Starting to think about hibernation

It's a beautiful season. Yesterday it was sunny and glorious and we took the boat out for our last sail of the year. Although we set off and arrived back in harbour to calm, blue conditions, out on the loch the wind was fierce. We had to reef, then reef again, and even so the gusts were blasting us over at nearly 40 degrees. The east wind is funnelled through the mountains here and it arrives in lumps that are erratic and full of crazy energy. It really is as if the mountains are throwing fistfuls of air at us. The contrast between the moments of calm and flurries of wind are exhilerating, and a bit scary.

The trees are responding here too. Docile one moment, when a gust comes they are dancing and hurling their leaves around with gusto. The birches have been golden for weeks, and the aspen stands are turning, one after another, great flames through the woods. Now the hazels are starting to turn as well. It won't be long before the leaves are all on the woodland floor and the year will be ended.

I await the first frost. That's the official start of winter here on the croft. It'll last until the first primrose, and it is always long, the longest season of the year.

Life will change. We're settled into the Great Hall in the woods. No more nights at the caravan at the shore or on the boat until springtime. A fire will be lit at dusk or earlier if it's overcast and no sunshine heats the shed we're in. We'll begin the game of trying to get up and walk up to the top of the hill to beat the sun getting up over the horizon. Our diet will change to porridge and parsnips and winter greens, dry beans soaked on the stove overnight. We'll sprout beansprouts to replace the salads from the garden. There will be long evenings for reading. Perhaps I'll get the knitting out.

The season's changing. That's good. I like hibernation. It reminds me of what the bears will be doing. We are animals. We should behave differently in winter.

One of my bugbears with modern society is how life is expected to be the same all year round. Children go to school for the same hours in the winter as in the summer. A 9-to-5 working day takes no account of the seasonal variations. Supermarkets carry almost identical food stock for 12 months of the year. I'm sure it's not good for us, physically or emotionally.

I exort everyone to vary their lifestyle to reflect the season, to move furniture around or somehow make a change to our environment, so we know we're in our winter den.

Pigs

One of the neighbouring crofters keeps pigs. They are wild boar crossed with something more domestic and are free to roam a huge area of regenerating woodland, where they rootle around, turning over the ground, creating good seed beds for new trees. I like pigs. I like meeting them in the woods. I enjoy watching them down at the shore of the loch, munching on seaweed. Their sounds make me laugh.

A couple of days ago we heard that the pigs had broken through their fence and were loose. They're not quite so funny when they stick their snouts and trotters where they're not welcome: a pig can make its presence felt pretty quickly in a garden as those stubby noses are the closest animal equivalent there is to a plough. So we've been keeping our eyes peeled.

A couple of days ago, one big sow was spotted on the road, leaning on her snout, dazed and docile. We wondered if she was ill, but the verdict was that she was just tripping on mushrooms. It's that time of year; fly agarics are popping up all over the place.

The next day we were sitting eating at the picnic table when we heard that tell-tale snuffly grunt-grunt-grunt. The big sow and a piglet were heading towards us along the path, ears flapping, tails twirling, eyes twinkling. They had no doubt smelled lunch. We managed to stop her in her tracks, persuade her to turn round and return down the path. I sprinted ahead and opened the gate for her and she obligingly trotted through, joining two more piglets and another sow on the road. Presumably she promptly told them all about the munchies to be had on our croft. We left them where they were to go and phone their owners and finish our lunch. By the time we returned they had scarpered.

They showed themselves to the sound of a bucket of pigfood, and no, they didn't look at all sheepish. They were at the top of the croft, which has now been well and truly ploughed. It will be interesting to see if the tree regeneration benefits from their intervention. We discovered later where else on the croft the sow had been before she came for lunch: a lovely old aspen grove, which used to have a particularly beautiful understory of mosses and herbs, looks like someone has been in there with a rotovator. We have returfed where we could and it will recover in time. I am thankful they didn't make it to either of my garden plots, neither of which have pig-proof fences, at least not when it comes to pigs with determination, which these definitely have. (Something else with big feet has been in one patch, but it wasn't a pig).

We've often pondered whether we should deliberately bring some pigs onto the croft, to see if they could make some inroad into the huge areas of bracken that limit tree regeneration. They didn't touch that area in their brief visit, and it is interesting to observe how little impact they have made on the bracken on their home croft. As long as there is vegetation to plough into within the shelter of woods, they seem to prefer that to digging on open ground, and they seem to prefer turf to bracken. I would too, if I were a pig. Digging bracken must be hard on the snout. This all makes me understand that if we want pigs to tackle the bracken zone, they would need to be fenced in. Some other time, maybe.

The pigs have returned home and the hole in the fence is mended. For now.

Hazel nuts

There have been steady, strong winds for the past few days and the hazel nuts are starting to be blown down from the trees. It's a race with the mice. I got a good haul this morning, from under the ancient lichen-garlanded hazel on the croft. Now they are in a bucket of water. The hazels here bear lots of nuts but a very low proportion have any flesh inside them. Whether they're for eating or sowing, it's best to sort out the viable nuts from the empty ones. Mice can presumably tell by picking them up - some must feel substantially heavier to a mouse. I'm too big and unsubtle to tell. But a bucket of water sorts them right out - the empty ones float, those with nuts inside the shell sink. Bingo. By tomorrow morning I'll know what proportion have a future.

Rowing

It's been a bright, blustery day with pelting showers. The sky is a pageant of clouds and when they part enough for the sun it sets the bracken to bronze. The birches are slowly giving up their leaves, one by one. With winds like this, as each leaf ripens to gold it is blown off, so the trees remain green overhead, thinning, with only the floor of the woods taking on autumn colour.

This morning the wind seemed light enough to row from the caravan at the shore to the bridge, which is its nearest road access. It's not far, maybe 300 metres. Two dead batteries needed shifting, and it was time to tackle that job. They're heavy. These two batteries were from the original set when the wind generator was installed 8 years ago. After they weakened about 3 years ago they were relegated to the caravan, where they have been fed by a solar panel and used to power the music and lights down there. They have finally given up the ghost. Battery technology is rubbish - they are the weak link in the off-grid system, predicted to fail in as few as 3 years and when they do they are full of toxic non-renewable chemicals so they are a pain to dispose of. We should be pretty pleased to get 8 years out of them. Compare the solar panel, which is guaranteed for 25 years, and the wind generator itself, which should last for decades, with the odd replacement bearing. We won't solve the planet's energy problems until we sort battery technology. Who's on that case?

The really smart solution is a battery system that uses the wind power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then a fuel cell to generate electricity from the hydrogen when you need it. That's what the PURE project does. Unfortunately it's still way out of our price range and not at our kind of scale. At least lead acid batteries are relatively cheap, though that's all they have going for them.

So, that's why I was rowing two big batteries up the loch this morning. The wind was surprisingly strong and kept blowing the boat sideways. At the uidhe - the 'throat' in Gaelic - where the loch narrows enough to bridge it, I was blown aground. Fortunately the tide was coming out so that acted as a counter-current to the wind and I managed eventually to get the boat up to the landing point and the batteries are now poised for recycling. On the way back to the caravan I was rowing against the wind. It felt like a lot further than 300 metres. Good exercise.