KEEP GOING
Little bits of good news….
This is just an update to let you know that we have not forgotten you. My intention was/is to wait for the BIG news before posting, but the truth is; we are still waiting for our lease.
Longer than anticipated, I’ve been holding off regular blogs, podcasts and a roll out of this website for some years now. We are ready to roll as soon as the BIG NEWS drops. In the meantime here’s some little bits of good news!
Paperwork ‘is on it’s way!’
We received a note from Bob Brady, the KCF Chair in September 2023. It read:
‘Thanks for your email dated the 25th September. I can confirm that your planting plan has been approved by the Board and will be forwarded to SF. As soon as the Lease and Heads of terms has been approved by our legal advisor we will send you out a copy of it for you to sign. This will be accompanied by a time scale that will allow for you to obtain legal advice if you so chose”.
We are still waiting further correspondence. We see the chair most days when we walk up the hill to water; he has been consistently reasuring to us with regular offers of practical support.
In the meantime, it’s just a case of being patient, working the day job, nourishing the roots of reforestation and keeping going. You can listen to our daughters regular updates and nature based observations on the croft via our weekly Kiddon radio show.
Soil!
Following lauras application to the Jude Dunn Land Fund. We have taken an active interest in fungally dominant actively aerated compost tea; and it’s role in supercharging the root zones of our cell grown trees. Our utility room is hums with the reverberation of bubbling, feeding that which is good from both temperate rainforests and home worm casts.
As well as a feed for our cell grown stock, we are also applying as a foliar spray. We look forward to the day of going to scale with backback sprayers throughout the croft.
Trees!
With practical support from a visiting volunteer, and a donation from a neighbouring friend and sawyer; we have built some fabulous vole proof boxes to expand our tree nursery. Each box holds 960 cells; and sits on it’s footprint of two pallets. We are very satisfied with this design, and it is eminently scaleable when we are ready.
Laura has been very busy with planting germinated seeds. All boxes, the ‘pentagon’ we built last year, and latterly our driveway; is hoaching with trees.
Planting!
Since our last blog, we satisfied the board panels criteria and concerns and our planting plan was ratified by the KCFC Trustees in September 2023. As it transpires, SF do not require a planting plan, instead favouring supporting individual crofters with the design of management plan once we become a tenant crofter.
Still, it was a timely and necessary hurdle, and useful for our visioning process. Over Winter/Spring we have been tackling invasives, planted out some more hedging, as well as a modest amount of trees, tubes and stakes on the hill.
Visitors!
We hosted a productive work party from the local ‘Work – Eat – Talk’ group, who held a very interesting discussion on a theme structured by the Scottish Histories of Resistance curriculum: ‘Aye, defend your Rights & Commons’.
We also hosted the board from Morvern Community Woodland, who were on a scoping mission for establishing woodland crofts. It was so nice to provide some traditional hospitality around a fire at the croft.
We host the occasional controlled burn, where we have mixed the burning of non native sitka I’ve been cutting, the occasional huge rhodie root I’ve grubbed out with some dried thinnings we remove from the clearfell in order to make space for planting trees. The beer tastes cold from sitting in the stream while we work, and both sun and moonlight sits well on our skins by this little stream on the hill we call home.
Best wishes
Rhyddian
UPDATE 19/08/24: The following application was made to the crofting commission list of cases on 18/07/24 under case number 131431 https://crofting.scotland.gov.uk/register-of-crofts?intent=holding&holdingid=26415
