Birch Cottage has a new website of its own
Visit the Birch Cottage website to bookWelcome to Lackan Cottage Farm
We’re Steve and Claire Golemboski-Byrne, we live here off grid with our daughter, our dog, cats and horses. We make all our own energy using wind and solar, grow as much of our own food as we can (it varies widely) and have used permaculture design principles to help us create a great place to live.
Here on the website you’ll find stories about the projects we’ve undertaken – what works, what doesn’t. You can come stay in our guest cottage – Birch Cottage and we will show you round, or maybe you just want to find out how to do some of this stuff. Either way, welcome.
Escape to the Country
Way back in April 2017 we were approached by a TV production company - Boundless - who make the BBC programme 'Escape to the Country'. The premise of the programme being that people who want to well, escape to the country, are shown several properties in the hope...
First year willow harvest – lessons learned
This winter can best be described as incredibly wet. Our land is saturated, and other than a bit of sacrificial field for the horses, we're keeping off it as much as possible and concentrating on jobs such as harvesting our willow crop for the first time. We've...
Hedgerow winemaking with Leo – 14th April 2018
A day of winemaking with Leo Cullen, who can conjure wine from just about anything. We’ll be walking and picking some ingredients in the morning, talking about what we can use to make wine, and how to go about preparing our ingredients and equipment, and then sampling some of Leo’s brews over a lunch of home made soup.
A strawbale barn
One of the hardest things about producing your own food isn’t growing it, it is storing it afterwards. It really wants to break down as fast as possible, and all manner of creatures want to eat it first. Until now we’ve stored food all over the place – hanging up in the living room; in cupboards. In short, not ideal. Another issue that we had was that our 4000 litre rainwater tanks and pump were not terribly pretty and very exposed to cold temperatures. The pump especially has been badly damaged by freezing twice now. The problem, as they say in permaculture, is the solution, and in this case takes the form of a strawbale barn, which incorporates the water tanks as its back wall.
Our first willow harvest
Our first basket willow crop Our first basket willow crop is now ready and we've begun to harvest it. We weren't terribly good about keeping the planted willow cuttings weed free, so its a little patchy, but about 90% of the planting has established. Funny old weather...
Soup!
We grow a lot of squash here, it seems to like our polytunnel. Our favourite so far is Burgess Buttercup, which grow squashes to a decent but manageable size and can be quite prolific. They also store beautifully, so we don’t tend to eat them until the dark days of January and February, when sometimes you just need a decent, cheering soup on a wild oul day.