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.
One year on…..
For a while there we thought it might never be sunny again, but once again we are enjoying the warmth, and the knowledge that the sun is providing our electricity and an increasing amount of our hot water. All around us the place is bursting into life, and the brown...
One million trees, one polytunnel, many volunteers
In what was an exceedingly hectic but productive end to the week, we welcomed a host of volunteers to the farm to help us plant our contribution to One Million Trees in One Day, which in the end turned out to be about 160, in a variety of places all over the farm....
Finally some sun, and a new polytunnel
Rather surprisingly the sun came out today so we dashed out and got to work. Claire and Lyra were on weeding duty in the small polytunnel, and I managed to put up the frame of the new big polytunnel, although some interesting acrobatics were needed as I was on...
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...