A permaculture design
Permaculture is at the heart of what we are doing here at Lackan Cottage Farm. We first encountered permaculture design when we lived at the Quarries Farm in Bangor, and attended our first introduction to permaculture course with Philip Allen. Since then we’ve embraced the ethos of permaculture, designed our own smallholding, and run a number of courses in conjunction with teacher Hannah Mole.
Steve gained his Permaculture Design Certificate at Carrig Dulra in Wicklow, and is now in his first year of the Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design, which is a great opportunity to look in detail at a number of practical and non physical designs here at Lackan Cottage Farm.
Involved for a number of years in the All Ireland Permaculture Gathering core team, and recently the European Permaculture Convergence core team, Steve and Claire are now helping to organise the first ‘Northern Gathering’, to be held at Oxford Island Wildlife Centre in August 2019. In addition, Steve is in the process of redeveloping the Permaculture Ireland website, which now includes a growing map of permaculture projects across the island of Ireland as well as events and courses.
One more exciting development is the announcement that Lackan Cottage Farm is to be the first LAND centre in Ireland. Learning and Network Demonstration sites were first established in England, and exist in Wales and Scotland, and are a vibrant network of permaculture sites. These include suburban gardens, smallholdings, rural farms, city farms, forest gardens, and amazing allotments.
Sites are set up to show permaculture in practice to visitors and volunteers in a safe, accessible and inspiring way, and are accredited through Permaculture UK. Our aim is to now establish a network of such sites across Ireland, under the IreLAND banner, and certify the sites within the exisiting Permaculture Ireland network.