Posts about starting up a business
I recently listened to this podcast - an interview with Greg McKeown (@GregoryMcKeown) the author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. And it got me thinking about the essential and non-essential within my own endeavours. I as much as the next person can get side-tracked or speed-tracked into the pursuit of the urgent but often frivolous. To date… Continue reading Essentialism
Its New Years eve. The animals are fed, the croft chores are done. And I'm sat inside contemplating life over a coffee. I find the approach of a new year an excellent time to think back on the year that is behind and forward to the days, weeks and months which lie ahead. So here's a… Continue reading 2018 Review & 2019 Plans
Rustle the top left hand edge of a map of Scotland, and chances are your fingers will briefly touch Uist. As excitedly reported in the rye-volution post, doughies along with some other local crofters were planning a technical and networking journey to learn from crofters about grain growing, harvesting and drying. A journey to the edge of… Continue reading A journey to the edge of the map
A rye revolution - a rye-volution A remembering of lost skills - a rye renaissance. It's coming guys - local lochaber grain - slow and steady like a slow rising sourdough. Three little rye rises to share:- 1. A photo of our 2018 rye trial plot - still learning (low density due to germination/weather) but… Continue reading Rye-volution Renaissance is Coming
Quite quiet on the doughies blog of late, and I thought it was high time for a mid season splurge of words by way of update. Bakehouse Update So our bakehouse has quietly grown in the interim. I reckon we have now gone from nano to pico to micro [and can now officially be labelled… Continue reading Sourdough Baking & Growing Update
A plastic free sourdough microbakery. Can it be done? I think yes, but we are not quite there yet. Although our outflow is plastic free (un-packaged returnable crates of unwrapped or paper bagged sourdough), there remains some single use plastic lurking in our incoming supplies. So I've gone about identifying it, and thought about the next… Continue reading A Plastic-Free Sourdough Micro-bakery
Bottlenecks. Perhaps the neck of a bottle of good craft beer. Or perhaps a narrow section of road impeding traffic. Well its bake day today at doughies, and so the bottleneck in question is a too small mixer impeding dough work flow! Today there's the usual regular orders for 75 loaves of sourdough goodness. That's roughly… Continue reading Bottlenecks
What is the question that drives you? The one that keeps you awake at night (in a good way)? For me it is questions like "where have all the oats gone?" "why are crofters not growing rye anymore?" and How can small food production on our croft be closed loop?" You can blanket these questions under… Continue reading The question that drives you
Hogmanay It's the 2nd of January - 2 days after Hogmanay. And January is a great time to reflect on the past, and think about the year ahead. Here at doughies HQ - we've been planning some micro changes for 2018. Here they are:- Thursday is the new Friday During 2017, we baked weekly every… Continue reading 2018 – micro changes
Blogging (at least for me) is about externalising internal thought. Writing down sometimes dis-jointed brain musings, connecting them together and then releasing them into the world. Today my collated strand of thought is centred on waste - both food waste, and waste efficiency being a small food producer. Hibernating for the Winter to avoid Waste… Continue reading Waste
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