H&C

22
Jun
2010

No Comments

Poly tunnel success

Dee is pleased with his rocket

“Summer is well and truly with us now. It has been quite warm and very dry. We have hardly had any rain for about two months and the river and burns are as low as I can remember. And though the hydro scheme is not working I am not complaining about having a bit of proper summer weather for a change. The previous two summers have been terrible with lots of rain and cold weather.

It was because of the poor summers that I eventually decided to buy a poly tunnel, and that is proving to be a really good decision despite the good weather. Ruth does my garden for me and has been in charge of the poly tunnel. She lives in the next door glen with her partner, who is a game keeper there. Anyway Ruth is, like me, from the south. Oxfordshire to be specific, and though we both love being in Scotland we do tend to commiserate over some things that are better in the south, for example the weather, and pubs. There are very few traditional type pubs in Scotland, the sort you would find in most villages in the south of England. She misses the quaintness, and I miss the good beer, and we both miss the good food!

Ruth does a number of different jobs but one of them involves helping in my garden and she’s very good at it. She has got a ton of stuff coming up in the poly tunnel, and it is a joy on a warm summer evening to go into the poly tunnel and pick various different salad leaves to make a fresh salad. I particularly like rocket. In recent evenings, we like to think we are in the South of France by making a salad Nicoise for dinner to have with a cold glass of Provencal Rose. And that makes us realise how much we have missed the nice summer weather over the long winter.

The hill is at last starting to green up, and the heather plants are again starting to colour up and grow, but the heather won’t bloom until late July at the earliest. In contrast the grouse have gone very quiet, looking after their young broods. This is the time of year that we keep our fingers crossed that we have a good breeding season, and no long periods of cold wet weather that can really effect the chick survival rates. We try to stay off the hill as much as possible to give all the nesting birds as much peace and quiet as possible. If we do go up, we never take the dogs, until after 15 July or so, at which time the chicks can all hopefully fly quite well. I have been up in the Land Rover with my binoculars to look for broods of grouse. It involves parking up at a vantage point and quietly observing the moor through the binoculars. I saw about 20 broods of grouse, which I was pleased with but with the heather being so tall I couldn’t count the exact number of chicks in each brood. I am cautiously optimistic that they have done okay this year.”