed that the winter rain had taken its toll before anything had a chance to establish, and needed to get something in as soon as possible.

Heather is a native plant here, hardy and resilient, and it’s roots help bind the soil well and minimise runoff.

As an extra benefit, the heather selection that we have covers a flowering period for all seasons, so there will always be some in flower at any given point. Great for nectar feeders.

The plants arrived via post in three large boxes, extremely well packed and with the plants still fresh and damp. Each small pot had been hand-wrapped in damp newspaper, separated by cardboard and paper padding.

I unpacked them and let them have some fresh air and a good, long drink after their travels.

Almost as soon as I’d done so, a few honeybees arrived, rapidly followed by about four white-tailed bumble bees. They all fed hungrily on the early flowering varieties in bloom. These were the first bees that I’d seen on the croft this spring with the really cold weather.

We won’t stop at heather, of course. We have plans for red clover, camomile, sedum, borage, hardy geraniums and others, but it felt good to provide an early meal for the bees.

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Flying insulation

A friend commented that there had been precious little recently in the way of house build updates. Which is very true. Progress has been slow, and we are still taping and foiling some months into the process.

A number of things have conspired to make what should have been a relatively quick job a complete marathon.

Husband has had to fill and tape all wall, door and window seams throughout the house BEFORE foiling, as well as taping everything again AFTER foiling.

This has turned into a huge, time-consuming undertaking which he felt was necessary because of gaps left by the builders. Gaps that if left open would have compromised our structural water and air tightness.

His faith in the quality of the work by the builders has been severely dented as these are not cosmetic problems that we felt could be covered over, sure to cause us issues some years down the line.

He has been doing this work alone, and other time-critical work has taken weeks away from this process, such as installing the house guttering and the start of work on the croft as Spring approached.

However, the end is in sight. The floor insulation for the next stage has arrived.

It arrived on a thankfully dry day, but a windy one. About 50 huge sheets of insulation which blocked the drive on arrival and which we had to manually carry between us into the house.

These sheets are big, requiring two of us to manoeuvre, but very light in weight, only 10kg each. They exhibited impressive aerodynamic properties as the wind caught them, acting like a sail, taking both our body weights to counter their desire to take off down the croft.

It took a whole afternoon to get them wrestled safely under cover into the house.

They’ve also provided me at least with a bit of a morale boost. They are a nod to the promise of progressing onto the next stage, which is laying these, then the underoor heating pipes, then screed, and us being a few steps closer to this being a house.

We will get there. Courage, mon brave!