Lewis Memories: Moving and Gardening

When I was looking for a house on Lewis in 1975 there were two available outside Stornoway within commuting distance.  I opted for the one nearer to Stornoway in the township of Coll, 7 miles from my office. It was an old 3-bedroom bungalow with an upstairs room reached by a loft ladder in the hall. However it had a large 'barn' built as an agricultural building but in effect a large double garage capable of housing both a caravan and a car or, in our case, a Bedford CF Autosleeper.  There was also the original byre attached. In addition on the ¼ acre plot was a good sized garden and a plot of trees. The latter was very unusual.

I had come from a village in Cheshire where houses were both expensive and sought after,  However on Lewis I had to pay very substantially (over 60%) more for a similar sized but detached house. Moving was not going to be cheap. Ironically when I sold the house in 2005 it had almost trebled in price whereas the house in the Cheshire village had multiplied in value over 10 times when I last looked in the '90s.

C'est la vie.

When I bought the house the neighbour opposite said "Oh. You're English. That's okay. The house has a garden so you'll be at home. You can always tell the English. They have gardens."

Outwith Stornoway it was true that few people had gardens in the '70s. They didn't have the time because they were tending the croft nor the inclination to have a hobby which was more of the same. For me, desk-bound during the day, the luxury of manual labour in the garden was wonderful.  

How things have changed. Within 15 years the neighbour's sister (they both lived in the family home) had insisted that her brother fence off a garden area for her. Nowadays there are so many gardeners that there is a Western Isles Gardening Facebook page and two substantial garden centres and quite a few people growing plants and food on a part time commercial basis too.  

Mind you when I came to the Island incomers were relatively rare. Now the place is full of them!

Snails and Slugs

It is probably too dramatic to describe the quantity of snails and slugs in the garden last year and now as of plague proportions but it's been pretty near to that.  After the amount of damage last year and after having resorted to slug pellets (which I really hate using because I don't really like killing anything - apart from wasps) I thought that the weather conditions which led to the large numbers were so different this year that things might have changed. Not at all.

A couple of weeks ago some Redwings popped in on their migratory route and in a few minutes two of them had demolished a lot of slugs in the grass at the back of the house.

 

However what has really puzzled me is the fact that snails always go upwards when it gets very wet. I recall them being collected in the rain when they crawled up the houses in Italy. So finding this one having a drink in the pond was one thing:

 But following this snail trail and finding one in the stream was quite another:

 

  Anyway a couple of days ago I decided to have a snail hunt and this was my haul:

Since then it's only been about half a dozen a day. I'm hoping that I can keep them under control this year.

I'm Not Cooking

In fact today has been a very productive day with me not being the principal contributor.  David woke in a mood of  'we are going to achieve today' and achieve we did. The first target was the fences which had become rather slack and in need of attention: the posts have been knocked home where needed and the wire has now been retentioned.  The afternoon was spent doing other jobs in the garden.  We gave up when I'd reached my use-by date and David decided that breathing in midges was a step too far (I should add that most of the afternoon was midge free but my arms and neck pay testament to the persistence of the little blighters.  Thank heaven they don't affect me or itch: they just look a mess.).   A friend recently described it as a 'low maintenance' garden.  We obviously have completely different concepts of the amount of work maintenance requires.

Anyway this evening for the second evening running David is doing the cooking.  I love cooking but it is good to have someone else do it for a change.

Gardening and Music

Today dawned and looked promising.  I'm not sure what it looked as though it was promising but it was definitely promising something.

I've been gardening for fortyodd years.  I've done a lot of gardening.  I have moved hundreds, yes hundreds, of tons of soil and stone making gardens.  Did I enjoy it?  Well that's not so easy to answer.  It kept me fit when I had a desk job.  Most people I know who love gardening enjoy it as a therapy.  I've never really enjoyed it.  It's something I do because I have to and because the result gives me satisfaction: satisfaction but not enjoyment.  Until today.  Today I spent a large part of a sunny, windless, cold (and midge-free!) day in the garden.  And I very much enjoyed it.  The situation helps, of course.

By 5.30 this evening I ached.  I did something I rarely do: I ran the spa bath and lay in very hot water  and when the spa didn't drown it out I listened to the symphony that I would take with me to a desert island if I was only allowed one.  Of course I'd never want to make that choice because what I want to listen to depends on my mood - like most people I assume.   In this case though it's a piece of music which connects deeply with me.  It is Dvorak's First Symphony: The Bells of Zlonice.  It's not a particularly popular piece in the concert halls but the second movement contains, for me, some of the most moving phrases.  I don't pretend to have a good musical ear but this is one of the pieces of which I have multiple recordings and actually have an outright favourite: Witold Rowiki's London Symphony Orchestra 1971 recording. 

Thankful Thursday

If you have wellington boots (wellies - which I understand are gumboots to those of you on the other side of the pond) for gardening and so on which have steel toe-caps then why would you wear your walking wellies (which don't) when doing the garden?  The answer in my case was because they are all lined up and I just picked the first pair that came to hand.  After all there's nothing dangerous in gardening is there?  So when I accidentally stuck the tine of the gardening fork right through the top of the boot and into the sole (I was using one hand and pulling out weeds with the other) it did occur to me that perhaps I should have given the matter more though before rather than after the event.  As it was the first thing that went through my mind after wondering why I'd been so silly was whether my tetanus booster was up to date (it's expired).  It was only then that I realised that the tine had gone straight between two of my toes.

You don't have to guess for what I am thankful today!