Pictures
Tree in Flower
Highlands of Scotland the perfect place to live
Free range pigs in the Highlands of Scotland - Sutherland
Old fishing boat brought down from Arbroath to eventually get burned on a community bonfire night. A sad way for a proud fishing boat to go.
Photo blogs
Photography websites and blogs are probably my favourite and most frustrating sites I look at, frustrating as the photographs are so much better than anything I have yet achieved, favourite - as it lets me see the wonderful diversity of life and places on planet earth, a place we all should look after. So enjoy the photo sites below:
www.anaspidesphotography-blog.com by Iain D. Williams on wildlife photography and places including underwater photography. He is also available for photographic assignments.
Chickens
We started to keep our own free range chickens in 2008 and started off using point of lay chickens, now we have a flock of 17 hybrids in a large run with two chicken houses that we built ourselves. Recently one of our chickens has got very broody, which is pretty unusual for a hybrid chicken. So we bought 6 fertile eggs on eBay and our broody is sitting on these eggs faithfully. We are taking her off the eggs twice a day so she will eat, stretch her legs and drink water. We are hoping to have a successful hatching of Light Sussex chicks, fingers crossed.
One of the chicken varieties my wife is interested in is the Scots Grey and I noticed that eBay UK has hatching eggs available from Murton Wildlife Trust which is based near Arbroath in Scotland. So we are considering trying to hatch this at pure breed chicken from fertile eggs as well. Just got to order the eggs and borrow an incubator.
Scotland
Broch at Nybster in Caithness
The Nybster Broch is an Iron Age settlement probably going back over 3000 years.
Nybster Broch
On the Internet
On the web BBC article on Caithness Brochs and settlements. There is also the Nybster Broch Project page about the recent excavations and discoveries.
Growing your own
We are trying to convert a farm stack yard (basically a storage area and dumping area on a farm) to grow a wide range of vegetables and some fruit. We constructed a polytunnel last year and we have now got it crammed with vegetables, strawberries in pots and tomato plants.
We have 6 potato sacks with different varieties of early potatoes being grown in the polytunnel as well as others being grown outside. The picture was taken in early May - the difference growing in a polytunnel is simply amazing. We bought our polytunnel from First Tunnels.
Free Food
Yes nettles can be eaten, used instead of spinach, used in making bread, beer and wine, and makes a nutritious soup. Well that is what countryside and living off the land books tell you, I do remember trying nettle soup many years ago and I did not like it. Well we have a good supply of wonderful nettles and while they are also loved by certain butterflies and months we will be experimenting with nettle as a food in the near future, we will let you know our results, later.
I also plan to use nettles to create a free organic liquid fertiliser to use on our vegetables and tomato plants we are growing, and possibly as an insecticide for aphids. We are not organic growers - we are just mean and if we can do it for free, well that is good - it is also is good for the environment as well as our pocket that suits us.
You may find this link on nettles interesting.
Web
Romania the home of dracula is a source of mystery and scary stories. I now know a little bit more about Transylvania after reading about living in this country on www.trackranger.com this is a very interesting website by Paul White.
Just been reading Beneath the Wig - a blog on current legal and political, social topics and everyone should read it, in my opinion.
We have three or four chickens who escape from their large chicken run and it now looks like time to clip their wings as they invade the new vegetable garden looking for worms and in the process dig up the newly planted or sown vegetables ... I am not looking forward to doing this although it is meant to be painless for the chicken.
I am interested in all wildlife and also in insects so you may find the links page on the Royal Entomological Society website useful if you are interested in entomology (study of insects).
Veggie Burgers - another tweet and another amazing website on a topic I have been interested in for a while - veggie burgers. I am always so disappointed when one buys from a supermarket and the vegetarian food tastes like cardboard and we live too far away from fantastic vegetarian restaurants such as Henderson's in Edinburgh. So Ultimate Veggie Burgers .com may be help put the taste into veggie burgers for us, can't wait to try out the delicious sounding burgers.
Cool Photo Blogs - as a person who aspires to become a good photographer I often get inspiration from other photographers and one place to find them is on the cool photo blog website, maybe one day I will be good enough to get listed on this website.
The first tweet of the day leads to an absolutely brilliant website - if you love biscuits and want to send them to a friend instead of flowers check out www.biscuiteers.com
Vegetarian living - a cool website for the Vegetarian Living magazine.
Wildflowers - I just remembered to look up a website that supplies wildflower seeds (and other seeds) for the garden and farms - we are working at creating our own wildlife and wildflower areas in our garden of 1.4 acres. So far we have planted over 400 trees, mostly native species including Rowan, Flowering Cherry, Birch, Scots Pine, Willows, Field Maple (Acer campestre), Alder and the none native larch. You can buy seeds for native UK wildflowers from Sow Wild Seeds
Politics - am I the only person that thinks Vince Cable is a liability to the Lib Dems? On the BBC website there is an article about Cable criticising the Tories for being "ruthless, calculating and very tribal". What else do you want from the Conservatives, nice tree hugging politicians that roll over and play dead when the Lib Dems want something, well for me the Conservative / Lib Dems are doing pretty well for the country - we need a strong government who is not afraid to make hard, tough and unpopular decisions. For me I like Nick Clegg and while I did not vote Lib Dems in the Scottish elections (I normally would) due to the AV fiasco and also I wanted to say NO to New Labour in Scotland, I will probably vote for the Lib Dems in the next general election; so Nick Clegg not all is lost as millions of voters will probably do the same.
Lesson learned - If you are developing a website then the following suggestions may help:
- Keep it simple
- Use html to structure your website and CSS to design it
- do not create flash only websites as search engines can't read the content on the flash site.
- if you use flash menus also make sure you have text based menus at bottom of page (for search engines to follow) and or a good up-to-date sitemap.
- if you don't know how to design your own website then use a content management system such as WordPress to create it. Pay for a good template and you just need to write the content.
- Creating a commercial site to sell products then consider using ecommerce templates
- read books on the subject, there is loads of great books on web design and css
Websites & more
A website I plan to look at more carefully is the Internet Radio - Blog Talk Radio www.blogtalkradio.com
Interesting article about Fish retail labels being inadequate led to the Marine Conservation website www.mcsuk.org a UK marine conservation society for the protection of UK seas, shores and wildlife.
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland - Scotland's national collection of buildings, archaeology and industry www.rcahms.gov.uk have an interesting page on a Viking "Shipyard" found on Skye.
Just came across the People's Trust for Endangered Animals http://ptes.org website, this is new to me and will be on my favourites list to look at regularly.
Photograph of a car in the west coast of Scotland "My New Car" I wish!
I just discovered World Photography a twitter / facebook based newspaper by Ros who had added a link to Istanbul Food with great photographs of food taken by Tuba Şatana (@tubasatana) ... now off to work in the garden, lovely sunshine and warm for May in Highland Scotland.
Web
Cool blog's www.beehive-bakery.blogspot.com - Stacie Stewart's blog on food, clothes and life - she is also on twitter @stacie_stwart
Travel & Documentary Photography by Jerome Lorieau - http://jeromelorieauphotography.com