High Summer Picture Post
July and August have been a bit of a blur here, with lots of cabin bookings keeping us very busy, and the garden taking up any remaining time and energy! So this post is more of a picture post of the last few weeks, but here are a few random thoughts amongst the pictures.
We had a very dry July but have had some good rain during the last few weeks, including some very heavy storms. Mostly its been good ‘soft’ rain which soaks into the ground and fills the water butts which we’re very grateful for when looking at the parched dry ground in other parts of the country.
The light in the evening is changing noticeably faster now, and we have started switching the lights on in the evening which tells us we’re moving towards the end of summer. Some people find the shortening days depressing but I like the changes of the seasons and Autumn is one of my favourite times of the year.
Its been a mixed year in the garden, flowers and perennials have done really well and burst into colour, but our kitchen garden didn’t do so well as seedling compost mix wasn’t quite right, but some crops have started to catch up so we should get some late summer courgettes, peas, runner and French climbing beans, plenty of salad, herbs and we’ll be harvesting potatoes next week. Our apple trees are covered in ripening fruit and we will harvest plums in the next few days. Autumn raspberries and blackberries are appearing and will ripen through August and September.
Sometimes it seems a lot of work to grow food, and there are so many variables that can cause a crop to fail from the earliest stages through to maturity; seeds, compost, germination conditions, weather, moisture, disease, mice, voles, rabbits, pigeons, pheasants, slugs and so on. But as I’ve written before, even if what we grow gets eaten along the way by something else, its still feeding the creatures that share our edible ecosystem. I like to think of our place as a community garden, even if its mostly just the two of us in it-its still a community of plants, trees, insects, birds, rodents, and small animals living here and sharing the space with us, so its very much a community. It doesn't need to be people to be a community, and doesn't need to be ingredients in the kitchen to be food. We're growing an edible, biodiverse ecosystem.
The warm dry weather in July did mean we got a head start on scything our meadows, previous years we’ve tried to leave it until later in the summer but then sometimes it gets too late due to damp weather and the grass flops over and becomes difficult to scythe. So we’re pretty pleased to have the bulk of the meadows cut and have used the hay as mulch on top of some cardboard to suppress weeds around some new plantings. We left some patches of yellow rattle to ripen fully before we scatter the seeds on the newly cut meadows. We also added a new sit spot under an elder tree, and we’ve even sat it in it a few times!
For anyone in the North or West Coast Highlands, I have some paintings and collages in a couple of exhibitions through the summer. The first is ‘Strata’ at WASPS Inverness Creative Academy, on until the end of August, and the other is the ‘Annual Members Exhibition’ at An Talla Solais in Ullapool.
