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...

Exploring

Now the weather is getting warmer we have had a chance to explore our local woods and my oh my are they amazing!

The BEST damming stream.

Under the old S&D Railway

Old Somerset and Dorset railway tunnel that was also used to test Concorde engines!

Elf Caps which I discovered too late are an edible. Top of the list for next year's foraging!

The first primroses we found

Water Water Everywhere...Except In The Taps

It's been a little while but really that is because not a lot has happened in the dreary winter days since my last post. We continue to be besieged by plumbing problems down here on the farm. It might actually be more accurate to say that we have been besieged by weather problems. Waiting for a two day weather window in February which is either dry or not sub-zero is a bit like waiting for Donald Trump to say something which is either intelligent or not entirely stupid. Without this necessary weather window we (as so often when writing about the farm we, in this instance, means the big G) are unable to cast the concrete lid for our septic tank (did I mention this was going to be such a glamorous post?!). In addition, the pipes that should be carrying glorious water from our bore hole to our taps have fallen foul of jack frost and are all completely rotten. As a rotten water pipe is as much use as a carpenters ladder we find ourselves still without tap-delivered water.

The irony is not lost on us however as we shelter from the quite frankly biblical amount of rain that we have been having over the last week. Today there is literally water running in every conceivable direction outside the caravan!

☹️

 I know that I have mentioned this before, but not having free flowing running water has really made me realise just how much water we do use on a daily basis. One of my best friends Marcus has been trying to make this point to me for years, usually in response to my incredulous exclamations at the brevity of his showers (seriously, he has the speediest shower technique known to mankind!). It has however taken until now for me to fully appreciate how much water we pour down the drain. Bear with me here, there is a point. We are currently buying our drinking water in 5 litre bottles from our local super market. We then re-use these bottles and use the currently untested water from our borehole for all things that need boiled water like  baths (of the tin variety for little man), hand washing, washing up, cleaning the toilet etc etc and other such glamorous pastimes. Everyday we get through at least 8 of these bottles and  it sometimes feels like all I do is pour water from 5 litre bottles into kettles. As a result with every kettle I boil I think about how I can reuse water. Don't get me wrong I am not talking about reusing the washing up water to cook the vegetables but I can now see why siblings used to be bathed together. So, I now steam lots more vegetables (usually over the daily quota of potatoes that the boys demand); I don't drain vegetables (potatoes) that have been boiled anymore but take them out of the pan and reuse the water for other veg later. None of this is particularly interesting or glamorous (sorry) or even that noble but it is important...in a world where it is very easy to sit at home and lambast the politicians of our age we must make sure that we are accountable for our own actions, however trivial they may appear. Convenience after all does not equal morality.   

On a positive and less ranty note at least the sodden ground is now soft enough for us to plant the orchard which currently looks like this!

A very sad looking orchard!

And we have our first hinged gate!

Gate #1

More progress to follow when we have made some.

Three Reasons Why This Is Not The Hell You Are Imagining

After a flurry of supportive messages following my last post, I feel duty bound to clarify a few things:

1. We are warm - we have a huge wood burner that feeds radiators throughout the caravan and gets it nice and toasty. In fact some evenings we end up in t-shirts because the burner is so hot! The only cold bit of the day is first thing in the morning. This is easily remedied though with a paraffin heater and some early morning cuddles in bed together before we all get up and get dressed. 
2. We do have water - it just doesn't come out of taps yet! We have two kettles that are always on the boil for hand-washing, bathing little man and washing up. Between the gym, my Ma's house and the tin bath in front of the fire we are squeaky clean.
3. The dream is very much still alive and kicking in our little corner of Somerset helped by the may millions of stars that we can see at night before we go to bed and the symphony of the dawn chorus that is not drowned out by cars or rowdy neighbours.

Who could fail to be happy when this is how your day starts

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.

Castle Farm Cafe

It's back to the old blog style a little bit today with a return to food and cafes. I have been meaning to visit Castle Farm Cafe for ages...it pretty much ticks all of my boxes: it's organic - it is based at Castle Farm Organics who supply amongst others Komedia with organic veg; the cafe is part run by the gyus behind Acorn Vegetarian Kitchen, my absolute favourite restaurant on the planet and this week, to add to my desire to show support and eat amazing organic veggie food, I heard about the trouble they are having with an application for a tiny extension to their licence to accommodate their growing list of evening events.

I was dismayed to hear that the council have received so many complaints from local residents about the negative impact that evening events and the sale of alcohol until the dizzy heights of midnight (I know!) will have on the community and so, before jumping in I thought I had better pull my finger out and try it for myself. On this, a rare child free day off work (no, it turns out I don't feel that guilty at all) I am as I type sitting in the barn that homes Castle Farm Cafe, with a hot water bottle on my lap, a candle flickering on my table and some truly delicious food on my plate.

It is cold today. I have just been to my Mum's house to wash my clothes and have a hot bath. On my own. Without a litany of requests being shouted through the door primarily involving reasons why the presence of a two year old is necessary to my enjoyment of the bath. I really did not think that the day could get any better (apart form the minor blips of reversing my car into a wall and then in a separate but equally embarrassing moment, of my car boot flying open depositing a travel cot, curtain fabric and my weekly shop on the main road. We wont mention these things again if you please). It turns out however that it can get better. A lot better.

As with the menu at Acorn the problem for me was what to chose. In the end I plumped for a warming bowl of the Soup of the Day which is aptly named Super Green and has Kale and pesto bobbing about in it making me feel both warm and exceptionally smug. On the side I could not resist a Westcombe Cheddar toastie. I am starting to think that it is biologically impossible for me to resist anything on a menu that has the words Westcombe and Cheddar next to each other, it really is amazing cheese and in this here toastie with onions it is heavenly. The menu looking amazing as it does mean that I will have to come back to try all of the dishes as they all sound so amazing. Whilst sitting here I have seen some beautiful arancini balls leave the open kitchen and some awesome looking pizzas have passed my table too. I have overheard a conversation about how amazing the banana bread is and another customer talking about the super green soup and what an amazing surprise it is to have gorgeous leafy green kale popping up on every spoonful.

It is cold today but I am already excited about spring and summer trips here to sit outside and look out over the valley eating all this amazing seasonal organic produce and supporting a local independent business that really brings something amazing to this little corner of Somerset. As our towns and even our villages become ravaged by the effects of supermarkets and chain stores it is more important than ever that we make the time, and yes sometimes a little extra effort, to support people like Castle Farm Organics and Castle Farm Cafe. I cannot think of a single way in which a local business providing locally grown organic food and hosting evenings of sauerkraut workshops and environmental film screenings, not to mention creating employment and a vibrant heart to a village that is not a pub or village shop can be negative. I for one think what they are doing is great and that more rural areas need business like this to bring people together in what can very easily become a drinking cheap Tesco wine on your sofa and only leaving to go to work existence. I only hope that when we come to create something at Dream Farm, our neighbours can see this too.

Truly super super green soup

Pizza coming out of the oven

Service area complete with Round Hill Roastery Coffee

Beautiful views from Castle Farm

Impossible to resist on a cold January day

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!