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.
Gathering our harness
This week we went off to the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, to their annual Horse Ploughing and country skills day. Apart from anything else it was a good chance to go and have a look at everyone’s harness, as it turns out that literally every single set seems to be different in some way, and we fancied seeing how ours compared.
Lackan Farm Forest School
An exciting development for 2017 is the formation of our first Forest School group, which will be led by Lucy, an experienced Forest School teacher. Ever since hearing about the idea of forest schools or outdoor schools we’ve been excited by the idea of getting a group going and an amazing bunch of children and parents have come together to make this happen.
Quick and easy window shutters
One of the problems we discovered with using old double glazed windows is that well, they aren't always terribly good at keeping heat in. Even lined curtains can only do so much, and our strawbale and earth plaster walls don't lend themselves to having shutters...
Building a pallet porch
In a climate like ours, some sort of porch is pretty much a necessity, not just as a place to store muddy boots and wet coats, but to act as an air lock so that warm air loss from the house is minimised when the door is opened. When we built the classroom we left a...
Finishing touches
Nearly two years after building the classroom, we thought it was about time that the floor got finished. It’s lovely Douglas Fir, and was getting progressively more filthy, but deserved better.
Hoof camp
After my recent visit to Bantry to learn some more about working horses, it was time to get things moving here at home, and so Rain has gone off to hoof camp for a couple of weeks in Glengormley, with John McDermott, to learn how to pull things.