The end of the shippon that will become our new home seems to be coming along nicely. The carpenters have been working hard and have finished the stud walls, they’re now starting to put the boards round – starting with the spare room. Our little loft is coming into shape too – we’re seriously reducing the amount of storage we have so we’ll have to have a proper clear out when we move – something to while away the dark evenings next year.
Our builders have continued digging the trenches for the electrical cables, which will come onto our land at the first pole and then go underground up to the farmhouse and then through the yard and under our boundary wall and our neighbour’s driveway, to resurface at the existing pole which will be moved a few feet away. It’s a major job. This week they started in the orchard, which was a bit of a surprise when I got to the end of the path to find a deep hole at the end of it. I imagine though it was more of a surprise for them when the hole kept filling with water – they’d hit a few old water pipes throughout the orchard, but it turns out one of them was the soakaway from the washing machine, so while it looked disused initially, it suddenly kept pouring with water every time I did a wash!
It’s also not been a great week for digging soil, with all the rain and the storm, so the orchard is a complete mess. We established early on in the build that the edge of the orchard was used as a dumping ground over the years for farm rubbish and broken machinery, but our builders kept finding concrete blocks and huge stones as they dug the new electrical cable run. It’s amazing just how well the trees have been growing despite all this – it makes us wonder what next year’s harvest will be like. The pup has found all this upheaval pretty bemusing, peering over the pallets into the holes, and running around in the mud.
Our neighbours have been incredibly patient and supportive, given we’ve dug up their flower bed and will be breaking up their driveway which doubles as access to their barns behind us (we’ve agreed to extend the concrete section of their driveway in return). We’ve made sure they’ve been involved at each stage, and had the chance to talk to National Grid directly, and John has been over a couple of times to make sure they’re happy with how things are going. Our builders are doing such a good job though, luckily everything seems to be going smoothly.
Whether because it was a ‘wet weather job’ or because the stones were needed for the garage building, this week our builders also finished knocking out the window space in our barn. It’s still strange to see it normal height inside the building, yet look particularly high from the outside due to the way the ground slopes. The stone masons are working incredibly hard on the walls of the garage, I think it’s nearly ready to put the roof on, which will be a major milestone. The stud wall between our laundry and our guests’ laundry is up too – it’ll soon be time to start shopping around for washing machines so hopefully we can time it for a sale.
We made a bit of progress with painting on Sunday afternoon, starting the second coat on the bedroom ceilings and getting most of the way through the primer in the shower room. Given it was such a nice day, I started to clear the vegetable beds a bit as well, so they’re ready for cardboard and compost. It must be time to put the onion sets out soon, which also means working out our crop rotation plan for next year. It feels way too soon to think about next year’s crops! We’re into pheasant season now so the back garden is full of birds who hide in the hedges at the back and come out to feed. I think the most I’ve seen at once is 12 – mostly females although we’ve had a couple of young males who the alpha male seems to tolerate for now. We’ve also seen our pair of uninvited rabbits frolicking in the back garden more openly – I suspected they’d been over to the orchard too when I’d found nibbled windfall apples, but this week I spotted them over by the pumpkins. We’ll need to put in good fencing around next year’s vegetables!
Ley Farm Cottages 