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.
Lackan Cottage Farm open day 2017
We've got the loan of a camera from Google that can take these 360 degree images, and boy have we made the most of it, capturing views from all over Lackan Cottage Farm, and making a tour of Birch Eco Cottage. The last couple of weeks have been spent getting the place...
A new home for the dome
Having put the rainwater harvesting in, we were left with a 4″ pipe running across the concrete outside the cottage, not ideal. It was always our aim to pull up all the concrete slab in front of the house and incorporate the area in to the garden – our permaculture Zone 0 through which we constantly come and go. On reflection though, we need some parking space for visitors, and so decided to pull up just the area beyond our front door, which is the bit we come and go through anyway.
Improving our water treatment and storage
We really enjoyed the recent permaculture weekend course, and one of the exercises we regularly do is to ask participants to look at our site and see if they can come up with suggestions or improvements. We got several great ones this time around and so set about acting on them. The first was the observation that the area around the pond was being wasted
Willow fencing
When I headed off to Tipperary to collect willow cuttings so that we might grow our own basket willow, Richard was kind enough to give me a trailer load of dry willow. The smaller stuff is all for baskets but I’d been wondering what to do with the heavy stuff. In a bid to protect the young hedge around the garden, Claire and I decided to make a woven fence, which then evolved as Claire suggested bending it over into hoops. The result is excellent, and blends into the garden without shading plants too much.
Our shop is open!
We’re always making things here at Lackan, and now Steve is making more baskets and willow things, we decided that it is time to make them available on the website. Many items are one offs, and once they are gone, they are gone, but they are all hand made here, from local materials (on site where possible), and always from sustainably produced materials, or in some cases, reclaimed items. Anyhow, we’ll be adding more items as we go, so the shop will change constantly, and hopefully you’ll be pleasantly surprised by some of the things that you can buy here.
Sept 2017 – Cob Rocket Mass Heater Weekend
I’m going on tour in September to teach a rocket mass heater workshop at our friend Claire Templar’s place Tir Na Nog in Mayo. Not many of these get built so its a rare opportunity to find out how and get hands on experience.