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.
Composting loo – a toilet reborn
Something that we've desperately needed since arriving is a decent outside composting loo, if only to save muddy hordes coming in and out of the house in the depths of winter. We inherited an old tin hut of an outside loo, that had the particularly endearing...
Off grid
It isn't a huge amount of solar, but it's enough to allow us to manage almost entirely without the mains grid. (The washing machine is too much for this system). We have, in theory, enough power to keep us going for 5 days in the event of it being virtually...
Pruck around the clock
'Pruck', as Dougie assures me, is the local word for things that have been scrounged, recovered, recycled or blagged, and a marvellous word it is too. This week has seen what I can only describe as a pruckathon, and we have many people to thank for their...
The vampire horse
Horses are the most benign, friendly non agressive creatures, right? Well - never annoy one, or you might just end up like Mel. He must have upset Sherafey yesterday, because he came in from the field with a huge hole in his neck. She must have been very...
The need for resilience
A fundamental part of our thinking here at Lackan Cottage is resilience - being able to cope with whatever life happens to be throwing our way at the time. For us, this means doing more ourselves and being less reliant on outside sources. The mainstay of this is our...
Our animal friends in their wintry wonderland
At last the rain and snow have stopped, and there is a hint of blue sky above us now. The wind is still bitterly cold though, and the snow shows no sign of leaving us any time soon. This winter has been an especially difficult one for anyone with livestock, and we...