Three pages of readers’ gardens to enjoy
A four-acre croft in the Outer Hebrides, with veg, flowers and plants to make dyes from.
If you live in the Outer Hebrides you have to accept midges. They do make gardening a bit of a challenge, especially as we have a small area of woodland as well as a stream, or ‘burn’; water and shade being the great loves of every highland midge! Fortunately, their season is short and I can generally find things to do indoors. Both my husband and I work from home as Harris Tweed weavers, so that also means we can be in the garden as soon as the midges have departed.
Everything is coming along well – we’re self-sufficient in veg and salad, and I never get over the pleasure of popping out with a colander for something fresh for tea. The next lot of ‘dye seeds’ are coming up, and the bronze fennel is growing well – it should give us some nice greens.
We have eight rescue pugs, two of which are blind, and so the grassed area outside the kitchen has been made ‘pugproof’, with obstacles removed and some planted pots with fragrance to help the blind ones negotiate the space.
Like our neighbours, we plan to collect seaweed this autumn as a mulch for the area where we’re growing beans. The shore is but a short step away and seaweed is something there seems to be an awful lot of!
Gardening here has been quite a learning curve, and we’re learning to use wind-breaks everywhere. I’ve plans for more willow hedges, maybe with the odd coloured dogwood? Solid fences are useless as the winds bring them down.
I spend a lot of time seeing what other people grow here and how they protect them. Fruit trees are rarely seen although fruit canes abound, rose bushes but not climbers – again due to the wind factor. I’m off now to pick more sweet peas and something nice for dinner – it’s a hard life here at the edge of the world! l www.pockethousestudio.co.uk.