What a difference a year makes

It has now been one year since we moved on to the farm. The one thing I wanted to avoid was moving on Christmas eve and we were feeling distinctly un-festive this time last year. What with packing up our house and moving to the land it was all I could do to get presents for everyone let along spread any festive fun. A year on and we are still in the caravan and still waiting for a decision on our planning application so it does good to remember what we have achieved in the last 365 days:

• We have power, real, actual electricity. There are twinkling Christmas lights EVERYWHERE!
• We have removed all the stinking rotten silage from the yard
• We have made paths and started to give shape to the land. This one may not seem like a lot but this has even the single biggest thing that has occupied us in the last year 
• We have created a mud bath in the process
• We Had a baby!
• We got hot water (one week before baby was born)
• We have found caves and met the local cavers. They can be found on our land every Wednesday and Saturday. They like dynamite
• We have bats (common pipistrelle thankfully and not anything rarer). They will be living with us in our home when we finally get to convert it
• We have tidied up endless little corners
• We have registered as small holders ready to get our first sheep and chickens in the new year. We are still arguing about wallabies and emus
• We have put doors on the barns and locked them with old locks we have found in the yard
• We have removed the concrete floor from the long barn
• We have created an entertaining space in the milking Parlour
• I have finally made the curtains that I smugly bragged I would have time to make between finishing work and giving birth last spring!
• We have held the first of what we hope will become our annual Christmas yard party
• We overcame a rat infestation
• We got a cat
• We spent a week, in a caravan during a heatwave with a newborn baby, a kitten and all the doors and windows shut
• We have unearthed hundreds of tyres
• We have moved thousands tonnes of soil
• We have planted an orchard
• Removed the concrete walls of the silage clamp - which incidentally lies on top of the ruins of an old house which I will endeavour to find out more about in 2018
• We have finally chosen the tree for the tyre swing
• We have made some lovely new friends
• We have acquired and learnt how to use loads of exciting machinery
• We re-diverted the stream

But perhaps the most important thing is that we followed our dream. I know that I have said it before but on paper, moving into a caravan without power, water or heating, in the winter, 5 months pregnant, with a toddler, to convert a barn that seemed to get no daylight, in a yard at the bottom of a hill where the fog settles for most of the year, without planning permission in place, with a listed barn and no idea what we were doing, sounds like the worst thing we could have done. In reality it is the best thing we have ever done and I would urge anyone to move heaven and earth to make your dreams a reality.

On that note it only leaves me to wish you all a very happy and fun-filled Christmas and to share some pictures of the progress we have made in the last year:

The Cattle Shed before

The Cattle shed after

Tidying up windows

Tidying up corners

Ready for planting bulbs

Re-building walls

Quarry path when we had just gained access...

...and quarry path now

Back of our home before we fully dug it out

Dug-out and re-built wall of what will be our dining room

Silage clamp walls before

and mid excavation!

Flood proofing the stream with the dumper...

...and flood proofing the stream with the tractor!

Thanksgiving the Rock Farm way

Sometimes it's hard to see progress. Particularly if you're living through a process. We don't see the rate at which our children grow until someone shrieks "look how tall he is now" across a room. Growing out a hairstyle or growing a baby takes 400 times longer when you live it because you don't see the daily, incremental nudges that stack up to make a whole lot of change or an entire human in miniature form.

This is how it is with the Farm. For a year now we have been digging, shaping, rebuilding and tidying but sometimes it doesn't feel like we've actually achieved all that much. All that changed for me this week when, after being totally inspired by what the clever folk at Castle Farm Cafe have done with a big metal barn, we hosted a Thanksgiving meal for 17 friends in the former milking parlour.

Since we moved here nearly one year ago, there are only really two things that I have missed: a bath (oh to wallow daily in hot water with wine and magazines!) and a space to entertain in! In our old house our 8 seater table would often stretch to 12 or 14 with kids perched on stools at the corners of the table and an assortment of untidy chairs formerly banished to the garage, hosed down and scrambled in last minute to seat extra guests.

A group of friends old and new came to celebrate a great year with us in a building that was, when we moved here, full of milking equipment and rusting metal. Looking at the picture of how it was then and what we scrabbled together last weekend I have truly realised how much we have achieved. It is now nearly a year since we moved here and there are no end of corners that have been tidied and made good...more on that in December. With an oven that came out of my brother in laws kitchen, a Fire hood from my mother in laws new house, some German beer festival tables and a rope light or two we transformed the metal milking parlour from this:

Before

to this:

On the strength of this meal we have been granted permission to host Christmas in The Milking Parlour so watch this space for mark two complete with Christmas tree and decorations galore as well as Barefoot in the Milking Parlour supper clubs in the Spring!

Planning application update

First of all congratulations and thank you to all of you who were baited by this most boring of post titles! I really have surpassed myself with this one.

This is just a very quick (and to be honest not particularly interesting) update on what I am quickly learning is an unapologetically slow process. We now have a validated planning application. We thought we had when I wrote my last post but it seemed there was still a map which was to the wrong scale, although how it has taken three months to realise this is anyone's guess. As a result our planning notice is now displayed for all to see on our gate:

This may not sound like much but it really does mean that we know when a planning decision will be made (it's the 30th September if you are interested but don't feel bad if this little foray into planning bureaucracy makes you want to rip your teeth out; I feel your pain). So in little under 8 weeks we should know if we can turn
this:

Barn

into this:

Initial Drawings

Now we have to wait and see what comments are made on the application and keep everything crossed that we don't come up against too much negativity.

Meanwhile we are clearing the yard of rubble and making some paths in the quarry to give what is essentially a glade some shape and structure. Last weekend we had our first camp on the land which has given us lots of ideas for how to shape the space and where to focus our energies whilst we wait for our planning decision.

Anyone wishing to comment on our application can do so at mendip.gov.uk

6 Months In: 6 Things We Have Learnt

As we hold our breath and keep everything crossed for a positive response to our planning application, the result of which is due any week now, I realised that it has been six months since we moved into a caravan in a former farm yard in deepest somerset. Whilst we are still very much at the start of Project Farm we have learnt loads in the last six months. I can now start a generator every time and my fire-lighting skills have come on leaps and bounds whilst Big G has learnt that it is impossible to build a farm single handedly with two children in tow as well as the not entirely unrelated skill of getting out into the yard and onto the digger before the digger obsessed toddler awakes. This does of course mean that someone else has to deal with the ensuing tantrums but it is amazing what an IKEA breakfast can do to soothe the mind of a distraught three year old.

Here are the six slightly more useful thing that we have learnt so far. These are the first things I would tell anyone about to take on a project like ours:

1.Assume you have a rat problem, before you even move in 

I realise that this is not a great start but I am being deadly serious. Our barns had been uninhabited for at least twenty years so all the flora and fauna had free reign to grow and do and they pleased. Enter us, with our rubbish and our food waste, add some springtime ratty breeding and BINGO we were infested. When I say infested I really mean it...after catching two of the little darlings in my car we realised that thanks to some half eaten strawberries (toddler) and an open window (me) we had had rats TRAPPED IN MY CAR for two weeks. TWO WEEKS*! I practically refused to drive my car for weeks afterwards and Big G had to reconcile himself to the idea of killing other animals. For a life-long vegetarian this was a stretch until talking to some friends who live in a beautiful Comer down in Devon. They had a similar problem but eventually realised that it doesn't matter how many animal rights protests you have been on, we are animals too and we have rights that the rats don't give two hoots about!

The other mistake we made was not to unpack all of our kitchen boxes when we first moved - in one crate in the barn was one opened packed of lasagne sheets...which they rats absolutely destroyed, along with some nearby clothing. It is certainly a good lesson in letting go of your belongings but it would have been cheaper and more hygienic to make sure there was no food for them to feed on in the first place. Lesson well and truly learnt.

A trap, some poison, a full car valet and the fastidious removal of all possible food later and we seem to have sorted the problem (crosses everything and tries really hard to forget that this ever happened).

2.Don't pay a planning consultant until you have joined the NFU 

It turns out that even in rural Somerset, where there is little doubt that your planning application relates to redundant farm buildings, the advice given by a local planning consultant may not include useful things like, 'a lot of what you want to do is probably permitted development so will entail far less paper work and far far less in planning application fees to the council.'

JOIN THE NFU ON DAY ONE! It cost us less that £100 for the land that we have and in 30 minutes on their website we learnt more about what we are permitted and not permitted to do without planning consent even being needed than in the three months of 'consultation' with our 'advisor'. As a sub point the planning department are also not willing or able to give advice which might save you (denude them of) funds. It got to the point where the council wanted five planning fees to convert one shed into five units...which it now appears probably falls under permitted development for that type of farm building we are talking about. We should get an answer on this in the next few weeks also but so far it is looking good. 

The other advantage to joining the NFU is that they have tonnes of advice on hand for all sorts of things including feed in energy tariffs. This is useful if, like us, you want to generate as much clean energy as possible.

3.Get the more terrier-like/less busy one of you to be in charge of chasing people for reports 

Because it turns out that everything takes for ever. You know that bit of buying a house when your waiting for a piece of paper to go from one solicitors desk to another's? You know, the bit that seems to take weeks and makes you want to the solicitors yourself and delivering said document in person? Well engineers, consultants and councils all seem to work at that pace all the time! Get on the phone and badger these people politely rather than assuming, like we did, that things just have to take a long time. 

4.Move in in the winter - it will make the summer seem that much more magical when it arrives

I cannot over emphasise how wonderful it is to watch the land awake and grow after the winter. 

Summer flowers

Common Vetch gone mad

5.The word 'Need' takes on an entirely different meaning when it comes to boys and their toys! 

That is slightly unfair - Big G's speciality is buying and selling vehicles so when he says that he can buy a digger and sell it for a profit once we are done with it I am inclined to believe him. However when he decided to buy a second dumper truck because "we need a bigger one to move that pile of rocks over there faster" I did raise and eyebrow. On the plus side the machinery obsessed boys in this household are in seventh heaven with a digger, tipper, tractor and two dumpers to play, sorry work, with.

6.DO IT! You are more resilient and it will be more brilliant than you think!

I was honestly unsure of how I would cope with life in our caravan and Big G was certainly a little nervous when I pushed for us to be in before Christmas when there was no hope of water let along hot water at that stage. However, we get to wake up every morning and listen to the birds, to walk out and drink our morning coffee in a farmyard and picnic in a beautiful glade where once there was a quarry, all without leaving home which is quite frankly, perfect.

* I would like to officially apologise for my over use of capitals and exclamation marks in this post but, I mean, RATS!! 

Sky Rockets in Fight Foragers delight

Well it has been a little while hasn't it? Baby induced radio silence is however over and there is so much to say about project farm that I could write for days, baby and toddler willing. However instead of blurting it all out in one post like an over excited friend you haven't seen for years (you know the one, loud, brash, in your face and BORING beyond imagination despite the large chunk of life there is to catch up on), I will just concentrate on one glorious element of our journey at a time. Just like that needy pal I want to do anything I can to keep you coming back for more.

Since my last post (a shameful two months ago and only three days before the birth of munchkin number two) Spring has sprung so far it has turned into summer and the land has changed out of all recognition. Despite the weather outside this week, Spring has been dry and mild and where once there was mud everywhere there are now beautiful grasses and flowers that I have never seen before. We have so many varieties of the pea family that I never even knew existed and  field full of grasses that are in full bloom (if I am totally honest here I didn't really appreciate that grasses flower but it seems they do. Not only that, they are beautiful to boot). One of the most wonderful things however has been the discovery of what edible offerings the land produces in Spring and Summer.

For me spring is defined by the scent of wild garlic. I am obsessed and make pesto by the gallon every year, dragging the family on long walks to find the best sites for foraging or leaving them dozing in the car on the byways of the south west whilst I trot up hills basket in hand. Although we do not have enough garlic growing on the land to feed my habit, I was delighted to find two clumps of it right on the edge of the land. Just enough to make a wild garlic risotto, which was incidentally my last supper before baba deux decided to arrive three weeks early. Every spring without fail I make this amazing risotto from Rachel Demuth which is super simple and bloomin delicious!

Wild garlic / Ramsen

Another surprise find was an abundance of mint. Pass me the mojitos and cancel my summer engagements darling! As if that wasn't find enough we also recently found that one entire bank of the quarry is covered in wild strawberries.

Srawbs

Mint galore

Slightly more unsual and not strictly spring based are elf caps which the woodland floor was covered with in the winter and which I have recently been told are edible.

Elf caps

So far so what right? We own some land and on it grow some edible plants. STOP PRESS! I have however saved the most unusual for last. We have known since we first looked at the land last summer that there as a Japanese knotweed problem - it would have been hard to miss as it has had decades to take root unchallenged and it does so love to grow. What is surprising though is that this too is edible and a quick search on the internet led us to tonnes of recipes for this 'delicacy'. We have yet to try it as we had, until recently, been doing everything in our power to get rid of it. So much so that it currently looks like this:

A big pile of Japanese Knotweed

One of the big advantages to this site being an abandoned quarry is that the soil is very shallow - one scoop with the digger and we were able to lift most of the knotweed out. As soon as it grows back (which there is no doubt it will - this stuff is more pernicious than Theresa May) I will investigate further although it may have to wait until next spring when the shoots are most edible. 

Now all we have to hope for is truffles and we've got it made! On this note if anyone reading this knows of any truffle dogs in the South West please get in touch as I would love to see if we do have any even though it is highly unlikely. 

For those of you you who got the musical/Anchorman ref in the post title here it is in full: Stay classy San Diego...

Winter Progress

Ever since this madcap journey to Dream Farm began we have been besieged by calls of madness. Madness at the amount of land we have taken on. Madness at the enormity of the project, but mainly our friends and family have talked about the madness of moving into a caravan in Winter!

Once we realised that we would complete on Dream Farm in October it quickly became apparent that we would have to rent out our house pronto and thus that we would have to move into the caravan in deepest darkest winter. We were very lucky that we immediately found a lovely family to take on our old home but this gave us an additional deadline of pre-Christmas which in the end we took quite literally and moved in the day before Christmas Eve. This was not, I might add, for the want of trying or the fantastic show of help and support from a great group of friends with vans, cars and good will. As an aside I cannot recommend highly enough the worth of a day moving house with friends. What should have been a stressful and difficult day was actually really fun and productive (this of course had nothing to do with the fact that due to the whole being preggers thing the most I could do was direct proceeding and make tea!). In the end we managed to do in a day what would have taken us weeks to do on our own and I spent a lot of the day laughing.

We always knew that initially progress would be slow. This is after all a long-term, forever-home project so nothing is going to happen overnight. There is a little part of me that thinks we will eternally be living in a semi-built chaos blind to the incompleteness that surrounds us but for now let's stick to the ideal scenario that one day we will have built (and finished) our dream home. Whichever way you look at it though it is going to take us a while. We have planners, neighbours (well one or two) the council, and frozen ground to get through after all and that's before we have even started to raise the money to actually build this supposed new home of ours. However we have actually done quite a lot in the short time that we have been the owners of this little corner of paradise.

The path(s): When they say that things must get worse before they get better they definitely had making paths in a field in the winter in mind! In the last few months we have taken a lovely, overgrown and neglected field and carved a series paths in to it! It is going to look wonderful when it is properly landscaped and seeded but for now it is a big fat scar waiting for kinder weather.

Beautiful field

New path behind the barn

Sometime when you're carving paths you find caves!

The quarry: the first thing we did on completion was to ask local farmer 'Farmer Dave' to come and chop down the weeds and flatten the anthills. There are, I dare say a fair few million ants who were not very happy with this but we now have a level, green space perfect for all our amazing plans.

The Quarry before on cold completion day

The Quarry now in crisp winter mode

Pimping the caravan: I am starting to get in to trouble for painting a picture of squalor and deprivation. Despite the lack of running water we are not simply living in a caravan. We (Big G) have built a porch and a beautiful shepherds hut bedroom to make the space a little more liveable and to accommodate our soon to be swelling family.

Le Caravan

Building the new porch to attache the Shepherd's Hut to the caravan

Extended dwelling, boot room, wood store and space for fridge freezer - see not too shabby at all!

Amassing some fun farm equipment: the logic, so I am told, goes a little something like: we own a farm therefore I must buy a tractor and a dumper truck. 

Tractor boy.

Water: We still don't actually have water that we can access, but we do have a 42 metre hole in the ground which, once the water pump is fitted, will pull water up into our soon to be erected water tank and then into (drum roll please) our TAPS! Whether or not we can then heat said water remains to be seen but I for one am happy with any sort of tap water.

May not look like much but this friends is our bore hole

Getting closer and closer to actually being able to pump water out of the ground

slurry slurry slurry!

Plans: We now have the first two drafts of our plans but more on this in my next post, complete with pictures.

When reality bites

It is now nearly three months since we officially took mortgaged-to-the hilt-owenership of the farm and nearly a month since we actually moved in.

Now don't get all excited folks. We have not, in that time, managed to work a Grand Designs style miracle on the falling down barns you saw in my last post. We are not living in some kind of dreamlike state, in the home of our dreams, glitter ball a twinkling (although more on this later because it turns out that as undoubtedly lovely as it is, on-demand hot water does not equal happiness). No, we are in fact living in a static caravan, or as Big G now insists I call it, a park home. It's a caravan.

Let me try to paint a picture. It is winter. We moved in the day before Christmas eve despite this being my one proviso leading up to moving day and static caravans, in case you do not already know, are not insulated. At all. The caravan itself is 10 feet wide by 32 feet long with three bedrooms, separated by paper thin walls, a kitchen with a kick-ass gas oven, a shower room and a toilet. These last two are currently more for ornamental purposes as we have no running water or sewage. In fact we have very few of the amenities which until now I took entirely for granted. We do not have mains power and are currently generating power from a fuel guzzling generator which powers, in turn, the caravan itself (it gets very loud when the toaster or a hairdryer get switched on) and a rack of batteries which do much the same only much, much quieter. The aforementioned lack of water is due to be solved imminently thanks to the bore hole we have drilled so that we can get our own water from the many water sources that run underneath the land. This also cuts out the awkward bit where we had to dig up our neighbours field in order to lay pipes for mains water, so ultimately is a win. There is a gas boiler in the caravan already so when we do get water we will also be able heat it. I know. not only running water but HOT running water. I did mention this was the stuff of dreams right? Our heating is fed by a wood burning stove with a back boiler that feeds a radiator in each room. When this works it works beautifully but it is reliant on several things:

1. Lighting the wood burner. I know, sounds obvious right? However when it's -6 outside and dark and you need to dress yourself and a sleepy toddler, the last thing you want to do is set your alarm an hour earlier so that the ambient temperature outside the duvet is something even remotely comparable to the temperature you have cultivated under the duvet. Even Big G does not want to do this however much his in built man-compulsion to make sure that his family to do not expire on his watch kicks in (which by the way it quite rightly doesn't at 6am in the winter!).
2. Understanding the thermostat. After a month  and two thermostats I am relatively confident that we now have this covered but only time will tell. I am now very good at identifying the early sound of boiling water in radiators. We are staying warm AND learning new skills.
3. Understanding how electricity generated from a converter works...thankfully Big G does now understand this so we no longer have buzzing lights, power that only seems to last two hours or a boiler that quite literally boils and means we have to put the fire out (see above).

AND YET...we are loving it. Now, don't get me wrong, I know that we are in the fluffy honeymoon period and that by March, when I'm eight months pregnant, I will probably be spending prolonged periods of time at my mums house so I can wash my hair, my clothes and walk around in a t-shirt rather than Ugg boots (yes, unapologetically) and all the jumpers we own. Despite the lack of amenities there is a kind of euphoria that we have both discovered and a couple of interesting things appear to have happened to us:

1. I have developed a much stronger desire to leave a smaller footprint on the earth now that we have to think about everything that goes in the bin, down the sink or what we want to eat for the next week because the convenience store up the road is no longer there. It appears that the family who owned this land for the last 100 years were 'encouraged' to stop farming because of their disregard for what went into the stream. We do not want to live like that and want instead to actively try and make something not only dreamlike and glitter ball filled but ethical, sustainable and clean.
2. We have developed a Waltons style goodnight ritual which goes something along the lines of: ME: "thanks for keeping us warm and making everything work and emptying the portaloo for me" BIG G: "thanks for not loosing your shit"*
3. Little man has taken to finding the north star on our drive home from nursery so "he can show us the way home" and then singing "we're at the fa-arm, we're at the fa-arm" as we turn onto the track. This is utterly heart warming and thankfully replaces the calls of "I want to go to the old house" that accompanied our first week in the caravan.
4. Spending so much time in the yard means little man has nailed his balance bike and is now on an unstoppable path to awesomeness.
5. People looking at me like I have an unfortunate illness no longer bothers me...it makes me laugh ever so slightly. It is not ideal. It is not the lap of luxury that we all sometimes dream of but bathing your son in a tin bath in front of wood burning stove and constantly having water on the boil in case an emergency hand wash is needed, feels a little more real than endless hot water.

*subtext: "like we all thought you were going to"

I am not being evangelical about any of this, I am simply noticing things about my self and my lifestyle that I can see the value in changing. In the same way that I think about that food that I put on the table for the family to eat I am now thinking about the impact I am having on my immediate environment in a way that I was not before.

Writing this from the wifi and coffee fuelled comfort of Society Cafe in Bath, having just showered in the gym (if the staff at my gym actually paid attention to the comings and goings of their members I would be in their 'comes here as a token gesture to fitness so she can tell her friends she's been to the gym' group, whilst quietly spending over £30 a month on some hot water and a hairdryer. Who's laughing at who.) and as our first set of building plans gets submitted to the planning department, it is far from ideal but I  can safely say that this dream is most definitely starting to take shape.

Clearing the yard after the auction

Reclaimed steps to the upstairs of our storage barn, getting ready for moving day

Discovering beautiful beams in our storage barn

Making a path to the quarry

Boys and diggers for the win

Clearing the yard

Finding the yard floor beneath the weeds

Clearing the weeds from the front of what will be our house

Laying floor in the storage barn

Barn storage ready

Watching the caravan being pulled into place

New home!