Hogmanay Hoolie

Well, the hogmanay hoolie was Covid-kyboshed so we kicked shut the door on 2020 with a less traditional shindig.

As the sun rose on the last day of this weirdest of years a muddy yellow digger trundled up our drive and made its way round the back. Its destination was the drying-green-cum-veg-garden that was now obsolete on both fronts – the cows having briefly escaped and feasted on the Christmas sprouts and carrots, and the washing-line having given into the elements.

It turns out that gingerly stepping between prized veg and cowpats while clinging to an airborne bed-sheet is actually a pain in the bum – even when there are no posterior-prodding cow horns on the loose.

Time for a revamp, and what better time than Auld Year’s Night.

This year the bells would herald a wholesome new beginning. No day-long wine-soaked hangover to haul me reluctantly into 2021. This new year would be welcomed with a glass of sparkling Kombucha to set the tone for our green revolution. Six bottles of the award-winning fermented tea were ordered on the back of reviews hailing it as a ‘delicious celebratory beverage’, ‘a really yummy drink’.

Well, that was absolute bollocks. My toast to 2021 tastes of liquidised feet.

All the more reason to get this garden transformed into a horticultural haven and drape it from top to bottom in high-yielding vines.

 Along with the all-important grapes, the garden’s new purpose in life is to yield an epic crop of veggies. This we tried last year in the face of constant salt-soaked gales and biblical quantities of rain.

2020’s harvest wasn’t, in fact, too shabby. The root veg reaped before the baby assassins tore in was fine, the kale abundant and the courgettes sufficiently plump and large as to cause hilarity among my more puerile friends. But herbivore self-sufficiency wasn’t exactly hovering on the horizon.

With nothing much standing on that horizon to shelter the veg-patch from the wrath of the North Atlantic, conditions are tricky for arable endeavors.  And we’re not alone. A quick surf of the web a few weeks ago and we found a community facing similar climatic challenges to getting their five-a-day.

The parish of Northmavine in Shetland barely clings to the mainland by means of a skinny isthmus that’s pounded on one side by the Atlantic and on the other by the North Sea.

The fact is that it’d be easy to be a pescatarian Shetlander thanks to its thriving aquaculture industry, but getting your greens locally isn’t so easy. This fact, and a wee bit joined-up thinking, led the good parishioners of Northmavine to come up with a storming idea: a Polycrub –  a storm-strength greenhouse/polytunnel hybrid that repurposes defunct fish-farm gear that would otherwise be sent to landfill.

So, instead of being dumped in a northerly midden, a lorry-load of former fish-farm travelled south and was carefully unloaded at the bottom of our hill. This turned out to be a rerun of the day we moved to this wee piece of windy heaven. The Shetlandic lorry was unable to turn through our gate and neither had the flitting lorry. As a result the removal guys had arrived at our new abode and unloaded it in painfully small increments into a painter’s van which they then drove repeatedly up the steep, winding drive to our door.

This time, there was no handy decorator onsite, just me, the husband, the eldest child and the entire day it took to hand-ball the lorry’s load up the drive, one massive piece of storm-proof sheeting at a time. It turns out that the fish-farm stuff has a third useful function – as a bingo-wing destroyer. After eight hours of lugging wooden stobs, plastic walls and massive pipes up the drive I momentarily had the beginnings of Madonna arms.

It was, of course, the briefest of moments as the next step in creating our Polycrub was achieved mechanically by an appliance very much resembling Bob the Builder’s best mate, Scoop. The yellow digger wheeched through its Hogmanay task in no time, leveling the ex-drying green beautifully. Next, a thick book of construction instructions was posted from Shetland and immediately transferred to the much more capable hands of a couple of our talented neighbours. They have the lateral thinking and engineering panache that sadly escapes this softer crofter and her family.

Thanks to those skilled Argyll neighbours and the ingenuity of Shetlanders, 2021 looks set to be filled with all things healthy and a wealth of clean living – well, up until the grape harvest and next year’s Hogmanay Hoolie anyway.