Harvest Home

It is harvest time in Orkney and the fields are full of beautiful, golden bundles. Gardeners are gathering up their vegetables and children will soon be piling up cans of soup and beans for their Harvest assemblies.




In celebration, we bring you an excerpt from Ernest Walker Marwick's The Lore of the Harvest which discusses the straw 'bikko' dog made from the straw in the last field. Below is an example of said 'bikko'.


We also found a J. Omond photo of some Orphir schoolgirls gathering peas, the sadly ruined harvest of 1909 (another Omond image) and a lovely harvest tea-break or 'half yoke'.




For more Orcadian harvest lore, click here.




The dreaded straw bikko - ultimate insult to a harvesting farmer.

Click to enlarge

Picking peas in Orphir.

Snow ruined the Harvest of 1909.

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A well-earned break.