March has arrived

Who would have thought that there was any more snow left to fall in the highlands? After a few beautiful days snow has returned to Coigach and for the second time in a week I am working from home.

Regardless of the snow and frozen ground Di has been busy preparing for the 2010 growing season. By the way she has fully recovered from her October "break" and her wrist is becoming stronger and stronger. Seed catalogues have been studied and orders have been placed to grow old favourites and new varieties. We have sourced lots of manure from a local crofter so after quite a few trips to his croft Di has been digging it into the vegetable garden as she prepares it for planting.

With the funding we received from the Moidart Trust we were able to have our vegetable garden fenced and a fruit cage added. Iain and Christie have made a great job of this and once delivered, we will be able to attach the windbreak netting to finish it off.

Our fruit orchard is being expanded with the addition of more apple trees and damsons - unfortunately the weather has meant we have had to delay planting them.

Last week saw the return of geese to the Garden. After wintering in Blair, Marius has returned to his summer residence with a new partner named Lavinia. They are geting used to their new surroundings and being visited by Lucky and Kai, Di's puppies.

Allan has been busy with all the consents required for our new visitor centre and once these have been received work will commence on the new build. The design is fantastic and we are really looking forward to seeing the "real thing".

Developing the interior of the growing house continues - Di and Allan have been busy and have built a 4th raised bed and will make one more. Alison, Di and I have made a planting plan for them and will expand on the range of produce we grew in 2009.

The hydroponic systems are to be extended with further high systems and more at ground level. We are so grateful to Allan for his involvement in the design, planning and installation of all these systems as it's not like a conventional growing house where there is mains electricity and water as are dependent of renewable energy and rain water harvesting.

So lots going on along at the Garden but back in the office Alison and I have been doing all our usual day to day work PLUS working on our new A5 catalogue. Late in January we had a meeting with Jonathan Scott, our designer, about the concept and layout of the catalogue. We thought there was a lot of work involved with our website but this... The beauty of the web is that we have unlimited space for text but with such versatile products as ours, how can you fit all that info into a small text space? Anyway the good news is that we are getting close to having a catalogue we are happy with and once it goes to print we will let people know so they can request a catalogue.

We have been working with our friends at Kitchen Garden magazine and there will be some of our kits included in their Reader Giveaways in the April issue.

From Easter onwards we will be opening our gate to the Garden and visitors are welcome to come along and see how we are getting on. Full details of this will appear on the website.

Bye from a snowy Inverpolly

Julie