A Life in the Making

Autumn Garden Jobs

October 02, 2020

Lauren Lochrie, the farm's permaculture consultant, is here to tell us about some of the garden jobs to be getting on with in the autumn:The days are cooling down, getting shorter and the sun sits lower in the sky. Garden production is slowing down and beautiful autumnal colours start to blush as...

Green Manures

September 29, 2020

Lauren Lochrie, the farm's permaculture consultant, is here to tell us about some of the green manures.What are they?Also known as ‘cover crops’, green manures are plants that are sown after harvests so that the soil does not remain bare and exposed to the elements which leads to erosion, run off...

How Grows It

May 19, 2015

I have lived in Scotland for 10 years and yet, I still spend a large part of May drumming my fingers, waiting for it to get properly warm, sunny and spring like, instead of wet, cold and muddy. That dragging feeling I get as time slows to a drip as I wait for my flowers to bloom and my garden to...

Garden Prospects

February 25, 2015

Please can it be Spring now? I realise that we don't have the massive snows of North America, but man, I am tired of the cold, tired of bundling children up in actual clothes and tired of the dark. But mostly, I am just desperate to start the garden.We have spent most of the winter working on str...

Shivering With Anticipation

June 29, 2010

Many of you have something to answer for...I've seen your blog posts. I have had the conversations. I know you've been picking berries, making pie, cooking jam, whilst we wait And wait And wait I've written about the microclimate before. Its cold in my back garden. It rains a lot. While...

When Inspiration Strikes

June 17, 2010

As any parent of small children will tell you, when inspiration strikes, you gotta move on it OR ELSE So when I saw this post from Angry Chicken, Ellis was out and Georgia was sleeping for the first time in weeks on her own in bed. I seized that inspiration and ran with it. Literally. I ran ou...