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.
Douglas comes to stay
Well at last we managed to sell enough things to pay for some flooring in the build. Clarke Cunningham supplied us with some rather fine Douglas Fir boards, which look great, although they aren't fixed down yet. They're windproofed from underneath, and well...
Making connections
One of the things that really cheers us up is when we hear from people who've stayed, or maybe just come across the blog and email to say 'Hi, we're out here'. Here's Lyra with Clare, who came to volunteer for a week recently, and was kind enough to send a...
The morning after
No amount of careful preparation can protect against damage like this, and we woke up to find that a huge piece of our largest tree had come down. Amazingly it missed both chicken houses, and the tipi poles, but our poor tree is looking rather sorry this morning, as...
Weathering the storm
So the first proper storm of autumn is coming tonight, and rather than wait for mother nature to do her thing, and then clean up the mess afterwards, we decided to be more organised this year and take down the tipi, wind turbine and firepit shelter, just in...
Meet the boss
Today it was time to get cracking and make cob - lots of it. Lyra might only be two, but between us we used nearly a ton of sand in the mix, and yet we aren't half way yet. Lyra is particularly keen on working with her trowel, and is genuinely quite good at laying and...
Lighting the rocket mass heater
Today we pushed on, built a brick support around the base of the firebrick burner, - above, and then backfilled all the gaps with perlite and a clay mix to thoroughly insulate the fire itself, which we want to burn as hot as possible. The clay mix is a...