Blog - Page 11 of 39 - Dirty Weekenders

8th October 2016

Superbothy 25 Year Anniversary

Dirties are Mighty

Dig a Big Hole, Kill That Tree

Biscuits Shall Appear.

At the time of the Dirty Weekenders 25^th Anniversary (Can’t believe Dirties is older than most of its current members!) we embarked on a bothy before the dirties term began. We headed up to Sam’s place which is at Comrie Croft roughly 60 miles north of Edinburgh. Sam’s place is a fantastic organic market garden which last time we went was just starting up. When we arrived those of us who were there before couldn’t believe how the place had come along, where there were just dug beds and empty polytunnels, there is now huge amounts of fruit and veg growing!

On the Friday we settled into the polytunnel and made a sort of cardboard fort to place our roll mats. Also it rained lots! On the Saturday we started work at around 9. We split up into two groups, with one group working on the market garden with Sam and the other heading to the woods to do some tree work for Comrie Croft. In the morning I worked on the garden, weeding and digging potatoes ready for market. Other people picked broad beans and other veg, and we also cleared some paths between the plants in the polytunnels. Lunch saw us have the mighty dirties sandwich, which had been missing from my life for too long! There was also an excellent game of biscuit Frisbee. After lunch I switched to the tree side of things, where I teamed up with French Will and we were cutting down some smaller trees to make space for the others to grow, and then cutting the branches off to make poles out of the trees. We also had to avoid many a mountain biker.

In the evening we had a bonfire and some drinks and there was singing and merriment (in some cases maybe a tad too much merriment!) On Sunday I was on team hole digging, where we were digging holes in the berry bush beds to put stakes into. Many rocks were battled then vanquished in the process.

This isn’t the most detailed post, but there is a Haiku. The bothy was fantastic fun and I can’t wait for the next one. Thank you to Keira and Tanya for organising, and our drivers Nina, Elu and Not French Lord Grantham for bringing us there (and doing a cider run).

Love from Bam Bam xxxx

16th April 2016

Sam’s Croft Bothy

Seeing as I had been hanging out with the Dirty Weekenders for two years but employment had kept me off every previous bothy I thought it time to pack in the job and have a good time instead. Plus it would be the last bothy John and Rosie were organising, so it was set to be a blast.

We drove out the luxurious accommodation of ‘Combruith’ a huge hostel in the nearby Comrie village, we had the run of the whole place to ourselves and quickly got into the taxing task of picking rooms, mainly based on which was named after your favourite woodland animal. John and Rosie made us some delicious linguini (far superior to it round cousin, spaghetti). Morna, on a search for anything sweet orchestrated the baking of a great apple crumble with backup from Lizzie.

We went to bed well filled ready for a big day of work. Breakfast was the biggest pan of porridge I have ever seen in my life, with toast for the fussy. We set off to visit Sam for our first day of work, prepared for the worst wrapped up in waterproofs.

Plant beds

Sam’s Croft is a huge, very steep field, which they are in the process of converting into a (hopefully) profitable business. The tasks of the day were path construction (mainly pushing barrows of hardcore), plant bed construction (pushing barrows of horse muck) or tree planting (pushing barrows of woodchip). But we conquered it in typical Dirties fashion with Maximum Effort. There was the fun of an engine powered tractor that a couple of us got to drive about (and maybe have the odd race in).

We needn’t have worried about the weather as it brightened up beautifully and we lazed about over lunch in the sunshine. After work some folks decided to walk home and took a stroll through the forest, where we found a lovely waterfall, of which some of us decided to climb up.

We came home to a delicious vegetable stew and the most epic game of sardines with 13 people in a cupboard or 14 jammed in a full storage room with the lights off. It quickly escalated into deception and subterfuge, with me, your poor narrator searching hopelessly on his own.

The second day of work was slower, mainly due to the weather, we still managed to get two rows of apple trees planted on the campsite nearby and another plant bed constructed through the rain, because We Are Heroes. Our hosts provided a delicious soup to bolster our sandwichy lunch but we soon had to get going (most of us had run out of energy) and we got back in the bus for a swift drive home.

Many thanks to John, Rosie and all those that helped out. It was a great weekend.