Even by Yours Truly’s intermittent blogging standards, it’s been rather a long time since my last rural bulletin, so buckle up and hold on tight for a whistle-stop tour of spring in Scotland, as viewed from here at The Sparrowholding.
In my defence, one of the reasons for the paucity of posts to date this year has been that work has been pleasingly manic for both HunterGatherer (with spreaders to calibrate, soil to sample and fences to build) and Yours Truly (with spurts of prolific proofreading activity punctuating my planting of the finer points of poetry and prose in the fertile minds of myriad pupils).
At risk of descending into oxymoron, I did say ‘pleasingly’ intentionally above, because when you are both self-employed, work tends to appear on a feast or famine basis and thus the feast periods are to be celebrated. Fortunately, our only real famine of this year so far was caused when March roared in like a lion – or, to be more precise, like a ‘Beast from the East’. The ensuing solid mile of snowdrifts between us and Kinross, saw The Sparrowholding cut off from civilisation for a couple of days. If by chance you didn’t see the photographic evidence at the time and are interested, scroll back to March on the Square Sparrow YouTube, Instagram and Facebook accounts for photos/micro-videos.
Our lovely little flock of nine Shetland ewes have been equally busy these past few months, first growing and then producing a veritable posse of 17 leaping lambs (as evidenced by various videos and photos here and on the Youtube , Facebook and Instagram accounts). This year’s gang of woolly warriors are particularly beguiling – though, of course, we say that every year.
Talking of things sheepish, we’re hoping that this year’s wool harvest will be good, as it transpired last year that some of our lovely girlies’ wool is exceptionally ‘fine’ – in the literal sense of the word! As I reported in the March update, late last summer a ‘friend of a friend’ of mine asked if she could have a fleece to spin for the 2018 Royal Highland Show (if you’re interested in country life but have never been before, and you live within travelling distance of Edinburgh, get it on your bucket list now!).
Anyway, we duly sent ‘the spinning lady’ away with Tufty’s gorgeous brown/grey fleece, and you can see the photomontage of the subsequent process that the fleece underwent and the shawl that it eventually became in a previous blog post if you missed it first time round. It is so exciting to see our girls’ wool transformed in this way, and if I didn’t have arthritis in my hands that makes dexterity a thing of the past, I would love to have tried spinning – and perhaps felting – for myself.
Given that the lady who did spin Tufty’s fleece was incredibly complimentary about the resultant wool, we’re hoping either to sell the fleeces individually to spinners this year or to group together with a couple of other local producers to get all our fleeces made into balls of wool by one of the UK companies who offer this service. Sadly, this is a very expensive business – hundreds and hundreds of pounds! – so we’ll need to weigh up carefully what is the best way to proceed. It just seems a real shame that a gorgeous natural material such as wool is no longer valued whereas eco-unfriendly, micro-fibre-shedding ‘fleeces’ have become the norm instead…
The thing I love best about spring in Scotland is that any foray outside – such as a leisurely stroll along the track just above us – is akin to walking along the green paint aisle in B&Q, thanks to the countless shades of green in every possible nuance to be seen in the hedgerows on either side. HunterGatherer and I amused ourselves the other day trying to think of names for all the shades. The track has also been a source of inspiration for some of my tutees at The Learning Cauldron for students who find it difficult/ unappealing to sit inside and concentrate.
Better still, the micro-orchard which we planted in the autumn at the bottom of our two-acre paddock is bursting into bloom, which means that our courageous little fruit trees (four apple, one cherry, one plum, one pear plus a couple of hazel bushes) survived their first winter against all the odds.
It’s reassuring that the garden is back in action again with the advent (finally!) of spring in Scotland, but I have to confess that it’s sometimes a tad demoralising when we see all our fellow gardening and smallholding Instagram friends from ‘doon sooth’ posting photos of full-grown plants. However, such are the joys of living in these precarious Scottish climes – and there, are of course, compensations…
