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.
Brendan and Gerry
Our wind turbine is like a family member - we've got used to its various noises, from a gentle thrum of a light breeze to the light aircraft sound it makes in a high wind, and a variety of rumbles in between. So at first, I wasn't sure whether I could hear a new...
Barra on the Bann
One of the best aspects of life here is that we get to try our hand at things that we'd never thought of. Filming is one of them, and over the last few years we've been involved in quite a few programmes. They've been great for introducing what we do here to a wider...
Wood pellet boiler adventures
Sometimes we're just cruising along doing our thing and a project arrives out of the blue. In this case it came in the form of our largest freecycle ever, courtesy of Leo, who had spotted it and decided it was too big a thing to deal with. 'It' is a Czech made Ponast...
Tidying up the power station
I actually did this work earlier in the summer but never got around to posting it. We decided to install another 4kw of solar pv, principally to allow us to run immersion heaters in both cottages over the summer and thus almost completely remove the need for lighting...
Making headway in the garden
Every day now it feels like we are making headway in the garden, this week we've brought in 4000 litres of compost to put on the newly manured beds, and that gives us a really nice fine surface to sow and plant into. It's pretty late now, but we've lots of winter...
Scythes, fresh planting and the chicken hordes
A beautiful summer's day here at Lackan, and one that began with some scythe action in the front field. The new austrian scythe is incredibly sharp, and I can cut grass to literally an inch long with it if I need to - certainly its as quick as a strimmer, and great to...