Surviving the heatwave, seasoning wood and more planning application drama 

It feels like we’ve spent most of this week trying to stop everything dying in the heatwave – much like the rest of the country! It’s been hotter here this time than it was in the last one – probably not helped by the length of time we’ve been without rain, as all the vegetation is dying and there’s nothing to help keep the heat down. We’ve made a conscious effort to use as little water as possible and have decided not to water most things, other than anything that’s growing food or flowers we’re using as pollinators. It’s been so sad to see things dying – from the trees in the wood and various shrubs around the garden, to the valley itself, which has gone brown. The poor pup has really been feeling the heat this weekend too, and took herself to bed several times (we took pity on Sunday and let her on our bed with a fan on her).

We spent the weekend cutting back plants that hadn’t survived, and generally tidying up the vegetable beds to remove anything that’s been killed by the heat (a lot of lettuces) or is ready to harvest. We harvested our main onion bed to make room for broccoli and cauliflower seedlings – a bit late in the season but a result of my over-reaction to finding most of our seedlings eaten by mice so hopefully something comes of them! And we put up an arch for our blackberry plant, which had quickly become overgrown and lacking in sunlight. 

As it’s been so dry recently, we also took the opportunity to do two other jobs. The first was to move our yew tree planks. The tree fell down years ago and caused damage to our Elizabethan Cottage. We had it cut down to avoid further damage at the start of the year, and a few weeks ago, we had the stem of the tree planked (with a huge chainsaw!!) ready to season for future use as furniture. We hadn’t had the chance to move it until now as we also needed to tidy in the Elizabethan Cottage first (we’d been using it as a dry garden store), but wanted to move the planks before the rain comes. The cottage was also full of ‘crow twigs’ – every year a family of crows nest in the chimney and fill the cottage (and stairs) with twigs that fall down during their nest-building activity. This year we removed three trugs of twigs from the stairs alone! John spent a couple of hours Saturday clearing out the rest of the cottage, and then we moved the planks onto pallets to store for a few years until ready. 

The other job was to move the woodchip that was left when the tree was cut down earlier in the year. Until now it hasn’t been a priority but we decided that as the weather has been so dry, it would be a good time to move the woodchip, so John moved it spade by spade into 4 sacks by the shippon. Hopefully they’ll be easily movable when we start building! 

We’re still waiting for the council to make a decision on our outstanding planning applications. We put two planning applications in mid-May for solar tiles and Air Source Heat Pumps, and also for the conversion of our Elizabethan cottage; and then a listed buildings consent application at the end of June to take down the front shippon wall and rebuild it as it’s not stable. The council asked to extend the original deadline as the Conservation Officer on our project was on holiday – after which she came back with technical questions and asked for justification for replacing the roof tiles and putting the ASHPs on site (who’d have thought we needed to justify using renewable sources of heating and generating our own power, especially now!!). Anyway – we submitted what they asked for at the start of August, only to find the Conservation Officer is on holiday again and we have to wait for her return next week. 

Given we’re still aiming to start building in October, we’re now running close to the wire… we need to know our heating and solar solutions so we can confirm our site electricity load with WPD (our electricity company) and finalise and book in the work they need to do. We’re also on a very tight timescale with the listed build application – we submitted one bat licence application for the entire site to save money, but it only includes buildings that have approved planning applications at the point of the licence being granted. If we don’t get that application soon, we’ll have to get a separate bat licence which feels like wasted money…. 

We also got challenged on the need to replace the wall (given it’s a curtilage-listed building that was deemed acceptable for conversion in our original application). We’ve now had to put in a full planning application for this, which we won’t have confirmed until late September. Talk about cutting things fine – we’re very lucky we have a fabulous builder and architect who are able to work around some of these last minute critical points!