Rocky Outcomes

This beautiful croft is a challenging place to live and grow.

There is a reason that generations kept sheep and nothing else on this land. Where they did manage to grow food, they had to scrape enough soil up through strip farming to support crops, and the evidence of their enormous efforts hundreds of years ago are still visible at low light on the hillsides around us. These areas are bizarrely called Lazy Beds in these parts, or runrigs and they stripe the hillsides above us like claw marks.

We are living on a seam of Lewisian Gneiss, an ancient form of granite whose bones poke out of the thin covering of soil in many places on the croft.

It makes for solid foundations for the house, but is not so good for growing trees and vegetables. Only a fool would try to wrestle a living from this land.

We are those fools.

This is why we’ve built deep grow beds in the polycrub and on the croft. It’s the only way to grow vegetables successfully.

What soil we do have is mineral rich, organic and deeply fertile. It’s never been worked so is entirely unspoiled through chemical fertilisers; there’s just not much of it.

We build our own compost using kitchen waste, wood chip, rushes, garden waste and seaweed. We have a five-bay compost bin setup which is enormous but which still isn’t big enough to keep pace with the needs of the grow beds, and is constantly being extended.

I do sometimes wonder whether the amount of effort it takes to grow our own produce is worth it and I confess to envy of gardeners growing in less challenging environments.

But it’s so satisfying to nurture and eat home grown food that every year we start again. And every year when we put that first strawberry in our mouths or take the first bite of a homegrown cucumber we deem it well worth all our effort.

There’s nothing like the taste of real fresh organic fruit and vegetables.