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 Million Trees In One Day
27th April 2013 One Million Trees in One Day is a charity, not-for-profit, cross border, community and environmental initiative which will plant a million young native trees at many different sites across both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in twenty...
Digging in the dirt
Two thirds of the way through Jean-Baptiste and Marie-Josephine's visit, and we've made amazing progress. Paths laid, 450 trees planted, new water pipes installed to the stables and outhouse, all the old rubble from the house levelled, tonnes of firewood cut, and now...
The Great Planting
Well at last the rain has stopped, we collected our tiny trees, from Tony at NI Farm Forestry, a mountain of cardboard from Toals furniture in Rathfriland, and after a couple of hours of fencing, set to planting the first block of trees. 0.2 hectare doesn't sound a...
Trees!
Part of our commitment to increasing biodiversity here on the farm involves introducing new woodland habitat, and so we're planting over 800 new trees this year which extends the existing woodland significantly. We're also planting additional hedgerows and allowing...
An (un)Well well
Something I have a particular aversion to is wells. There's just something about looking down a narrow shaft into dark water, not knowing where the bottom might be. Hence I didn't particularly relish the task of climbing down a ladder into the depths, to bale ours...
Winter Wwoofing
Our intrepid winter (technically spring but you wouldn't know it) Wwoofers (worldwide worksers on organic farms) are here: Marie-Josephine and Jean-Baptiste, who have performed amazing path building feats on their first proper day here at Lackan Cottage Farm. Here...