A hot harvest for the long, dark winter
The paddock is a welly-swallowing pig haven at the moment where only the light-footed, trotter-blessed dare venture.
My daily rounds of scattering their feed on every speck of land has become a strange compulsion in which I’m convinced their mental health depends on foraging through every inch of their field.
We discarded the long plastic troughs long ago as they had become mere playthings for the pigs to wheech about like some Highland caber-tossing contest and I felt they should at least have to root about a bit for their grub.
The autumnal downpours that have lashed the croft for weeks now have disturbed our hairy pals not a jot with them appearing to be as happy to endure a good Scottish soaking as to huddle in their straw-filled shelter or under the forest canopy that borders their home.
Their human butlers are not quite as chuffed with the conditions. Having face-planted too many times out of wellies that had been sucked irretrievably into the mud, I refuse to join the hungry hoards in the paddock, but now fling their wee pellets from the sidelines.
It takes an age and a half to scatter the kilos of feed from the woods and then from around the entire perimeter of their fence.
This process is not helped by the fact that it’s often performed in the pitch-black dead of night that was formerly known as 7am.
Despite what the porcine recipients of our efforts might believe, we do have other jobs to do, places to go, folk to meet so can’t always wait until the sun deigns to rise at 8.30am.
We will have a morsel of respite from the dark mornings now the clocks have changed, but it won’t be for long.
Anyway, the pigs’ catering over the last few days has morphed into something resembling the produce of a trendy vegan deli thanks to the efforts of their male carer who has begun the mammoth task of clearing out the Polycrub.
The bulk of its prolific harvest has been munched, pickled, frozen and smoothied now so all that remains are the last of the tomatoes, celery and pumpkins.
The remnants of the rest of its bounty, including sweetcorn stalks, snail-nibbled courgettes and some squishy cucumbers, were all served up to the gluttonous lot next door.
However, not everything grown by our fair hand was to the pigs’ taste. We were careful to segregate the benign veggies from their more fearsome friends. Burkina yellow habanero, Trinidad scorpion, Armageddon and basket of fire peppers all thrived ridiculously and lived up to their daft names.
Never one to indulge in gender stereotypes, I won’t attribute the husband’s fascination with these painfully hot chilies purely to machismo, but our visitors most determined to sample them do tend to be of the same gender. Their inclusion in a curry or enchilada can render the dish inedible to anyone without an asbestos palate, but we did grow some subtle and pleasant jalapenos and padron peppers, many of which have been pickled to see us through the next few months.
I think we’ve done well with setting aside plenty of sustenance to get us through the dreich Argyll winter.
We have Christmas hams aplenty and still a profusion of herbs and tatties to serve alongside.
There’ll be mutton curries, mutton fajitas and mutton chilli to warm us through the winter too once we can be bothered catching our remaining blackies who are still as skittish and wild as the day we first brought them here.
Sadly our dog has significantly fewer brain cells than her woolly neighbours so it’s up to the two of us to round them up and the process can be a bit slapstick.
The sheep seem to have clocked that the sight of any human approaching portends something disastrous like dosing, clipping or being led into the trailer-of-no-return.
I don’t remember anything about shepherding in our wedding vows, but it should have been in the first line.
Failing to fling oneself in the right direction when a psychotic flock is charging in concentric circles seems to threaten marital harmony almost as much as the surreptitious inclusion of an Armageddon pepper in the spag bol.
‘Sadly our dog has significantly fewer brain cells than her woolly neighbours.’