Things you take forgranted

I've been having a recurring daydream lately. It involves our piece of croft across the road. Its a beautiful spot with gorgeous views in both directions and I've always thought it would make a great spot for a campsite.

Ignore the wrecked cars and scrubland, and think holiday view

Seaview - think summer...

There are no services on site at the moment, but mains water is nearby and its easy enough to put in a septic tank for a shower-block when you have a digger <daydream item1>. Despite the irony that the powerlines for the whole of south Lochs run accross the land, and it is next to 2 community wind turbines, connecting to the grid would costs in excess of £6k.  So maybe it could be an off grid campsite?

My idea was tested this week when our own house was rendered off-grid by a particularly ferocious storm.

This was once our shed, squashed flat by a westerly gale

It has made me realise the things that I would miss if electricity wasnt always there.
The light in the bathroom when you're just nipping in.
The kettle for the first cup of tea in the morning.
The bedside lamp when you're scared. 

Wind power, from making a mess, to making electricity

The big things I could get used to not having, or of only having at certain times of the day - like the TV or internet, or the washing machine.
But its the little things that I don't notice that get taken forgranted.

Its also noticeable how taking away all those distractions has an effect on your perception of time. Suddenly there is time to think, not just to react or digest.  Perhaps visitors to our campsite would put up with the lack of power, in exchange for the long light summer days.  Perhaps they won't mind lighting their own fire to boil the kettle, when they have a good hour to plan a cuppa. 

 I wonder if there is a market for a return to old fashioned ways. How about some wooden cabins, made comfortable and cozy with oil lamps, a mini-stove and the peace and quiet. 

Nowhere to charge your devices so you become unavailable.... just reading old fashioned books and hanging out like kids do.  Or going for a walk and becoming part of the beautiful countryside.

Nearby the campsite, there are a collection of freshwater lochs. Perfect for paddling or swimming on bright hot days.

Peaty brown water makes everything underneath seem golden

Just along the road there are the ruins of an old Norse Mill which was used for grinding corn over a thousand years ago.

There is plenty of places to walk and stunning views everywhere.  When you pass through the countryside in a car, you are disconnected from the environment, it is easily taken forgranted.  But there is nothing like the Hebrides to bring you face to face with nature.  When its sunny it's beaches are comparable to the Caribean.

Luskentyre beach, just an hour away, with Taransay island across the water

But when its stormy, the hebrides shows you the full force of nature. Perhaps those log cabins, should be stone cains instead... even so, I think this daydream has a lot of potential.....

Protein, pork crackling and red wine....

For all its sun drenched days and fresh air, there is a dark side to self sufficiency which cannot be avoided forever.  If you are a meat eater, how do you get your meat?

The first livestock we got on croft 1, was chickens.  The idea goes that you can buy in a a few hens for eggs (protein) a cockerel for the ladies and every year perhaps you'll be blessed with some baby chicks.

Our first brood of all natural chicks was a pure joy to watch. We put 2 broody hens aside in their own 'maternity wing' and just left them to get on with it.  As soon as each of their eggs hatched, the Mums decided to join forces and both moved into the same nesting box. It didn't seem to matter whose was whose, better together!

Unfortunately the cute bundles of fluff only lasts a couple of weeks and then the chicks enter the 'crow' phase.

It's not until months later that the average chicken keeper can tell whether they are boy chicks or girl chicks.  The idea is to keep any girl chicks to increase and replenish your egg laying flock, but fatten up any cockerels for the pot.
Nature seems to have its own timer for this part of the process.  I only keep one cockerel, because more than one and they fight... to the death.  As soon as the boy chicks are big enough to start cocker-doodle-doing its time to get the catching net out and set aside some time for preparing the bird for the freezer.

Mark has drawn the short straw when it comes to 'dispatching' our birds, but after researching a few different ways, he has developed a quick and as far as we can tell trauma free method.

When they all come out of the shed for breakfast, I hang around the feeding tubs and select the right bird. Whilst they're busy with breakfast I can grab the cockerel, hold him under my arm while he flaps and protests and put him into a pillow case - this immediately makes him go quiet and I can hand him over to Mark.  Mark uses a broomstick to stamp on the neck, breaking it immediately and hopefully the process is completed successfully.....  I say this has taken some practice, because one of the first times we tried it,  I went back to a 'dead' bird to start plucking and it blinked.... but that will only happen the once.

Meat from a free range chicken who has been running around all its life sounds ethically superior to the supermarket birds.  I have to admit that in reality they are chewier, thinner and create a bad atmosphere at the table when remembering their cute days.  However, it is meat and needs must.

When it came to the pigs, things got more complicated.

...how could you. :(

Pigs get big.  They arrive like little dogs and as the months go by they turn into large adult pigs.  Where I grew up on the Essex/Suffolk border, they farm pigs outdoors.  You can see them from the A14, enormous pink pork machines, living on the hillside with Anderson-shelter-style huts, so big that all I can see are the pound signs.  I am still debating with myself whether its better for these animals to be out in all weathers, in the mud and cold, or in a nice warm straw lain barn, 15 to a pen.... at least in the UK these are the only 2 options and our bacon does not come from an animal kept in a metal cage all its life, as is the case in other parts of Europe.

But I'm getting political, instead of enjoying what we had.

We bought in 2 Gloucester old Spot X pigs in the April and fed them until the October when they were big.
I had taken to measuring them with a bit of string. I had a handy formula for calculating their weight just by measuring the length of their back and their girth.

By this time, a bit like the Hungry Caterpillar, they had eaten their way through; 38 bags of pig nuts, 5 months of our leftover vegetable scraps, 4 months of vegetable scraps from a nearby pub, one small grassy yard, one field of rushes, and one concrete and polystyrene floor.
They were big now, wire haired and they had beady eyes.  One of them bit me one day and I was getting a bit scared of them too.

Pig bite

I can hear myself getting defensive here, because in reality, no matter how much you think that they have had a good life, it doesn't take away the day of saying goodbye and how sad that makes you feel.

 It didn't make a bad day better, that one of them escaped on the way to the trailer and shot off up the hill. It took us 3 hours to coax her back down with apples and pig nuts before she finally joined her brother in the trailer.  Mark drove them to the abattoir in town and they stood up all the way, ears flapping in the wind. It was only the last 3 miles when they lay down and went to sleep - it reminded me of my boys, they do the same thing on a car journey.

The abattoir asked us if we would like the heads back, when we came to collect the carcasses. I was worried I might recognise them, so I said no - I think they sell them on for an extra bonus.

Down to business though. The abattoir offered a butchery service which wasn't too expensive, but we save pennies in every ways so I did it myself. It took a Friday evening and most of the next day, but I completely filled our large chest freezer with joints, chops, bags of stew and put aside a back joint and a leg.  An unfortunate part of butchering is that I gave myself an 'idiot rash'. The knives were so sharp, I couldn't help but nick my hands here and there.  It made the next process smart - salting a bacon joint for streaky bacon and soaking a leg joint in brine to become a ham for Christmas.

But though it was tiring, I completed the job and we had a supply of the best tasting pork you could ever have.  It was the Ferrari of food, with the added joy of having reared them ourselves.  They were so much fun to have, it made up for the guilt of their ultimate end.  We will definitely have pigs again, though this time, we'll try to grow as much of their feed as we can.  Pork is an expensive meat to have, but maybe if we can combine it with a bit of chicken and a bit of lamb, we can make it last a whole year, and be more at ease with the process.

Christmas ham

The lambs

One of the best things we did this year, was finally starting our own flock of sheep.
After collecting a chest freezer full of milk from the shop across the road (they saved it from the bin when it reached the sell by date and would keep it in the freezer until we picked it up in the wheelbarrow!) we advertised on the noticeboard 'Wanted: Orphan Lambs'.
We'd been told that sometimes lambs get rejected by their mothers, and the process of finding them another Mum, or rearing them by hand can be too time consuming when you have a big flock. We on the other hand have 2 little boy 'lambs' of our own who would be very willing to put in the time and the cuddles necessary for the job.

A few weeks into lambing time, we had a call from our neighbour in the next village, Dolly.  We had a large old water tank filled with straw already installed in the kitchen by the radiator and so, Dolly the lamb arrived. (Named in honour of our benefactor, but also a double joke referring to the cloning station in Roselin.)

When Murdo, husband to Dolly (human) brought Dolly (lamb) up the drive dangling by the 2 front legs, I couldn't help but scoop her up in a blanket and treat her like a delicate thing.  But I didn't actually know what else to do.  Her Mum had died shortly after giving birth, so she had had a little colostrum, but not much else. Murdo had given her some milk via a tube into the stomache, so, as I had my bottle, my tube and my instructions on the packet I made up another sachet of colostrum and gave it a go.
Murdo had told me that unless you have 3 hands, it makes it easier to take a sip of the milk yourself, and put the tube in your mouth. I knew to sit the lamb accross my knees while sitting in a chair, but even with all the instructions and diagrams in my sheep keeprs book, it still took a while to get the hang of it.  But I managed to get Dolly to chew on my finger, then I slipped the tube into her mouth and down her throat, being careful not to get it down her windpipe. Then I let the milk out of my mouth and down the tube straight into her tummy.

Probably the best lucky dip ever!

I gave her a little at first and then put her back in her tub by the heater.  She was shaking after having the tube down her throat, so once she'd had a rest I tried with a bottle to get her sucking reflex going.
It took a while over the next couple of days to build her strength up because I didn't really know what signs to look for.  But once I saw some colostrum had gone in, I moved onto the milk.  Then one evening she was making some strange noises and when I looked in her bucket I could see she'd had a poo. My baby rearing experience suddenly clicked and I knew everything would be alright now!
Next she just needed some cuddles, so I passed her onto the correct department.

 

 

What more could one little boy need.

 It was just a few days before Dolly (human) rang to find out how we were getting on. By this time Dolly (lamb) was skipping about the sitting room, as lambs do, and investigating the great outdoors.

So did we want another she asked?
And so we nipped off that morning to pick up Murdo (lamb Murdo, not her husband)
When we got to their barn he was standing up in a cardboard box bleating at anyone he could see. Obviously stronger, he had been one of twins, but his mother had rejected him and concentrated all her efforts on the other lamb. He is a cheviot x, as opposed to Dolly who is a blackface, so he was already a bit bigger, but still in need of some care. He already had the sucking reflex as he'd had a few tummy fulls of milk, so it was easy to feed him straight from the bottle.
Before long the 2 of them were spending the sunny days outside in a makeshift pen and the nights in the wood shed together.

 
Then along came 'Shouty' - again from our generous neighbours Dolly and Murdo (humans) and so called by Morris because this one wouldn't shuttup! Shouty was another who had been given the energy of mothers milk, but had fallen on hard times shortly after.  We thought at this point we should probably take down the notice in the shop, but when Dolly (human) rang for the 4th time and I explained that Shouty was getting left out in the wood shed at night, she was relieved to say they had a sister for her.
So finally we gained 'Quiet', another Cheviot x who was very docile and needed some extra cuddles when she started to hit a low.  By this 4th one I realised there seemed to be a period where it wasn't just the milk they needed. Sometimes they would go a bit stiff and generally look depressed - of course, not surprising when they were obviously mourning the loss of their natural mother. So at this point I would sit them on my knee while I was at the laptop and the warm body contact was well received, just to let them know they're not alone.  Quiet pulled through and she is the prettiest of them all.

Look at those pink ears

 Our 4 lovely lambs.  We had used a range of 'care' styles from a tube into the stomache, to a cuddle of the sofa and our initial flock is established.

There were other things mentioned in the sheep rearing book that weren't so easy to negotiate. For starters, Murdo is a boy.... and we did not at this point in the flock, want to keep a Ram.  Also, sheep generally need to have their tails docked so that they don't get too long and pick up mud and dirt.  Mark did a quick ebay search and found a nifty tool - for £15.59 a solution appeared.  £14 for a pair of 'pliers' and £1.59 for 100 elastic bands and the sheep don't seem to feel anything at all. Our friends asked, while considering Murdo 'What are you going to do with them when they fall off...?'

 ...take a picture of course!

We have pampered this first 4 - they have had a hut to sleep in for the first 6 months of their lives, but now we have moved them into a second paddock with long fresh grass, we've used this as an excuse to remind them they are actually sheep and equipped to sleep outside.  One day they will be roaming around the fields further away and turning the brown grass into green by mowing and fertilising it for us.  Then when they move on next spring, we can start to advertise again for some more orphan lambs....

Happy workers in the best job ever

Polytunnel Island

Its all very well planting courgettes under old bed frames pulled from skips and covered in plastic, but the only way to 'grow your own' properly on Lewis is to get a polytunnel.

We had re-dug the large ditches running either side of a flat section of croft by the house and named it Polytunnel Island. It took a while but eventually we bought the required piece of equipment to complete the name.

Our tunnel is 6m x 3m, and it was cheap!  I hereby give in to the idea, perhaps fact, that it will not last in the Hebridean environment, but we did so much research for so long and talked to so many people about which was the best tunnel to buy that we
a) never got round to buying it, and
b) couldn't afford the one that looked the best - despite the hope that we could get a grant to cover some of the cost.
But this year we are following the Nikey mantra 'Just Do It', so we are.

The polystyrene boxes came from a local fish farm - they were brand new packaging cases, but someone in marketing noticed they needed to change the name on the box.  They say 'Wild Scottish Salmon', but should have read 'Farmed in Wild Scotland', two very different things and something which would warrant a whole other blog post on fish farming...

...but anyway, I had to drive the van to Scalpay to pick the boxes up.  The fish-farm had a warehouse full of them and had contacted the Lewis & Harris Horticultural Producers group to see if any of their members could put them to good use.  Perfect, we thought, but unfortunately the logistic of picking them up from Harris proved too much for most growers and the majority of the boxes ended up in landfill.  Such a shame when needless waste occurs despite the best intentions.

As the year has continued though, they have been just the thing for our softer crops and seedlings.

Baby courgettes, picked young and roasted whole

Mixed lettuce leaves

Tomatoes

Oregano at the back, guerkin at the front

Meanwhile outside things have grabbed a couple of months of hot weather too. Beetroot, turnip, swede, rhubarb, red onions, rooster potatoes, cabbage and broad beans have all done well. Sometimes they have had a boost from an old bed frame cloche, but some have been given special treatment in our newest vegetable patch, carved out of the marsh grass last year with a digger.

Potatoes in the new bed - purpose built cloches in the background, made by Mark - they seem incredibly superior after my tatty bits of plastic on bed frames!

The beloved and faithful courgettes, 3 different varieties this year

and of course theres always eggs from our lovely hens... when they're not going broody and putting their sisters off laying...

One day, perhaps we will make it to our dream of having a Pick-Your-Own-Vegetables-and-More shop.

Customers will come and pick their own food from the ground so it is always fresh (home grown veg goes off noticeably quicker than shop bought because there are no chemical sprays on home produce...)

In the same way that at the moment my customers wander in and ask for eggs, I hope they could come in and wander around the vegetable patches, choosing what's ready and in season.

It's a way off yet, too many hurdles to straddle in learning what grows well in our Hebridean conditions.  But by getting the polytunnel on polytunnel island this year, I feel we are a step closer....

Last words

There's never a right time to say this, but I don't want it to get missed just because I never wrote it down. In fact its creepy writing it now, like I'm tempting fate to play its worst card.
However.
When I die, I would like the following as my epitaph:

Do not cry for me, I am not gone,
I am the wind on the grass and the corn.

Returning to work

A time has arrived, which I knew would come some day and I have always dreaded it. The end of my maternity leave.

I can't complain with the amount of time off I've been allowed - just under 9 years in all.  Obviously this has not been granted by one employer, but has been made possible by a sketchy combination of employer contributions, a generous tax credit allocation and various overdrafts, not to mention downscaling from our house in Coventry in the midlands of England and moving to the remote Isle of Lewis off the NW coast of Scotland.

But it is a time which has allowed both me and Mark to enjoy raising our wonderful boys and to see every stage of their development and safe entry into the school system... plus a couple of years just for good measure!

Looking back on what I felt was a turbulent time working, I can now see how decent people at my old work place did everything they could to wave goodbye in the kindest way.

I had been working for the Learning and Skills Council for 7 years and at the same time as applying for maternity leave, I was also applying for voluntary redundancy. I was given both, and 2 weeks before my due date, I waddled away with some lovely leaving presents for the baby and enough money to set us up for a whole year.  I couldn't have been more pleased to be leaving.  Regardless of the happy circumstances of having my first child, I had not enjoyed being a very small cog in a very large machine and had grown very bitter and insular despite outward appearances.

So naturally I had dreaded returning to the professional open plan office environment, with no soul and no love allowed, where decisions were purely business and people are forced to be schizophrenic, splitting their personalities between work and home.

However, things are different now. I am different. We are in a different world on the Isle of Lewis and I do not have to go back to where I was before.  I have been given a job which just ticks so many boxes for me, that I am still a bit scared to believe it is true.

I cant escape the nature of the work - administration; all the boring and arduous details that bog people down, but have to be done - the devil is in the detail. 

But it is for a small company - I will be able to feel the effect of my work and see the results directly.

It is local - I don't have to spend money on a car and petrol to get there and I don't have to spend time travelling.  I can walk there in half an hour or get the bus in 5 minutes.

It is informal - I do not have to struggle into tights and stupid shoes every morning and freeze my toes off in an air conditioned fashion parade.  I can wear jeans and boots if I like because nobody cares what I look like.

The boss is female - I am working for a mother of three, a friend and neighbour and I am already behind her and her business and everything that she wants to achieve. I can see her visions and understand the processes she needs to go through to realise her ambitions.  It is not something that I would do myself, but I know how to support someone else and I'm looking forward to being able to use my skills to help grow her business.


So here I go, an employee again and I never thought I would be this relieved to be returning to work.

Everyday tesselation

Ever since I've had children and my life has become my own to control, I have found that things often resemble one of those sliding tesselation puzzles. You know the ones, that have a grid of squares and you must move the pieces around until they at last make a picture. 
Its a bit like that, organising different parts of everyday life, moving the pieces around and around until suddenly - it fits! The bigger picture can be seen.

Todays example involved cooking sunday lunch: I'm peeling turnips and wondering how I am going to manage to store all the turnips we've grown so that they don't go off, because in time we want to keep pigs again and turnips are a great feed for them.  The only practical way I have found to store them so far is in soups - not so good for pigs, but fine for humans.

This year, because of the current lack of feed for pigs, we have taken on 4 orphan lambs instead.   We have bottle fed them since they arrived, with cows milk and they have done very well.  We asked the shop accross the road whether, rather than throw away the bottles of milk that had got to the day of expiry, we could take them off their hands.  Fantastically this meant we gradually built up a chest freezer full of milk to then feed the lambs with once they arrived in the springtime. 

The shop has stopped wasting its unsold milk - piece 1 slides...
The milk has been drunk by the lambs and saved us from buying in formula - another piece slides..
I'm left with a mountain of plastic bottles....no picture apparent yet ..
We start harvesting vegetables and soup-ing what we cant eat fresh...another piece of the picture slides...
I use the plastic bottles to store the soup and the final piece in the grid slides into place.

The tesselation happens by moving the given pieces around and around until they all fit to form an organised picture, with no gaps and no overlaps.

Ok, so its a pretty obscure example - what do you expect, peeling turnips is not the most inspiring time you can have.  But it did remind me of other times, of juggling children, people, events, money - when suddenly the disparate pieces have slid into place and a glimpse of an ordered, cohesive bigger picture has been acheieved.

I'm sure a mathematician could explain this all much better - there is probably a nifty algorhithm or formula that saves all the waffle about turnips.

But in my head I can see some order from seemingly separate events.... so thats reassuring...

Growing Your Own

It has been 6 years since we moved from Coventry to begin what we hoped would be a self-sufficient life.  We wanted to buy a house outright and not pay a mortgage.  Pay off our overdrafts and live within our means. Well.... old habits die hard.  But we have stuck to our dream of growing our own food.... it doesn't last all year, it takes time of course, but it does supplement the supermarket shop and there are weekends when we are very nearly self sufficient (damn those chocolate cravings...)

When I was little my Dad subscribed to a weekly magazine called 'Grow Your Own'.  He collected each issue in a 1970's brown binder and built 2 polytunnels in the garden.  That summer, I was introduced to a new world, an alternate climate with the strong smell of tomato leaves and courgette plants like something from 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'.  The atmosphere in that tunnel still comes back to me regularly in dreams, I'm not sure what significance it has but its had a lasting effect.
Since then I have always wanted to get a polytunnel - finally, 6 years after moving to our own home, we have got one!

Inside the polytunnel

Apart from my Dad's magazines my past experience of 'growing my own' was in our garden and greenhouse in Coventry and later on our alotment (which also features often in my dreams - for some reason I keep going back there years later to see what still might be growing...)

The garden path in Coventry, tulips on the left, leeks on the right.

The alotment was an invaluable place to learn hands on, thanks to all the retired people who now worked full time on their plots. I must have been listening because the first harvest from the alotment was abundant and delicious.

Growing in the Outer Hebrides however is quite a different game. There are a number of additional pests that we encountered which weren't native to the Midlands, first and foremost sheep, then cows and by my own doing, chickens. The chickens were our own to take responsibility for, but the cows and sheep were from next door and harder to come to terms with.

The first thing we put in, back in 2009, was our 'poo bed'.  I had been reading a book on permaculture - a way of growing where the idea is to work alongside nature; rather than trying to constantly tame and shape it, you can put in less effort by going with nature's flow.

I shuttered off a large section of  ground in the old hay drying area on the croft - it has 3ft walls and provides some good shelter from the worst of the gales.

Then I lined the base of the raised beds with old newspapers, wheelbarrowed over from the shop accross the road.  The idea is that instead of digging over a matted grassy area, you put a layer of weed retardent down first, then fill it with dung and plant potatoes into plugs of soil that sit within the manure. The you cover the whole thing in either more soil, or in my case, bags and bags of grass clippings dropped off by a local garden maintenance firm.

The result is odd looking but it saves a lot of digging.

Potatoes growing through the grass clippings mulch

 It worked very well indeed. the mulch retains the moisture which potatoes need a lot of.

When the plants have flowered its supposed to be the right time to dig them up.

You don't need to turn the soil over completely once you've got all the potatoes out, because it will all rot down, and the paper will biodegrade to make a good nutrient rich patch again next year.

It is such a wonderful feeling digging up potatoes, like funding golden nuggets.

Laying the potatoes out in the sun to dry

The potatoes nearly didn't happen at all though, due to an infestation of cows at an early stage.  I had set up the raised bed, planted the potatoes and covered it all in grass clippings. I had put together a fence from, here's the error, old fence wire and posts and the smell of silage wafting accross to next doors field must have been too much for the old dears.  As soon as I popped inside for a well earned cup of tea, they nipped through the gap between us and next door and were in like a shot.  They walked through my fence as if it wasn't there and I returned to the patch 20 minutes later to see them chomping down a large mouthful of grass clippings and seed potatoes each.
There is a reason we have gun laws in this country, that afternoon I nearly made a whole lot of beef burgers. 

The next day Mark put up a proper fence for me.


 After the initial teething trouble, the poo bed worked well for other crops too.

Courgettes and onions did well with its rich mulch protection.

Just as things were growing well we fell victim to the next infestation.  I had planted runner beans, sweetcorn and strawberries in beds surrounding the poo bed.  When I found next doors sheep in there one day, the air turned blue.  It looked as though someone had been at everything with a strimmer. They had completely mascerated the sweetcorn and just left the stalks

Sheep damage, note they left the rhubarb alone, the leaves are poisonous to them - shame

I had been so looking forward to runner beans, simply boiled and covered in real butter.  The sheep beat me to it.

Runner has beans

In Coventry the men at the alotment built huge runner bean walls, like something from the world war trenches.  There was such a glut of them every year you grew tired of them.... until one day you just can't grow them.


To be honest, while we still managed to get a harvest from some things, that year was a huge knock to our confidence of growing.  We had hoped we could get straight into the soil before tackling the larger, harder problems of fencing on the croft. We had learned the hard way that sheep are evil, they can jump old fences and the only way to help yourself is to barricade with barbed wire and 6ft posts!

Fencing, you can't have enough of it

After that we stuck to growing outdoors, but under cover.  the community skips prove to be a valuable resource for anyone used to an alotment style of growing, where any old bit of tat can be put to good use.

Old bed frames proved to be the most effective. Especially when they were thrown away next to the packaging plastic that the new bed's mattress came in!  We have quite a few of them after regularly keeping an eye on the community skip, they are great for courgettes.

Pallets also prove to be effective sheep protection.  This potato box had netting over the top to keep the chickens off, then when it came to harvest time you just pull down the walls and the potatoes fall out. It doesnt look pretty I know, but I do functional gardening, I'm not bothered about aesthetic!

 In 2012 I did more potatoes in the pallet pen and for the first time broad beans.  They benefit from the shelter of the pallet walls, but still get enough sunshine to grow.

Turnips under a bed frame cloche

At last we had done enough fencing to <mostly> keep the sheep out.  It has taken a lot of swearing and realisation that sheep will wait until you have grown something before they show you where your weaknesses are. But finally we have started to get our harvests back up to an alotment level.

2013 is the year of the Polytunnel though....we are hoping for great things.....