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.
Tour and talk at Lackan -24th April 2022
This is our tenth year here at Lackan. After two years when we've basically been closed down, and the world has changed in many ways it is time to open up again. We've had lots of requests from people to come and look around and ask questions, and this is a great way...
Finishing the roundhouse
Five years ago now we started building the strawbale roundhouse, which has been a slow affair, mainly due to not having any good clay with which to make earth plaster. The roundhouse has sat there full of junk - a wasted opportunity that has nagged at me each time I...
The same but different
It's nearly ten years now since we landed here at Lackan and in some ways the world has changed very little, and in others we live in an utterly different universe to the one we inhabited back then. Ten years ago we were holed up in our truck in Bangor, building a...
Thoughts on heating systems
I get asked about heating a lot. What's best, the most cost effective, simplest, efficient. All that. So this is a collection of my thoughts based on all the various things we've tried (and we've tried quite a few). So far we have (or have had) - Range cooker with a...
Summer updates from Lackan
July already, how did that happen.Needless to say we've done a fair bit since my last post back in December, so I'm not even going to try and cover it all, as its mostly in a recent video where I did a quick walk round. As you can see, we've made some changes. The...
Bornay wind turbine upgrade
So after years of gradually building up our renewable system, we've definitely got to the point where its perfectly capable of supplying us with enough power, but the thing about building a system as you go along is that its a learning process, and sometimes you use...