Welcome to The Wild Croft

Thanks so much to everyone who came along last weekend to help with the basketry willow harvest! We got a huge amount cut and graded over two days and it was mostly brilliant weather for it too! We had helpers from Strontian, Tain, Evanton, Helmsdale and Ullapool as well as locals. We`re very grateful to have such a supportive community 🙏

We had a great hedgelaying workshop on the croft yesterday and managed to lay about 50m between the 10 folk who came.

It was definitely not an easy hedge to lay with some chunky trees and some big gaps but the end result looks brilliant. It was all done with handtools and I think there will be some achy arms today!

Many thanks to @torquilvarty for running the workshop and @woodlandtrustscotland for funding it.

This will help let more morning light into our veg and orchard areas on the croft while still maintaining shelter from the prevailing wind. Plus of course it`ll make a great habitat as it regrows and bushes out.

It`s been great to be back in the coppice this week. Tuesday was a stunning day too, though it was pretty soggy today! Thanks to Fluff, Ike and Niall for their help, it`s much more fun to work together.

This year`s coupe is a bit bigger, 0.1Ha of mostly multi stemmed birch. This is part of woodland planted nearly 30 years ago and this is its first cut as we turn this woodland into coppice.

The first task was to find some straightish poles to use as hedgelaying stakes for our workshop this weekend. Not a very easy task among twisted and gnarly birch! We eventually cut about 50 though which should be enough.

As usual the firewood will be stacked in the woodland to dry a bit until Spring when the ground is dry enough to extract it. Most of the firewood is for our own use, but this year I hope to make some charcoal with offcuts and bits.

The brash is chipped in piles around the wood. We use this throughout the year to mulch other areas of the croft, and leave some to turn into compost. Piles from 2 years ago are well composted now so we`ll sieve and use that for veggies next year.

Of course we`re not too tidy, and plenty of brash, twigs and woodchip stays in the wood to nourish the soil and provide valuable habitats.

It`s willow harvest time soon. Come and join us on 17th and 18th January to help out!

We`ll be cutting, grading and bundling the basketry willow so that it can be dried and stored to make baskets with over the next year.

Come either day or both. We`ll provide soup and cake! Please RSVP by message or email via our website. Let`s hope the weather is as nice as last year when it was still and frosty.

We got some exciting new additions to the croft this week, two kunekune pigs!

We`ve been planning to get pigs for quite a while but have had a busy year with lots of trips away, so decided to wait until now when things quietened down a bit for us. They`ll need feeding twice a day so are quite a commitment timewise. We`re new to pig keeping so thought just a few to start with was sensible!

These fellas are already 7 months old and we`ll keep them probably for another 6 months or so. For now they have some young woodland and ash coppice to forage in, and we`ll let them onto our meadow for a bit too. Then in the drier months we plan to rotate them through our main coppice woodland (which is too waterlogged for them in winter).

We chose the smaller kunekune breed as they need less bought-in feed, and can thrive on good quality grazing and forage. They also root less than bigger traditional breeds so hopefully won`t churn the ground up as much, although we do want a bit of ground disturbance too.

Charcoal! This has been a long time coming but I`ve finally built a charcoal retort so we can make charcoal from croft coppice wood.

The design I used was a Hookway retort, designed by James Hookway who I met at the NCFed gathering a few years ago demonstrating his design. He sells plans and I got someone to fabricate the stainless inner and then I built the rest mostly with bits I had lying around. As you can see my fabrication skills leave a lot to be desired, maybe I should stick to wood! But it works.

First firing yesterday went really well and I opened the barrel today to find some lovely charcoal. The retort uses scrap wood to indirectly heat the barrel with a rocket stove design. Once up to temperature the wood gives off volatile gases as it converts to charcoal and these are fed back in to fuel the fire. This makes it very clean and efficient compared with more traditional methods, and is well insulated with vermiculite to keep the temperature up. It`s also an amazing sound and sight!

Watching videos online I was expecting flames coming out of all sorts of unwanted spots but my extra efforts to seal it up well with fire rope, insulation and flour paste seemed to pay off!

Of course this is a bit small to be making charcoal commercially and we don`t have enough spare coppice wood at the moment anyway, but it`ll give us enough for ourselves and to share.

Eventually I`d like to use gorse for charcoal, as apparently it`s extremely good and burns every hot (and we have an unlimited supply of that!)

I spend a lot of time rambling on about coppicing and how we`re using it as a management method for our croft woodlands. Now we`ve written a whole case study about just that! So if you want to read a bit more detail about the how`s and why`s of our coppice systems, and see a few more pics too, then check it out.

Just search online for the Reforesting Scotland Hub and you`ll see our coppice case study up there, along with a few others that are worth a read too.

This is part of a project by Reforesting Scotland (which I`m involved with) to document existing coppice sites across Scotland to show what`s out there and build up a picture of how and why folk use coppice. These can then hopefully be used as inspiration and a resource for budding coppice projects. Search for the Scottish Coppice Network to find out more or follow links in the case study.

Workshop update! It`s been a slow burner this one, juggling with croft jobs and @timbertunnel builds, but we`ve finally got the cladding finished and have made a good start on the inside too. Thanks to Aurore, Ike and Dylan for their help!

Still to do are electrics and workbenches inside but it`s already been amazing having a decent space to work in. It`ll also be connected up to the old workshop with a canopy at some point.

We`ve almost doubled our solar capacity too with the extra roof space, now with over 8kw of panels, which should give enough energy to power the house and heat hot water most of the year, and surplus to charge the car on sunny days.

Thanks to everyone who came to our second croft woodland workshop on Saturday. It was lovely to show folk around and chat about trees in the sunshine.

We`ll hopefully have a few volunteer days over the winter in the coppice and harvesting basketry willow so sign up to the newsletter on our website if you`d like to hear about those.

We got off lightly with last week`s storm, with just a few branches snapped, but along the road from the house some chunky willows had come down and were hung up on phone lines (pun intended) and other trees.

So, it was a great excuse to finally buy a long pole saw and we made the most of the free bounty, chipping most of it plus a few firewood logs. The chips will have a higher nitrogen content than usual as they have leaves in with them, so ideal for composting. I`ve layered them with grass clippings, sheep`s wool and chicken manure.

On another note, there`s still 1 space left on next Saturday`s woodland workshop if you fancy a tour of our croft woodlands. Booking via our website.