OUR CROFT
You don’t have to pull on boots and get your hands dirty when you stay with us. However, many visitors return year after year because they and their children enjoy experiencing life on a working croft where you can do as much or as little as you like. The croft features a large 20 x 30 metres vegetable patch, a 50 ft poly tunnel and lots of raised beds. Fruit and Vegetables
We grow almos
t all our own fruit and vegetables and we are happy to pass on our experiences in grappling with self-sufficiency. Each successive year sees the production of good crops of vegetables and plenty of soft fruit in the summer/autumn, all of which we are available to purchase for our guests. We use an incubator for hatching batches of chicks - it never ceases to amaze us (and visitors) how a helpless, damp hatchling transforms in a few hours to a fluffy, scampering, independent and very vocal chick. Life changes
Some of our guests enjoy our real eggs or freshly picked salad leaves so much they can no longer put up with shop bought. WILDLIFE
Birds
The croft, though small, has a wide range of habitats that attracts plenty of wildlife, particularly birds. So far we have seen house martins, wrens, robins, swallows, great, coal and blue tits, sparrows, starlings, sedge warblers, blackbird, pied wagtail and yellowhammers nesting on the croft. Black grouse regularly fly over, buzzards are common and both golden and white-tailed eagle are seen. Rarer visitors have included waxwing and blackcap. We have also seen a whinchat on the nuts, which although not rare is an unusual sighting. Siskins, on the other hand, are always about unless the peanuts run out or the sparrow hawk is on patrol. And just how many siskins can you get on one feeder? Flowers
If you are interested in wild flowers we suggest you visit in June. There have been over a thousand (yes!) orchids on the top half of the croft, mostly of the varieties shown here, which range in colour from very pale pink through to very dark purple and the more unusual Lesser Butterfly Orchid.