Category Archives: Big Garden and Croft

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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Straggling Homeward

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Jonathan >

Late afternoon – 3pm at this time of year, and the first still and sunny break for many days. We gather up : coats, boots, Tilly.  From Smercleit, north along the western shore of South Uist as far as Boisdale. We turn there, our lengthening shadows straggling homeward behind us.

Isle of South Uist : Denise at Boisdale beach

5th December 2002, 18 years ago today, a day much like today, we arrived at the walled garden with our ginger cats Molly and Meg, Lady – a wire-haired Jack Russel,  and mile-high hopes for a more fulfilling life.