1/11 When we moved to the croft, we had no background in farming. We decided to start small with the animals we would bring on and in May 2016 welcomed our first 3 chickens!

2/11 In the early days all our hens had names. We started with Rose, Bay and Willow, who were then joined by Herb, Meadow, Sweet, Blue, Bell, Heather, Poppy, Clover – you can probably guess the name theme!

3/11 All our early hens lived in a static hen house that was here when we moved to the croft. We soon saw the quality of the eggs our hens were producing as a result of having a huge area to roam and eat grasses, herbs, insects and small mammals.

4/11 As a way to get a bit of extra income, we built a small honesty box at the top of our track to sell our surplus eggs.

5/11 Despite being fairly rural we live on a major tourist route and we soon realised that we couldn’t keep up with the demand for our eggs – both for tourists and our growing local market!

6/11 We decided to upscale and bought 2 mini hen houses on wheels and put these in our newly planted hedgerows. We could use the hens to scratch around and reduce the grass competition for our trees

7/11 We’d been reading a lot about integrating hens into a pasture set up where they worked along side other animals and changed our feed to certified organic

8/11 We decided to build an Eggmobile, a mobile hen house that we could tow using a quad bike. This lets the hens eat the bugs in fresh cow pats and add their own fertiliser to the fields.

9/11 With all these new hens, we needed to expand our market. We decided to set up Egg Club, a weekly delivery service of eggs to people locally

10/11 Egg Club is fully subscribed and has been a really successful venture for us. The hens are making great improvements to our fields so we may embark on EggMobile#2 this winter

11/11 Egg Club has also helped us build relationships with new customers and direct most of our sales to local people