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.
Rocket Mass Heaters
Rocket Mass Heaters are a really efficient way to heat a space, that you can build yourself for a relatively low cost. They are designed to burn at a high temperature, which results in less smoke and a more efficient fire. Ours is always a source of fascination, and when lit, the big room is warm in no time. Steve is off to Mayo in September to help run a course in building one, and in the meantime, here’s a reminder of how ours was put together.
Barn building on a budget
One of the last existing buildings that we took down here was the old wooden garage outside the cottage, and the time has come to replace it with another useful structure that will be used to store garden produce and tools. We want to build it on a tiny budget using reclaimed or local materials to create a natural looking structure that has minimal visual impact.
Toilet twinning just the job for our compost toilets
Lackan Cottage Farm (and our compost toilets) have teamed up with Toilet Twinning, to help provide clean water, basic sanitation, and hygiene education to people in some of the most deprived areas of the world. Nearly one third of the world’s population lacks access to even the most basic sanitation, whilst at the same time, nearly one third of household water use in developed countries ends up being flushed down the toilet.
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