Hello, Jane here, guest blogging again at Jessica’s request following another lovely visit to Sparrowhall. In contrast to my guest blog last year, this time instead of a day-by-day journal (the most common feedback I got on last year’s blog was that it was “detailed”), I’m leaving you a hodgepodge of photos, highlights, and yes, some quite overly detailed observations.
Food
Jessica makes yogurt and bakes bread at least every other day, or about four times a week. She is very organized and scheduled about it, so she claims it’s “easy.” I find it pretty impressive. She also made biscotti—special for me because I can’t eat dairy—flavored with cardamom, which she crushed in a mortar and pestle. Biscotti are also allegedly easy. I’m skeptical. They were delicious.
Because I can’t eat dairy, I can’t vouch for the deliciousness of Jessica’s yogurt, but it sure looks delicious. The bread certainly is.
Eggs make up a major part of daily meals at Sparrowhall, especially lunch, which tends to be eggs on toast (from Jessica’s homemade bread). The eggs are spectacular. I failed to photograph the deep bright yellow-orange of the yolks.
Extra eggs, when available, are put out for sale in an honesty box where Sparrowhall’s drive meets the road. (Honesty boxes are found across Sanday, not only for eggs but also for cakes and other such treats.)
The chickens provide the eggs, so that's also “easy.” However, the humans are playing an important role. In this case, it’s mostly Danny—the chickens are his jurisdiction. Danny feeds the chickens: in addition to regular feed they eat table scraps and the whey left over from yogurt making, and they dig through the compost and sheep poop to find bugs and whatever else turns up (chickens are indiscriminate diners). Danny also builds the houses where the chickens spend the night—somehow I also failed to photograph the very clever hutch that moves on wheels to rotate the chickens, so their poop can fertilize a wider area, and the bottom of the hutch stays clean since it’s just bars. I had heard about these kinds of coops, and the one Danny built is a very fine one.
There is also a lot of management involved in keeping the chickens. The two bantam hens are smaller (as bantams are) and lay smaller (thus less desirable) eggs but these hens are good at hatching and raising chicks, so in the clever scheme that keeps poultry production running at Sparrowhall, when one of the bantams goes broody—desperate to sit on eggs—Danny gathers up whatever non-bantam eggs are around and puts them under her. She immediately and enthusiastically takes up the task of sitting on her adopted eggs and takes care of the chicks when they hatch. Currently one of the bantams is raising four black chicks from eggs laid by the big black hens, all of which were big enough to venture out during my visit, and one of which is immensely larger than the other three, for reasons that remain a mystery. Chickens lay more eggs in the summer, so when they were at their most plentiful, Jessica put tons of eggs in waterglass to preserve them for the leaner months. She also pickled a big jar of hard-boiled eggs, which I got to sample and were very tasty.
When I arrived this year, there were two black cockerels at Sparrowhall, the younger of which is still perfecting his crowing voice. The older cockerel had developed a bad leg, and was hopping around—it seemed to be an injury rather than an illness because he was otherwise healthy, so he was culled to end his suffering. Danny took care of the task swiftly and with minimal pain and stress to the poor cockerel, which was then transformed by Jessica into an incredible meal of coq au vin. I got to assist with plucking and as sous chef.
We also had a wonderful couple of meals of wild goose breast, from the 17 geese that Jessica
inherited from a hunter last fall. The goose breast definitely requires vigorous chewing, but the fantastically gamey flavor—enhanced by a delicious marinade that Jessica made—made it worth the effort.
The sea provides too, with assistance from Danny and his salvaged and rehabbed lobster pots. The day after we first went to the harbour to put out a lobster pot, it got filled up with juvenile crabs—much too small to eat, so they all got returned to the sea to keep growing (or to get eaten by seals, more likely).
The next effort netted a 1.5 lb lobster, which took a nap in the kitchen fridge while the pots went back out for more. Another day brought another lobster—this one too small, so back into the sea it went—and in the other pot, a hefty crab, well above the minimum legal size for catching.
It fell on me to make dinner that evening, and channeling Jessica’s talent for research and the timing and weighing of things to be cooked, I miraculously managed to produce some perfectly cooked lobster and crab to accompany spaghetti.
Since I enjoy mind-numbingly detail-oriented tasks, I then spent the next couple of hours picking all the remaining crab and lobster meat out of the shells, to be converted into crab/lobster cakes or something else that was hopefully enjoyed by Jessica and Danny after my departure.
Last year’s blog featured haggis, which I had picked up at Donaldson’s butcher in Kirkwall before catching the ferry. This year I thought I would pick up three haggises (is that the correct plural form?) at Donaldson’s, and I tried to do that, but that day they had a special buy three get three free special, so on the insistence of the cashier I ended up schlepping six haggises to Sparrowhall, one of which we ate, while the other five went in the freezer for future meals. Six haggises weigh a lot, in case you're wondering.
And there are vegetables! Danny took charge of the spring planting this year, and the polytunnel is a delightful chaos of spuds, peas, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, chard, carrots, beets, kale, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, broccoli, cauliflower, and more, some of which had grown past its prime while other produce was just getting ripe. The cucumbers are the stars of the show. Jessica made dozens of half-sour pickles, we ate cucumbers nearly every day, and the produce drawer was still filled to the brim with cukes. Beets were also abundant enough that Jessica had produced a large jar of pickled beets before my visit which were nearly done when I arrived, and I assisted with putting up a second jar. The beet pickling juice—a bright red concoction of sugar, salt, and vinegar—was so intense I swear it got me drunk.
Supplementing Danny’s polytunnel is the community garden a short walk down the road, across from the school, where the day’s veg are put out on a shelf, available to whoever wants them for a donation that you leave in the honesty box. I picked up some beans there—once shelled, it was just a handful—along with tomatoes, a single small piece of broccoli, and an onion. It's just whatever random assortment of goodies happens to be sitting on the shelf when you stop by.
Animals
There is a lot of overlap between the categories of food and animals at Sparrowhall, so this section will deal with the animals that did not provide us with food during my visit. There’s not much to say about the two remaining ducks, which seem to have stopped laying eggs for the moment (or for the season) and so have moved temporarily into this category, rather than with the food providers. The ducks stick together and seem easily alarmed.
The ewes are much tamer than last year—except for shy ewe—and the lambs are adorable and tolerate quite a bit of petting of their lovely wooly heads when receiving their daily portion of kibble. Being sheep, they get all the nutrition they need from grass and other vegetation in the fields, including the abundant roses growing in a small section of field surrounded by broken down fencing, where they like to shelter and nibble.
To ensure they will come when needed and allow themselves to be handled, Jessica gives the lambs and ewes a few handfuls of feed in the evening. I got to take over this very fun task a few times. One lamb in particular seems more interested in affection than food, so while the other sheep butted heads trying to get the last bits of feed out of the bucket or off the ground, this little one just cuddled next to me and seemed to be asking for forehead scritches. Most of the other sheep at least tolerate touching in the rush for food, so you get to feel the very different textures of their wool, some quite rough, others almost silky. The lambs in particular are very soft and cuddly feeling. By the time you read this, the lambs will have been weaned. The ram lambs will go with their dad, Pete, safely away from the ewes and the ewe lambs, in separate fields.
The cats! Cookie is bigger than the tiny kitten she was during my last visit, but she is still fierce and fearless and has become an expert at catching birds, mice, voles, insects, and anything else that can’t manage to escape her claws. She climbs up on the barn roof and tries to reach under the eaves to catch the birds she knows are there. Just like when she was a kitten, she doesn’t hesitate to use her very sharp teeth and claws on humans to communicate her irritation—like when you try to pull burrs out of her fur—but she is still totally adorable and has the loudest purr.
Freya remains unimpressed. She comes in the house more often now, although Jessica said she disappeared for the whole month of July. But she only tolerates petting on her terms, and has no patience for Cookie, who just wants to play with her (and with everything).
The one thing the cats don’t catch is rabbits, because rabbits are mysteriously absent from the area around Sparrowhall, even though I saw hundreds of rabbits hanging out in fields along the road on other areas of the island.
The voles are interesting. They are Orkney voles, a subspecies of the common vole, which is not found anywhere else in the UK; they were apparently brought to Orkney by humans in Neolithic times. I haven’t seen a live vole, only a dead one, left in the drive by one of the cats, but it was quite large and plump looking (I'll spare you the photo--you can Google cute pictures of live ones instead). It’s not hard to believe that the ancient Orcadians ate them. Jessica assured me she is not planning to add voles to the menu at Sparrowhall anytime soon.
Beaches!
I learned on this trip that Google Maps is not to be trusted when it comes to Sandy's famous beaches, because what looks like a beach on the digital map, and at first glance in real life when viewed from the road, can end up being a sort of sandy and/or muddy tidal flat where the water never gets deeper than your ankles. A proper map identifies these correctly as sands—neither sea nor land. My failed attempt at finding a place to swim at Cata Sands led me to continue to the eastern end of the island where I immersed myself in the sea at a lovely beach featuring the wreckage of a World War I destroyer ship.
Getting there
Getting to Sanday is a whole other adventure, especially if you decide to cycle up the Highlands or along the northwest coast like I did this year (coast) and last year (central Highlands). If anyone else is thinking of doing this, feel free to reach out for tips!
And that’s it for this year’s blog. Thanks to Jessica and Danny for another awesome visit. Can’t wait to see you again next year!
