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.
Cabin in the woods
Blogging from the phone now as we have no proper Internet. Explored our woods today and found a little cabin hidden away..Some great clearings for camping, so exciting things ahead there.
Do you know this sheep?
Do you know this sheep? Or at least what breed she might be? She looked at us with a very enquiring air yesterday as we passed her by at the Balmoral Show, so we stopped for a chat. Balmoral was fascinating, and we could have spent days wandering round. These chaps...
Decay is a many splendoured thing
The end of my first week in the cottage, and already I am starting to know all its little quirks. Where the wet rot lurks - where the damp is - where the fungus is - where the rotten brick is, and which bits of its sturdy, yet delicate structure would be best left...
Dead wind turbine
We returned home today to discover that the wind turbine had suffered a catastrophic failure and lost all three blades. 2 of them were embedded firmly in the ground below the turbine, and one has yet to be found. I repaired one of them a week ago, and straightening...
Farewell thatched living room…
Today we had our first visitor to the cottage, and Sinead did us proud. We tackled the thatched roof in the living room, and managed to pull the old timbers, turf and straw down without burying ourselves. It is amazing how much material was up there - the pile we have...
New, old, low impact
When we made the decision not to go to Wales and do our thing under the Welsh One Planet Development planning, I felt rather guilty, even though we had found a fantastic place here in Northern Ireland. A year of planning, meetings, travel, and making new friends, as...