Living in the Highlands
It is nice to actually enjoy living somewhere, many people love living in towns and cities with all the excitement and things to do and see, others like living in the countryside or small rural towns and villages - often a slower pace of life and more friendly neighbours.
We love living in the Highlands of Scotland, a dream we never thought possible due to money and the need to earn a living. It has certainly been a life changing experience away from a 9-5 job to a life where we dictate our hours and what we do. It may not be the life for everyone thank goodness, or everyone would be living in the Scottish Highlands on a croft. It is the life we (my wife and I) had wanted for many years and hope to live it for many more years to come.
It Does Not Look Like Much at the Moment
While the land we have it s bit rough around the edges we both love it. This section of the website is about the challenge to convert just over an acre of rough croft land into a little garden paradise - where we grow sufficient food to reduce our dependency on supermarkets and shops, while having fun growing vegetables and having a few chickens for fresh, free range eggs.
Living on a Croft
We have 2 + 1 dogs, and our two dogs just love supervising the work being done on the croft, unfortunately they also either want played with all the time (our collie Charlie above) or want to help by getting into the trench as I did it to "help" take out the stones (Sam - our oldest who is lying down).
What is this about the 2 + 1 dogs? well we share another dog - Tibby, who is the farm dog on the croft and we now help look after her. She is absolutely brilliant and helps with the weeding - literally as she spends all day when I out working digging up soil and pulling out weeds (dockens etc) with her teeth.
Tibby hates getting her picture taken however we do try and sneak in the odd photo when she is not looking.
Keeping Chickens
We currently have 8 chickens, all hybrids, that have settled into their free range lifestyle on our croft. When you see chickens living in a free range situation you realise how crual keeping them in battery cages is, they just naturally like to scratch about looking for worms, and when you see them run after each other, when one has a worm, it is comical.
Developing the Croft
We live on a croft, a very small one of 1.25 acres of land, barely big enough to call a croft yet it is a registered croft. Our land is going to be used for growing vegetable with the aim of being self-sufficient in potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and other vegetables and salads by the end of 2009. It is a bit of a challenge as the land we have was used as a stack yard for over 50 years and there is not much soil left - a stack yard is where farmers stacked straw and the ground is fairly compacted and shallow. Yet we do have a secret weapon.
The Secret Weapon
Maybe you think that Ad and his JCB Digger (above) is the secret weapon, well he was a fantastic help digging away the soil from in front of the Caithness stone drystone wall, and digging out drainage channels in our vegetable growing area. However, the real secret weapon is about 400 tons of FYM (Farm Yard Manure) that we inherited when we moved in. Normally this cow manure would have been spread over the fields to help with fertility of the grasslands, however due to illness the manure was not spread and we now have a brilliant source of manure that is being used to improve the very poor quality soil we have.
Ok I know it does not look like much to shout about, or even write about, yet the manure we have on our croft is a god send as it allows us to convert very poor, heavy clay soil into deep, rich and organic matter rich soil for growing our fruit and vegetables.