Monkshood flowers

This perennial in our garden, has regal blue spires and is flowering profusely now. 

It is a relatively unknown plant and deserves a lot more attention as it is very pretty. It produces tall spikes of hooded purple, blue, white, or bicolor blooms in late summer depending on your colour choice and we only have blue plants. All parts of monkhood are poisonous.

Plants grow best in partial shade and Monkshood dislikes hot weather, so it's usually not a great choice for gardeners with hot summer climates but suits our growing situation on Skye very well!

Getting the bull to the fank

Today five of us went down to the common grazings to walk the community bull to the fank ready for uplift. He has been with the cows all summer and now he is being taken to Inverness for the winter as he belongs to the department of agriculture and those crofters with cows hire him for the season. This is quite expensive, but much cheaper than keeping him full time as he would need to be fed and housed by the crofters over the winter.
He is quite docile and went easily to the waiting pens though we had to leave some cows to keep him company till the transport arrives this afternoon as he was not happy to be left there alone.

Beautiful cloud patterns and light in Lochalsh

On Saturday I was lucky to be invited to go sailing in Lochalsh and we sailed from Eilean Donan Castle back to Kyleakin. There was not a lot of wind for our journey so we eventually had to motor most of the way but you could see in the clouds that above us there was much more wind. Here are a few photos to show how lovely the clouds and light were that day.

Here are a few photos of the lovely cloud patterns

Taking in the onions

Just taken in the rest of the onion crop. Got some good big ones and when these are added to the ones already lifted we should have enough to last till around January. The picture shows them drying ready to be hung up in the larder.

last of the summer flowers

Here's a photo of the new round lawn we made last year with some nasturtiums, bupthalmums and hydrangeas making the autumn display. The new lawn looks quite established as we added some plants from other parts of the garden to make in "instant".