Category Archives: Big Garden and Croft

Retrospective

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J&D > A few days ago we parted with all our remaining chickens – three Buff Orpington hens : they’ve started a new life in retirement with Tracy, in Benbecula.  We’ll now be buying our eggs – and we’ll get them from those with small flocks who look after their birds well ; and indeed we’ve already bought our first box of eggs since 2005, from Catriona Walker.  Here’s a retrospective of our two main flocks, over the years.

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Mucking Out & Making Good

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Posting to this blog has lost momentum. Until the purchase of our house in Wales is completed, we daren’t allow ourselves much freedom to make plans for our new lives there.  Similarly, until both our remaining properties here are sold, we have to work hard and keeping things going here, just in case things don’t work out as well as planned.   We really can’t afford to let ourselves get stuck in limbo-land. So, for now, we’re just getting on with the mucking out and making good – whether the benefit of us or those who follow.

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Then & Now

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Jonathan & Denise > Ciorstaidh [Kirsty] MacDonald and her older daughters Mary and Annie are making hay in the field below Carrick – which we refer to as Field 1 or Home Park.  The young boy sitting on the grass is Alasdair Lachlainn [Alexander Lachlan – or just Alex] : as a young man he emigrated to Canada and made a good life for himself there.  Here he is sitting back to back with his year-older sister who became a nun, being thereafter known as Sister John Vincent. The last time such labour-intensive work was considered at all worthwhile was during the Great Depression  – when this old photo was taken.

 

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Indications

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Denise >

Here we have the classic first indications of spring, even in the midst of winter.

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Gooseberry Goodness Again

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J > This is in the ‘Dyeshed’ – which is also used for preparing garden produce for the kitchen or preserving it for the pantry (where we keep our winter stores).  Preserving includes a variety of methods : dehydrating/dessicating and salting ; jams and jellies ; chutneys and pickles ; and – as you can see here – wines.

In the white bucket we have a gallon of gooseberry juice, filtered off from the skin and the seeds, with just one kilo of sugar added dissolved into the juice, a teaspoon of yeast nutrient, and a sachet of Gervin GV9 yeast – perfect for the job, and here you can see it already beginning to froth up. (Carbon dioxide is a by-product of fermenting sugars.)

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Stock Take of the Spuds

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J & D > This is one of our regular stock-takes of our winter store of spuds – with three varieties of main-crop potatoes. We do this every 3-4 weeks, normally. We take the opportunity to check the potatoes in every box for any rot or starting to sprout (both are high risk if the weather is mild and very wet – typical of south-westerly winds).  This time, there was not a single spud that had to be thrown out.  Typically, any problems are before Christmas : in the new year, it’s rare to lose any of our stores, and the spuds will probably last us until early summer.

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North meets Med

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Denise >

Bread – the staple of the northern European diet ; with olives – the qunitessence of the Mediterranean diet.

An Garradh Mor : Sour-dough bread with olives

An Garradh Mor : Sour-dough bread with olives

Nicely sums up our lives – J and I.

And very very yummy!

Warm & Dry

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J > There’s been so much wind and rain, lately, that it’s now impracticable to give the sheep supplemental feeding – hay and sheep ‘pencils’ (a compound feed shaped like short stubby pencils) – outdoors.  There’s far too much wastage, and on a very wet day almost all the food I put out may be spoilt.  One morning last week, as I was manouvering through a gate with a full bag of sheep pencils over my shoulder, an especially viscious squall of wind and rain struck me sideways ; and …

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Fading Glory

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J  > This photo is from the same session as the previous post, but it didn’t fit with the theme of husk, so I left it out. Now, however, I think it deserves a post of its own.  There’s something that’s so unexpected about that remnant of colour in a landscape (and garden-scape) now almost completely turned to shades of brown and grey.

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Sweet-and-Sharp

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J & D > As winter deepens, fresh foods give way, one by one, to stored or preserved. This week we’ve harvested the Japonica Quince fruits, which are inedible (that’s an understatement, if ever there was!) when raw, but make the most perfectly sweet-yet-sour jellies.

 

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