Magnolia

A dry calm spell of weather recently has meant I was able to get the drone up in the air.  The woodland 'garden' planted in the 1930s has suffered a lot in recent years from storm damage, with lots of trees and shrubs being felled by high winds and often sadly obliterating beautiful shrubs as they fall.  Luckily the beautiful Magnolia you can see from the main road has not yet been hit, and we enjoy it flowering every year.

This year it has flowered abundantly and a week or so of calm weather meant there was a good cover of flowers on the tree itself.

Kilmaluaig graveyard was hidden by scrub Blackthorn and Bracken when we first came here.  We managed to clear it, cutting back the scrub and cutting the Bracken, but unfortunately the Bracken is back.

A break in the weather.

Bracken is a pervasive successful plant. It loves Mull.  We have an ongoing battle to keep it at bay. In some places we don't always win that battle without help. We do try. Farmer spends days and weeks mowing.  We stopped being organic because we realised we needed to resort to using a helicopter to reach the inacessible hillsides and rocky outcrops that you could not take a machine.  We had booked a helicopter early in the year.  We expected them to appear mid July.  They finally appeared today.  There is talk that if you spray too late, you are wasting your money.  You can imagine how that feels as the days go by and the weather is either too wet or too windy for them to come.  Sunday was the cut off as the pilot was going to Australia to do a spraying contract down there.  Thankfully (we hope) the conditions were fine, once this morning's mist had burned off.

By early afternoon it was crystal clear.

Lamb sales next week. Farmer has to move the tups.  He puts them through the fank. Cap waits for instructions.  Jan is coming into season, and has gone a bit nutty so she is in her kennel.

Guests are seeing basking shark off the point. I go to look. I am not so lucky, but there is a lovely view to the islands and the Haunn cottages.

Burnet rose hips.

Golden rod.

 The Point was sprayed for bracken last year and it is wonderful what flowers are appearing now. It is quite a special habitat out there.

A new weapon.

After last night's rain the sun came out.  The wind has not dropped, but it is warm wind.

We are still waiting for the helicopter to come and spray the bracken.  This is some of the bracken we are targeting this summer on the in-bye.

Farmer has a new weapon to use himself though.  It arrived today.  It is called a weed wiper and is a very efficient way of treating the bracken.  It works by contact rather than spraying, so is more controllable.  You can raise or lower the drum according to how long the bracken is, and what is underneath it - so that you only kill the bracken. Obviously he can only kill bracken using this contraption in areas where he can drive the quad with this towing along behind it.

Wind blown heather behind the steading.

The clouds over Ben More from the Reudle cairn this evening were dramatic.

Carbon footprint and Status changes afoot.

In September we attended a Climate Change and Farming seminar hosted by Soil Association Scotland near Fort William. We came away with the thought that whilst we might have successfully reduced the size of our holiday cottages carbon footprint, with the recent installation of a wood-chip boiler and an ongoing installation of a wind turbine, it was time to look at the carbon footprint on the farm. We intend to address this over the course of the next few months. Watch this space to see how we get on.

This week on the farm we have altered direction a bit. We have - very sadly - given up our organic status. We spent a long time thinking this through (over the last couple of years) as organic status was a good way of reassuring people that we followed a recognisable standard. And now we don't have that, how can we impart the message that although we are not organic any more, we will still farm in an environmentally friendly way, with as much concern for the land and the welfare of our animals as before.

One of the main struggles of working within an organic system here at Treshnish was our inability to keep up with the spread of bracken. The Farmer has spent weeks, over the years, in spring and summer mechanically crushing and cutting bracken, wherever he could get his tractor, quad or Allen Scythe. Hours and hours of back breaking work rewarded in the areas he was able to reach, but beaten in areas where he was not. There are places that you cannot cut because you will destroy the wild flowers growing underneath, such as the small white orchids growing on the banks outside Toechtamhor cottage. For me these are a marker of how far the bracken has encroached. When we first discovered the small white orchid growing here 12 years ago, there was no bracken anywhere near it but now the bracken is threatening this species as well as the many fragrant and butterfly orchids growing in the same area.

In the long term, in order to help preserve the diversity of flora in these delicate areas of the farm we need to be free to adopt non organic methods, if necessary, as part of a bracken eradication strategy. There were other reasons too, such as finances (dripping tap springs to mind) but we wont go into those now and please take my word for it, it was not a decision we made lightly.

We have joined 'LEAF', which has a self auditing process, quite a lengthy one, which I aim to work through this winter, in order, hopefully, to be ready for an on farm inspection next spring. LEAF ('Linking Environment and Farming') is an organisation with an approach to the environment which is practical and rigorously monitored, encouraging farmers to improve their environmental impact and provides help in looking at the carbon footprint of your farming practice and this is something we feel strongly about.

So good and responsible farming practice will continue here - looking after our animals and the diverse habitats on the farm. We will continue with the 'Scottish Quality Beef and Lamb' membership which monitors livestock farming issues, such as animal welfare and traceability, whilst we work on becoming a LEAF farm.

I will report on how the audit is getting on over the winter!