By Gabrielle Williams.
There’s a place near to here called Hill O’ Many Staines, which always makes me smile. It’s beautifully literal. That name could probably be applied to most of Caithness. I was pottering in the front garden yesterday, lifting some of the snowdrop bulbs now that they’ve finished flowering, tidying as I went. Fast forward an hour and the fruits of my labour are piled majestically. Well OK, that’s overstating it a bit, but I was pleased with the results. The stones were mostly only few centimetres under the soil, so easy to find with a probing fork. These will be very useful soon for weighting down the weed suppression membranes over the raised beds and creating little pathways between them. There’s plenty more where they came from too.
Eventually, we’d like the front garden to be a pretty space, full of a succession of seasonal bulbs and flowering perennials. Soon, we’ll be mulching it with wood chip to suppress weeds and create more soil as it breaks down. The Morello cherry seen in the background was the first tree we planted here.
