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.
Out with the old, in with the – old
A few miles from us in Ballyward, is the blacksmith’s forge of the Walker brothers. Gates have been made there and horses shod for generations, and Walker made gates a century old are still in use and good repair. Gate styles are very distintive things, and I hope that someone has taken the time to research them properly, though I can find nothing online.
An interesting diversion
The weather may have been pretty consistently awful this last while, but somehow we've managed to make what feels like significant progress on the various projects that are ongoing here at Lackan Cottage Farm, in between being slightly sidetracked by things like the...
Ducks!
Three years after starting the pond, we finally have ducks! They are Aylesbury ducks – 3 ducks and a drake, and they are having enormous fun getting used to their new surroundings.
Filling up with firewood
Last winter we were the masters of firewood. Ample supplies, thanks to kind folk,and having our own huge sycamore fall over in the wind. The summer of 2015 saw the woodyard completely cleared, as amazing volunteers helped us split, chop, and stack the whole lot inside.
Tree surgery
The four huge spruce trees at the front of our cottage offer plenty of welcome privacy, but they do overshadow the growing field somewhat, so we decided to take down the largest of them and see what a difference it makes.
Farewell to old friends, and a welcome to new faces
For three years people asked “free range hens – don’t you worry about foxes?”. “Not at all”, I would reply casually, and so our hens wandered all over the place, right up until the night I came to their house, to be greeted only by the plaintive cheeping of one of the baby hens