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.
Smokin….
For a day off, it has been a very industrious one. In the morning I cut another load of cordwood ready for Monday's volunteer group to continue building the front wall of the roundhouse.A potato harvest has been long overdue, so we raided our plot and came back home...
Making great progress
After six days work, the roundhouse is really starting to take shape. Three quarters of the roof has been boarded out, and will be the visible ceiling from inside. The outside will be covered with old sheet or tarp, then strawbale, then pond liner, then more old...
Our first reciprocal frame roof!
Well I never thought we'd do this as quickly, but today the roof frame went on with surprisingly little fuss. In the morning we completed the henges and finished the wallplate - below and had a practice run with the reciprocal frame at ground level so that we'd have...
Roundhouse progress..day 3
Day three on our roundhouse build, and we have made excellent progress. Today we prepared the supporting posts by charring the ends of them in a fire, before dropping them into the post holes dug on Monday. Clinton, Chris and I backfilled the holes with slate,...
Cloughjordan – its not just me
After my last post on Cloughjordan - the eco-village that isn't, I couldn't help wondering that surely I couldn't be alone in thinking that it was a soulless place that really had missed the point. Turns out I was right. There is even a website devoted to it -...
A missed opportunity
When we began the process of looking at how and where we'd like to live, we started as close to home as we could, and that turned out to be 'The Village' at Cloughjordan. Hooray, we thought, a cutting edge eco-village at least if not exactly on our doorstep, on the...