Tag: pignuts

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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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Bluebells and pignuts

Our next trip to the croft is in September, and itching to make a start, any kind of start, we’ve bought some seeds to sew in the established patch of woodland on the western boundary.

We can’t start anything on the main croft land until the drainage and groundworks are complete, which won’t start until the Autumn, so the little woodland belt is the place to begin some underplanting.

First off, I’ve bought pignut seeds.

Pignut is small perennial herb, whose underground root resembles a chestnut and is sometimes eaten as a wild or cultivated root vegetable. It has fascinated me for many years.

The name Pignut comes from its popularity with pigs, who root it out for its flavour, which is said to be similar to water chestnut. Wild food foragers also love it and jealously guard their sources.

Secondly, I’ve sourced some bluebell seed from a small, licensed croft on the Isle of Eigg. Eddie’s Croft.

Bluebell seed can be procured from many places, but I particularly wanted to find Scottish bluebell seed, and being so close to Skye, seed grown on Eigg will, I think, be more naturalised to the climate and conditions there. We will scatter it in the birch grove and hope that in a few years we’ll have the beginnings of a sea of blue.

It’s a small start, but it’s a start, and it’s exciting to be making our first mark on the land, however modest.