Each year we seem to plant more vegetable seeds than the year before, so each year we have to break out a new bed in the vegetable plot at the back of the house. Digging this year's new bed quickly became a nightmare, as it ran across, not one large boulder, but two.
After a great deal of sweat and polite language, they were broken up and removed, the shattered remnants joining the mass of other stones we sifted from the soil in a neat pile at the side of the garden.
Since the stones took up about 25% of the volume of the earth, we had to get some new soil to fill the bed, which was easily done from a pile of excellent sheep manure which a nice lady crofter keeps at the back of her shed.
Our battle with rocks and stones is nothing compared to the backbreaking campaign that must have been waged by the crofters who opened up the fields of Ormsaigbeg some 200 years ago. Evidence of their efforts lies at the side of many fields, neat piles of stones thrown there as they tried to plough the ground.
Many of the bigger rocks went in to building the dry stone walls that used to bound each croft. Sadly, most of these are now falling, replaced, if at all, by wooden posts and barbed wire.
Each year we seem to plant more vegetable seeds than the year before, so each year we have to break out a new bed in the vegetable plot at the back of the house. Digging this year's new bed quickly became a nightmare, as it ran across, not one large boulder, but two.
After a great deal of sweat and polite language, they were broken up and removed, the shattered remnants joining the mass of other stones we sifted from the soil in a neat pile at the side of the garden.
Since the stones took up about 25% of the volume of the earth, we had to get some new soil to fill the bed, which was easily done from a pile of excellent sheep manure which a nice lady crofter keeps at the back of her shed.
Our battle with rocks and stones is nothing compared to the backbreaking campaign that must have been waged by the crofters who opened up the fields of Ormsaigbeg some 200 years ago. Evidence of their efforts lies at the side of many fields, neat piles of stones thrown there as they tried to plough the ground.
Many of the bigger rocks went in to building the dry stone walls that used to bound each croft. Sadly, most of these are now falling, replaced, if at all, by wooden posts and barbed wire.
And they used call them lazy beds?
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