Look below for what's happening in the garden now.

The Garden page has information on the habitats, plants, projects, displays and the astonomical observatory. The Study Base page has more on the cabins and activities. 

The garden lies quiet in January. The meadow plants are gathering their reserves and slowly pushing out small bunches or rosettes of leaves which may yet get burnt if the weather turns cold. Most form and colour still come from the dead remains of last year's plants and the branches and bark of the trees and hedges as they filter and deflect the low sunlight.

The images above, 13 January 2012, show (left) the delicate remnants of a flowering stem still holding the open seed-bearing capsules of one of the small willow herbs, species of Epilobium, and (right) the top of a teasel flower head Dipsacus fullonum in the morning sun.

Left above (also 13 January 2012) is an image of a frosted leaf showing the veins that last year carried the leaf's water, and are now raised clear and white against the brown background of the dead tissue. The image on the right, taken 16 January 2012, is a part of the trunk of a young birch (both Living Field collection).

5 December 2011

The severe cold of last year has yet to reach the garden. The plants sit out a dull wetness, relieved by the occasional day of clear sun, when the skeletal architecture of the dead stems and fruiting heads strikes as much as the few living blooms remaining. The umbels of the wild carrot Daucus carota take first place for intricacy of structure, as they did when alive in late spring and summer.

The photographs above (Living Field collection) show, top left, a single flowering head, an umbel, and (right and lower) two closer views of the same umbel, all taken on 5 December 2011, a bright day just over two weeks before the winter solstice. Insects and microorganisms still find a place within these carrot structures, which with the heads of the teasel stay intact most of the winter, unlike those of the thistles, which tend to fall apart.

To see lichen shrouding rocks and trees, you have to go higher, to the blackthorn thickets of the Sidlaws, or even farther to the highland birch and pine forests, but very slowly, lichens are growing on  rocks in the garden, and on walls around the farm. This yellow lichen is spreading on the low wall at the entrance to the met site. If you stop to look closely, better with a hand lens if you have one, you can see the convolutions of flat spreading forms and cup-like rising forms, and some parts that look older and maybe dead, and bright new vigorous parts that will continue the colony.

Lichen is, as you learn in school, eaten by reindeer (though none have been seen in the garden this year), but the main use of lichen to people - except when they have been very hungry - is as a dye for natural fibres, including of course wool. We won't go into the way the lichen is soaked in urine, but see T Darwin's book for an informative and amusing account of lichens in medicines and dyeing.  

Only a few plant species continued budding and flowering into November - the cornflower and corn marigold and the dyer's greenweed, coreopsis and chamomile. A few remaining heads of the greater knapweed Centaurea scabiosa, a close relative of the cornflower, still offered a place for small insects to eat and be eaten.  

The photographs above of a battered flowering head of the greater knapweed, taken 4 November 2011, are shown more for the overall blend of the colours than for the detail. The image at the top covers about 2 centimeters of the flowering head. Each floret (with the deep red line from the base of the tube to where it splits) is about 2 millimeters wide. Several insects buried themselves at the base of the florets and the whole head was laced with threads about one-tenth of a millimeter thick (lower right).

19 October 2011

Flowering and fruiting continue on some wild plants right into late October, even later if the deep cold stays away.  The wild marjoram Origanum vulgare, right in the photographs below, taken 19 October, has continued to flower from late summer, and is now one of the few labiates open to any bees still active. The black mullein Verbascum nigrum (left below) also develops late in the season, with a clash of colour and form in the flowers and still with many buds to open. Both these species grow year after year in the untilled and uncut part of the garden to the north west of the meadow. The specimens of black mullein appeared from soil collected about ten years ago during research on seedbanks. The plants die down in winter, but have reappeared each spring, unlike the commoner great mullein which rarely lasts more than its second year.  

Some plants are eaten whole or their leaves stripped by wild visitors, but some are eaten bit by bit, leaving the skeleton intact until it finally falls apart. One such is the horseradish Armoracia rusticana, whose leaves are being invaded in sections and eaten from within, until the tissue is too thin to hold together and holes appear. Parts of one leaf on 19 October are shown below. The width of the leaf in the right hand photograph is about 20 cm across. The left and centre ones are slight magnifications

The horseradish finds little favour here as a uncooked vegetable - it is better known as a preserved sauce for use with meats - but its white flesh is still commonly eaten, shredded and raw as a potent garnish, in many other european countries. It is easy to grow and adds serious bite to a meal. Traditionally, the plant has had a wide range of medicinal uses. The specimen in the garden was brought in last year to an area that got overrun with grasses, but it will be moved to the developing medicinals section for 2012, to join other members of the cabbage family.  It's not the only member of that family to have a pungent taste and smell - the yellow mustard paste comes from seeds of the related white mustard Sinapis alba. 

The fruiting in the hedges is past its peak. The hawthorn and elder berries have gone, but the sloes - the fruits of the blackthorn Prunus spinosa - have turned from the unexpected plummy-red of summer to a very dark blue verging on black. The fruits in the photograph to the right, on 19 October, are about 1 to 2 cm across. Too bitter for human food when raw but a useful flavouring. 

By 6 October the hay from the meadow had been piled, soon to be collected and moved away.

 

5 October 2011

The dyer's coreopsis Coreopsis tinctoria and dyer's chamomile Anthemis tinctoria are both still flowering and fruiting. Both are of the composite family, and with a growth habit that is indeterminate, in that flower buds continue to appear through the season if the weather gives them the chance. They did not mind the cold and wet of summer but will be stopped by the first few frosts.

On a turbulent day, the flower heads were swaying so much that they created a sort of wind painting (above). You can get the feel of it by lazily watching them out of the corner of your eye.

The hedges have been giving shelter and food to small animals for a few years. The elder Sambucus nigra flowered well this year and now its black berries are ripening. When eaten, they leave behind a red framework that supported them. The berries to the outside of the cluster have already disappeared in the photograph to the right.

The memory of the strange stink of the elder's leaves and stems stays with you from childhood. There's nothing like it. The stems break easily to expose soft pith tissue which you can grub out to make a tube. But elder has a wide range of medicinal uses and yields various dyes. The flowers make a herbal tea, and the berries are still used to flavour wine. Other wild fruits are ripening in the hedges - hips and sloes among them.

The elder is common and can be grown easily from a piece of root and lower stem wrenched from an existing shrub. It's worth growing in a wildlife garden or hedge for the many things that live on it, and you can investigate its usefulness, just as the first hunters and then the first settlers in these islands must have done.

The giant cotton thistle continues to live out its life. By the end of September, many of its composite heads were about to release the wind-born seeds (photograph below). Because of their many spines, the bigger fruiting heads can get to look a bit ragged, collecting the remains of spiders' webs and dead flies and bits of wind blown detritus. 

In the photograph above, the whole head is about 5 cm across. A couple of weeks ago, the head was closed, protecting the seed, but now it's opened, allowing each seed with its pappus of hairs to leave when the wet and wind allow. Like many other annuals and biennials of its type, it still has the capacity to continue flowering after its first seeds have flown, but new flowers in late September are much smaller than those of the summer.

The brassica part of the crop sequence is in various states: the swedes are still bulking but the leaves of the broccolis, on plants that were left in the ground after the flower heads were removed in bud, have been stripped and eaten except for the main veins (photograph right). Even these will rot later in the year and offer a sludgy late autumn desert for the slugs.

Various culinary herbs are still rich and green. The fennel Foeniculum vulgare and the lemon balm Melissa officinalis both grow well at this latitude. They cohabit in a small patch in the raised bed. The fennel can be used to add a mild aniseed flavour to salads, and is now grown commercially as a salad herb round here, while the balm, apart from smelling fresh and lemony, gives a herbal tea. These plants can be strong to the taste at first, but try them a few times! Here they are in the autumn sun - the fennel is the one with the feathery leaves and yellow flowers; the balm looks a bit like a mint. 

 

 

15/17 September 2011

The cornflower Centaurea cyanus has a sort of lived-in look about it after being thrashed by the rain and wind of the late summer. Stems are layered, but flowers, what's left of them, have bent upright (photograph below) and seed heads are quietly filling.

The cornflower is mostly very rare in the arable scene.  It can cope with the northern weather, probably better than other cornfield annuals like the poppy and corn marigold - in the garden it's generally the last annual in flower to be killed by the frost. But it can't cope it seems with chemical pesticides and the intense competition it gets from dense stands of modern cereals. 

So it is a mystery why its blue haze still spreads every now and then over a few cornfields in east Scotland. Does it rest in the buried seedbank waiting for the right year, or does it come in as a seed impurity? Insects like it. The big patch of cornfield annuals sown this year in the west garden is still busy in mid-September with hive bees, hoverflies (photograph right) and small bumble bees, most of them on the cornflower.

The garden has had much less success with its plan to establish a range of forage legumes. These plants - fixing nitrogen from the air and high in protein - have been part of managed pastures for centuries but are now rarely seen, apart from white clover. The dry soil after sowing in spring, followed by the wet of the summer, and a perverse lot of wild creatures that seem intent on devouring anything strange and legumy, have reduced most of the forage legume collection to bare plots. And there we were, proud in 2010 of the 10 or 12 wild legumes that have become part of the garden since its beginning in 2004, and hoping to grow more. Even the wild red clover Trifolium pratense and kidney vetch Anthillis vulneraria that so enlivened the meadow last year were hardly to be seen. It's the year that bears, not the field! Was it the very long cold winter that suppressed legumes or just a combination of other conditions that we simply don't understand. Not all the legumes suffered. One that grew well was a seed impurity (that's being polite, the seed merchant sent what turned out to be hungarian vetch Vicia pannonica instead of the species ordered), but at least it grew.

Of the few that did not totally die, lucerne Medicago sativa, produced its pale blue flowers in late August and September (photograph right). And we're not the first to fail. In their 1850 Synopsis of the vegetable products of Scotland, the Peter Lawson family of seedsmen say this about lucerne: 'The climate of Scotland has been considered by some as too cold for the growth of lucerne ... lands that .. are of a tenacious nature and damp in winter are totally unfit for growing it.' But they go on to say that if proper attention be paid to the young plants, they will continue to produce for eight years and even more. Let's wait a year or two for the symbiotic bacteria to get going.  We remain optimistic.

The north part of the east garden has been reserved for a collection of medicinal plants which should begin to take shape next year. One of the first to go in was the marsh mallow Althaea officinalis which took well and is now flowering (below).

While it grows wild in coastal ditches and marshes, though rarely in the north, the name officinalis indicates the connection with herb gardens, where it has long been grown for the mucilages (in its roots and other parts) that are used in poultices and ointments, and also at one time in confectionary. The plant has a waxy appearance, puts out shoots late and flowers late around here.

A few small plants of the labiate family have been finding their way into the garden in the last few years. While meadow clary has been in and around the meadow for years, and the corn mint was one of the many plants introduced through the Institute's seedbank research, the marsh woundwort (see below) seems to have found its own way in, but a plant that we think is a calamint, the wild basil Clinopodium vulgare also appeared recently. Unusually for wild labiates in this region, it has its flowers arranged in tight clusters, or whorls, around the stem. Like other labiates, its flowers attract insects, but once the petals wither, the mass of teeth and hairs must deter many that want to eat the growing seeds. In the photograph to the right, each calyx tube with its five teeth is 2-3 mm across.

27 August 2011

The first photograph, below, shows the post-deluge carnage of the heritage and modern cereals in front of the giant cotton thistle. The tops of the tallest cereals, emmer and spelt, are about six feet above the soil. Only the modern wheat (variety Tybalt) survived the wet and wind of mid-August intact and upright without support. 

Seed has formed and matured on all the cereals. It will soon be harvested and stored for next year. What to eat and what to store was once one of the big decisions in agricultural life. If you were hungry enough to eat the lot before sowing next spring, then you had no crop the next year. 

Despite the weather's thrashing, the heads of the heritage cereals retain their architectural grace. The photograph right shows part of the great lax panicle of the black oat, also known as bristle oat, Avena strigosa.  It grows vigorously, but its grain is a small proportion of its total mass.This oat is one of the ancient cereals of Britain, and though hardly grown now, is occasionally found as a feral plant in some areas of the north. Each black 'grain' is about 2 mm wide. The Living Field got the seed for this black oat (and also emmer and spelt) from Orkney College two years ago. 

Many of the flowering plants in the garden are now well past flowering and into full seeding. Only a few, such as the tansy Tanacetum vulgare are still in full flower (below right). Its small, yellow button heads, each about 1 cm across, distinguish it from all other composites growing in this area. This individual may have descended from bits of stem and root brought to the garden a few years ago, refugees from zealous roadside manicuring. It's a perennial, but seeds freely.  

Tansy unblocks channels to your senses. Rub and smell the leaves - they have a strong, almost biting, aromatic scent, not unpleasant.  The plant has been cultivated on a small scale for thousands of years to flavour food, dye cloth and cure various ailments. 

In the garden here, it shuns the meadow and hedgerows in favour of open ground or cracks and crevises. This year, we established a permanent clump of it in the plant dyes section and will add another in the medicinals section in the autumn. Its flowers offer food to bees and other insects well into September.

The woundworts are another group that extends flowering into late summer. The hedge woundwort is as oderous as the tansy, but with the smell of small dead things - voted the most stinky plant in a competition here at Open Farm Sunday 2010. Its relative, the marsh woundwort Stachys palustris, is neater in architecture and not smelly. Marsh woundwort are uncommon in many areas of the croplands, but frequent where moist ditches have been left by fields or roads.

A few plants of marsh woundwort established themselves in the garden, in shade, a few feet from the pond (photographs above). Their reproductive spikes continue extending upwards as they flower - they still have open flowers at the top while seed is maturing at the bottom. As with other labiates, they are much appreciated by pollinating insects.

Prehistoric women and men were no pansies when it came to eating wild plants as salads, garnishes or flavouring. They had their pick of wild garlic, sorrel, dandelion, hairy bittercress, tansy (see above), various mints, lady's smock and herb bennet (thanks to T. Darwin). And we still do today, so there's no need to settle for blandness - bit by bit you can open your mind to the taste of herbs. 

An exhibit on herbs for eating and cooking started this year in the raised beds. Those grown so far are the common, mostly introduced herbs such as parsley, sage, thyme and oreganum, and some less known, including fennel and lemon balm. The plants are not yet well grown, but you're free to nibble.The photograph right is of the bright green leaves of parsley. More wild plants used as culinery and salad herbs will be added in autumn and in spring next year.

The meadow has been a bit subdued this year. The nitrogen fixing legumes that gave such colour and interest in 2010 had almost disappeared. Hardly any red clover Trifolium pratense or kidney vetch Anthillis vulneraria, but we expect they are not gone, just resting. The yarrow Achillea millefolium, cock's foot grass and lady's bedstraw Galium verum have set the tone since spring (photographs below).

 

The lady's bedstraw, its yellow flowering stems above left and in the meadow right, is yet another of those plants that has many uses both in medicine and dyeing. It's been harvested from the wild and grown in semi-cultivation, as it is now in the meadow and the strip between the glasshouse and hedge just outside the entrance to the garden, where it grows bushy, a couple of feet in height.

And finally here's a moody scene of wild carroty heads, dead willow herb, hedge and thundery sky.

 

16 August 2011

Middle to late August is the time to see the flowering and fruiting umbels of the wild carrot Daucus carota. The recent deluge and strong winds have flattened those growing near the paths with nothing to hang on to, but most of the plants in and around the meadow may have bent a little from the base of the stem but are otherwise unharmed.  

The photographs above show (top) a group of plants having flowering and fruiting umbels, (bottom left) an umbel in full flower from above, about 15 cm across, with its concave, almost spongy-looking surface and dark red centre spot, and (bottom right) one seen from the back, having almost finished flowering. Soon the outer branches of the umbels will curve inwards, enclosing the many small, bristly fruits and looking like a round wicker basket with a hole at the top. The wild carrot in the garden reappear each year without any help. They are much favoured by insects. Wild carrot is uncommon as a weed in fields, but the cultivated variant, if left to set and drop seed, will occasionally appear in a later year as a volunteer weed.

The brassica plot in the arable section continues to yield its diverse produce. The plants with the big tubers, reddish on the outside, are widely known as swedes but locally as neeps (photograph right) and are huge and still growing. This variety was bred at the Institute. The leaves have the bluey-grey look of the cabbages rather than the bright green of the turnips, but swedes are in fact the same species as oilseed rape (Brassica napus). The swede variant has been bred to bulk its lower stem rather than put its effort into many oil-bearing seeds, but if swedes are left the next year to seed, they will look much like a scrawny oilseed rape. The yellow flesh when boiled and mashed is traditional with haggis and tatties but is a delicious cooked vegetable in its own right.

The cotton thistle has grown into an eight-foot giant and still amazes with its mix of cotton-down and spiny armour. The photograph below (Living Field collection) is of the main 'rib' of one the branches, sheathed in threads of down. The rib is about 2 cm across.

Three of the tall-growing heritage cereals - emmer wheat, spelt wheat and black oat - were badly thashed about in the recent deluge. They more or less all fell over, one of them on top of the much shorter modern wheat in the adjacent plot. The tall cereals have now been given extra support and continue to fill their grain. The other heritage cereal - bere (barley) - grew shorter and sturdier this year than last and was less affected by the wind and wet. But the mix of modern and heritage cereals in this small plot shows the benefit in this climate of the long term efforts by plant breeding to reduce the length of the stem, increase its straightness and resistance to bending  and concentrate more than half of the mass of the plant in the ear or head.

The heritage cereals such as emmer (right) have not had the same attention from plant breeding as have modern wheat and barley, and though they are much less used as crops, there is no denying the flowing lines of their architecture.   

 

3 August 2011 in the Living Field Garden

The chicory Cichorium intybus returns to full flower each year in late July and August. It likes those unkempt, grassy areas near the entrance and by the field gate. Look closely at the intricate structure of the composite flower head with its range of blue and mauve.

Chicory rarely grows in the croplands here. The botany books suggest it is probably native to Britain but introduced in the north. Ours was but we're not sure where it came from. Its strong wiry stems and blue flowers distinguish it from all other composites in the garden. The best time to view the flowers is in the morning; they tend to close, though not all and not completely, later in the day. Its roots, when baked and ground to a powder, give the flavouring added to coffee in some parts of the world, while the young buds can be cooked as a vegetable or salad. There are many varieties or cultivars grown as vegetables or in small scale production.

The teasel Dipsacus fullonum has also been around since the garden started, but needs a couple of years undisturbed, since it becomes established in the first year, flowers in the second, then dies.  The small rose-purple flowers with purple anthers stick out at various places, usually in  bands around the head. Bees and other insects visit frequently when the head is in flower.The dead stem and head are strong and spiny and usually remain through the winter. The photograph right is a close-up of a head when the flowers have finished and withered; each 'cell' is 2-3 mm across. 

Crops of the brassica or cabbage family (Cruciferae, now Brassicaceae) are grown each year in one quarter of the arable sequence. The cabbage plot is well stocked this year with rows of broccoli, cauliflower and various cabbages, which are all domesticated cultivars of the wild cabbage Brassica oleracea.

  

The wild species, or possibly naturalised descendents of a previous cultivated variety, live as perennial plants right next to the sea, for example on and above coastal cliffs in Angus (look near Auchmithie) or Fife (near Crail).The wild cabbage is by no means the only crucifer to yield useful cultivars. The wild turnip and wild mustards are others. But a more unusual one, growing again after last year's successful outing, is the abyssinian mustard Crambe abysinnica, which bears oil in its seeds, just like many other relatives in the crucifer family. One plant turned up in our seedbank studies a few years ago and the plants have been grown from that. It is visible in the photograph above as a light green haze of stems, just beyond the rows of cabbages and in front of the meadow at the top of the picture. 

A vegetable plot has been cultivated in the west garden for the last two years by SWIIS Foster Care. The plot has potato, leek and onion, beans, various plants of the marrow family and sunflowers (photograph right). The sunflowers are garden variants of the genus Helianthus, and belong to the composite plant family (now Asteraceae) like the chicory, cotton thistle, corn marigold, mayweeds, groundsel and nipplewort. Despite the differences in colour, size and showiness, the sunflower and chicory have the same basic structure - the ray flowers around the margin and tubular flowers in the centre. 

An finally, here is a close-up of a chicory flower head (Living Field collection). Each tube with the vertical blue stripes is about 1 mm across.

 

19 July 2011 in the Living Field garden

The poppy Papaver rhoeas, corn marigold Chrysanthemum segetum, cornflower Centaurea cyanus and mayweed Tripleurospermum inodorum, sown this spring in a small plot of the west garden, are now coming into full height and flower (photograph below, Living Field collection). The plot was established to display cornfield annuals which have now been displaced from the perennial meadow.

Other weeds of arable fields, including fat hen Chenopodium album and corn spurry Spergula arvensis, both present in the soil seedbank, emerged at the same time as the sown annuals. The soil of the plot will need to be disturbed every year to prevent perennial plants taking over.

The meadow in the east garden is now in full flower. The trend of the broadleaf plants to move to the fringes continued this year to the extent that there is now little wild carrot Daucus carota or musk mallow Malva moschata (photograph right, Living Field collection) in the centre. In contrast, the field scabious Knautia arvensis remains in profusion throughout the meadow, providing for pollinator insects.

All the plots in the arable 'rotation' have grown well, so much so in the case of the fallow that it had to be tilled recently to set back the weeds. The heritage and modern cereals, the potato varieties and the different kinds of brassica are all looking good in mid-July. 

Parts of the cereal and fallow plots can just be seen at the middle right of the photograph below. The clump of plants with white flowers at the near centre-left is mostly wild carrot that has migrated out of the meadow, the edge of which appears near right. 

 

The single cotton thistle Onopordum acanthium, in front of the gate in the view above, has grown to about 8 feet in height and is now opening its flowers. 

The cotton thistle's impenetrable spiny flower 'buds' that were present at the beginning of July have started to unfurle to show purple flower heads composed of many tubular florets (right, showing a 4 cm width across the centre of a head, Living Field collection). This big thistle gets a lot of attention, particularly from children who are amazed by the furry-leathery leaves, the armoury of spines  and the great size of the whole plant. Insects and spiders find places to hunt and hide in its architecture. Now they have turned their attention to the florets. Just about visible in the photograph are  two black bodies of insects and a lacework of threads, presumably left by another visitor and connecting the florets. Those florets in the centre have yet to open.   

 

Finally, here is another view of the new plot for cornfield annuals, showing mostly the blue flowering heads of the cornflower.

 

 

 

1 July 2011 in the Living Field Garden

Following last years's successful foray into plant dyes and dye plants, the Living Field decided to start a permanent dye plants area in the garden so that material would be available each year. The area is just getting established. Many of the species are perennials that die back in the winter and so will take a few years more to reach their full size. The dyer's greenweed Genista tinctoria, shown right in flower, is one of the perennials. It's a member of the legume family, and so fixes atmospheric nitrogen from the air, and looks a bit like a small version of the broom that grows in the field boundaries hereabouts. The dyer's greenweed is native to the UK but is uncommon in the wild this far north.

Other perennials include the madder, which is struggling after being transplanted in April, and alkanet which is starting to feel at home. Some are biennials - they grow vegetatively one year and flower the next - and one such is woad Isatis tinctoria, which was badly set back by the severe winter, but is now being encouraged to flower so that seed can be collected for future years. The woad produces a haze of many small brassica-type flowers and distinctive pods (photograph right). Still other dye plants are annual, or weakly perennial, so have to be grown each year from saved seed. Some of the most showy - the dyer's chamonile and dyer's coreopsis - will reach their peak of  flowering in late July.

All manner of strange things turn up in the Living Field garden, many of them uninvited but most of them welcome. One such is the cotton thistle Onopordum acanthium, several individuals of which appeared in the year the garden was opened, 2004. Where they came from nobody knows, because they are uncommon in this area and have not been found elsewhere on the farm. Possibly they were in the seedbank, buried in the soil, and opportunities arose for them to emerge during the construction of the garden from a muddy corner of field.  The Onopordum's of 2004 were so impressive that we forgot to collect seed, but last summer, 2010, two or three new plants emerged, one of which survived the winter and is now about 7 feet tall (photograph below right) and growing.

 

The flowers are not out yet, but the composite heads, each several centimetres across, make an impressive show (left above).

Heritage and modern cereals were grown again from seed and took well on transplanting to their small plots in the arable 'rotation'.  This year, there is spelt and emmer wheat, modern bread wheat, black oat and modern oat, and bere and modern barley, all grown from saved seed. The bere has been particularly impressive this year, extending fast and flowering a couple of weeks before the modern barley.  The photograph below shows the newly headed modern barley in front of a line of bere, which is about a foot (30 cm) taller. The ears of the modern barley are bright green, compared to the more straw-coloured ears of the bere, which have already bent over and are much more awny. There is even more difference in height between modern bread wheat and the emmer and spelt.

 

At Open Farm Sunday, 12 June, Mother Gill's Concoctions displayed bread, bannocks and biscuits made from the various cereals. Really tasty they were too - no more white sliced for me. Thanks to the Agronony Institute Orkney for the original seed of the emmer, spelt and black oat, and to the miller at Barony Mill, Birsay, Orkney for the samples of bere seed and meal used at Open Farm Sunday.

All photograps - Living Field collection.

Contacts:

Geoff Squire for enquiries on this page

Gladys Wright for further information on the garden 

 

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