Welcome to The Wild Croft

Very exciting to be starting on my new workshop and today we got the frames raised and purlins fitted.

I opted for a portal frame design which is pretty rare to find in timber (usually steel). The reason I chose it is the open shape with no horizontal ties, which makes it much handier for a workshop, moving long bits of wood around etc. I also needed to keep the eaves height low for planning reasons and so it fits in with nearby buildings.

It`s taken me a while to get this far as I needed to dig into the hill by hand to get the width I wanted. All made with Scottish Douglas fir and will be clad in larch. Roofing will be metal sheets thought they`ll be hidden under solar panels.

We`ve been away a lot recently but still managing some spring croft jobs in between. We finally remembered to clean the Timbertunnel sheets before the plants start growing again. Aurore tried with a carwashing brush but the pressure washer was the tool for the job!

Another job long overdue is a rainwater harvesting system for my logstore Timbertunnel. There`s no mains water on this part of the croft so we have to carry water over for the chickens if it doesn`t rain enough. Hopefully this 200L barrel should last a bit longer through dry spells.

And lastly I`m chipping away with my new workshop build next to the house. It`s replacing an old timber shed which sat on a concrete base I think from a previous stone byre. To make better use of the space, I`m digging into the hill a bit (by hand) and extending the base, which means pulling out the old foundation stones. The one in the pic was the corner stone and took some shifting on my own!

We`re so lucky to have the amazing @cerealbakery_ in Tongue. Wingmon and Niall arrived last Autumn and the bakery has become a very regular treat for us, with incredible baking and coffee. They put so much effort into ethically and locally sourcing the best ingredients and it really shows.

So we`re really happy to be selling Aurore`s basketry there with a selection of baskets, trays and garlic holders at the moment, together with my whisky barrel plant labels (which are in good company alongside @seedsofscotland seeds). And hopefully if the weather plays ball we`ll be bartering some croft fruit & veg with them this season too!

They`re open Friday to Sunday during winter so drop by if you`re in the area.

More pollarding! This time I`ve been cutting the tree row south west of our main veg growing no dig beds. The trees (ash, alder & oak) were starting to cast too much shade on the beds. Cutting them high as pollards keeps them the size we want, while creating open space beneath them to grow other more shade tolerant crops such as fruit bushes, and we could also train climbing plants up the trunks (maybe vines and hops).

Depending on how long we leave the pollards before cutting again we could harvest tree hay, bean poles, wooodchip or firewood from them in future. No fixed plan on that yet though, we`ll just see how they grow and the main priority will be the level of shading.

It`s been a cracking few days after the storm (which didn`t really affect the far north) so I`ve been opening up our food forest area a bit more. Last year we laid the hedge here which brought lots of light in, and we decided to coppice several more trees this winter to open it up even more.

We`ve already got established soft fruit here, but have removed some apple trees that just weren`t doing well. This year we`ve bought more soft fruit varieties to try and hope to turn this area into a bit of a food forest. It`s a slow process though as it`s a bit of a battle with Rosa rugosa which suckers up all over.

All the brash was chipped and we`ll use that to mulch the fruit bushes, and I`m thinking to order some mushroom spawn too to grow on the wood chip and some of the logs.

A massive thank you to everyone who braved the roads and came to help us harvest and grade the basketry willow this weekend. We had perfect (if cold!) weather for it and got a good chunk of the willow cut and bundled.

It`s our first time having a group of folk come and help on the croft and we really enjoyed it. It`s how big, manual crofting jobs were always done in the days before machinery and it turns a daunting task into a lovely get together, sharing stories and food.

It`s convinced us this is the way to go so it`ll be an annual event now.

#crofting
#basketry
#willowgrowing
#woodlandcroft

Regrowth of last year`s coppice stools.

It`s nearly a year since we cut our first area of coppice on the croft, transforming a woodland planted around 1997 by previous tenants. Virtually all of the stumps have resprouted including birch which I`d heard was less reliable than other species.

Photos show 1: common alder (a particularly vigorous one!), 2: rowan, 3: birch. It`s interesting to compare how the different species regrow. Also there is a massive amount of birch seedlings all over, so I`m intrigued as to whether they grow too or get shaded out as the coppice stumps regrow.

Worth also pointing out that this area is deer fenced… This wouldn`t be possible if it wasn`t as we have a lot of red and roe deer around here.

#coppice
#woodlandcroft
#workingwoods
#crofting
#alder
#naturalregeneration

A new year and a new coppice coupe…

We`ve made a good start on this year`s coppice, with most of the trees already felled and logs stacked in the woodland, where they`ll stay until it`s dry enough to get the tractor out to fetch them in. It`s mostly alder this year and the colour of the cut logs is amazing.

2024 was a challenging year in many ways and I`ve been looking forward to a return to the croft woods and the start of a fresh year to reset a bit. I took a break from social media as you might have noticed but looking forward to sharing more again this year.

#coppice
#alder
#woodlandcroft

I had a great week in the croft last week, catching up on some jobs. The timbertunnel is sheeted and we mulched it with old carpet and cardboard, ready for woodchip on top. There’s still a fair bit to do on it, but I’m back to installing @timbertunnel for others for now! I’ve put in a willow bed alongside too, hopefully to soak up a bit of moisture as it’s a pretty wet spot.

Meanwhile my red alder are germinating well. I’m not growing much in the way of trees this year, just these alder for our next coppice areas. There’s space for around 500 though so see how many I can grow!