A Highland Vegetable Garden

When we built our house some six years ago, we planned a vegetable garden at the back, on a patch of steeply sloping land covered with brambles and bracken interrupted by rock outcrops. However, it faced southeast and would get the sun from first thing in the morning until early evening. Clearing it took some time, but the profusion of weeds suggested that the soil might be reasonably good - and, with the slope, it would be well-drained.

When we dug the first beds, rough, narrow strips across the slope, the soil looked promising - the land had been croft land and, being close to an old croft house, might have been used to grow potatoes or oats in the past. So we bought raspberry and strawberry plants and stuck them in - we are no gardeners but are great believers in learning by trial and error - and were quite thrilled with the results.

At this point The Diary allowed an old ambition to take control, to do some brick or block work. The vegetable plot was therefore steadily and unnecessarily expensively terraced, each block having to be carried from the road up some 60m of steep path and eight steps. This was followed by paving slabs to form paths between the terraces, the soil from beneath them being placed into the beds.

Lettuces, brassicas, radishes, beans, peas, onions, courgettes, carrots, parsnips and rhubarb followed, along with blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes. Our policy of trial and error produced some spectacular failures - runner beans were a disaster as the wind and salt spray murdered them - and, in some years, seeds and onion sets rotted in the rain-soaked soil. But some crops thrived, soft fruit doing surprisingly well, this being protected from our resident bird population by suspending old CDs over the beds. We brought unchlorinated water down from a neighbouring stream, erected a greenhouse to grow tomatoes, cucumbers and sweet peppers, built compost makers out of breeze blocks and bought plastic ones when the amount of vegetation needing to be composted overwhelmed us.

The Scottish west coast climate, with its long, dark winters, gales and rain, might seem an unpromising one, but we have been amazed at how well our vegetable garden has done. It was, therefore, with some optimism that, for the first time, this year we planted potatoes, one of the Highland's traditional staple crops. Oh dear!

See post about potato-growing here