We are now starting our fourth year here at Lackan Cottage Farm, and what seems like an endless series of building projects is at last coming to an end. The cottage refurbishment, polytunnels, compost loo, stables, the little cottage, outhouse, woodshed, bike store, paths, ponds, wind turbine and solar arrays, and most recently the rebuild of the old hay shed into a workshop and bigger hay shed.
A few miles from us in Ballyward, is the blacksmith’s forge of the Walker brothers. Gates have been made there and horses shod for generations, and Walker made gates a century old are still in use and good repair. Gate styles are very distintive things, and I hope that someone has taken the time to research them properly, though I can find nothing online.
Three years after starting the pond, we finally have ducks! They are Aylesbury ducks – 3 ducks and a drake, and they are having enormous fun getting used to their new surroundings.
+++ PLEASE NOTE WE ARE NOW FULLY BOOKED +++
We get a lot of requests from folk who would like to come and have a look around, find out more, and share their stories with us, so this year we have decided to have an open day, when anyone can come and see what we get up to, and ask questions about any aspect of what we do here at Lackan Cottage Farm.
Experience basket weaving with locally sourced willow to make your own traditional skib which is a simple round basket.
Last winter we were the masters of firewood. Ample supplies, thanks to kind folk,and having our own huge sycamore fall over in the wind. The summer of 2015 saw the woodyard completely cleared, as amazing volunteers helped us split, chop, and stack the whole lot inside.
The four huge spruce trees at the front of our cottage offer plenty of welcome privacy, but they do overshadow the growing field somewhat, so we decided to take down the largest of them and see what a difference it makes.
For three years people asked “free range hens – don’t you worry about foxes?”. “Not at all”, I would reply casually, and so our hens wandered all over the place, right up until the night I came to their house, to be greeted only by the plaintive cheeping of one of the baby hens
After all the hoo-ha, storm Frank didn’t hit too hard, and everything remains standing. Seeing as we have so much in the way of weather here, I asked Santa for a weather station and she has obliged, so now I have even more things to measure, and finally I know what it takes for the wind turbine to do its thing.
Well, our climate chickens are fairly coming home to roost tonight, as storm Frank rages around us. Destructive winds are raging, huge amounts of rain falling, and we genuinely don’t know what will still be standing come the morning.