May garden update
Normally this would be a hectic time of year with courses running and guests staying, but we have time to spend in the garden and are concentrating on the veg. It’s great to hear how you are all getting on with growing in lockdown – keep us updated, we...
Accommodation closed until further notice
We’ve now closed Birch Cottage and the Off Grid Horse box until June at the earliest, and we’ll take a decision on reopening based on government advice. Thanks for your understanding.
Looking forward to spring
A busy week in the garden, we’ve tidied up all the beds that have crops in – the chickens had been wandering and taken advantage of the lack of netting on one or two things, so we’ve covered those properly, and cleaned up decomposing leaves that are...
True North
Back in 2019 we spent a few days filming with Jon Thompson and he made this excellent short film for the BBC True North series, about our life off grid. We’re really pleased with the way its turned out, and were delighted to take part in a well attended Q&A...
Brendan and Gerry
Our wind turbine is like a family member – we’ve got used to its various noises, from a gentle thrum of a light breeze to the light aircraft sound it makes in a high wind, and a variety of rumbles in between. So at first, I wasn’t sure whether I...
Off grid, resilience and permaculture courses at Lackan
In increasingly uncertain times, people are increasingly asking how they can do more for themselves. We’ve become so reliant on external sources of food, fuel, light, heat, and, to a great degree, knowledge, that it is really empowering to do more within our own...
Barra on the Bann
One of the best aspects of life here is that we get to try our hand at things that we’d never thought of. Filming is one of them, and over the last few years we’ve been involved in quite a few programmes. They’ve been great for introducing what we do...
Wood pellet boiler adventures
Sometimes we’re just cruising along doing our thing and a project arrives out of the blue. In this case it came in the form of our largest freecycle ever, courtesy of Leo, who had spotted it and decided it was too big a thing to deal with. ‘It’ is a...
Tidying up the power station
I actually did this work earlier in the summer but never got around to posting it. We decided to install another 4kw of solar pv, principally to allow us to run immersion heaters in both cottages over the summer and thus almost completely remove the need for lighting...
Making headway in the garden
Every day now it feels like we are making headway in the garden, this week we’ve brought in 4000 litres of compost to put on the newly manured beds, and that gives us a really nice fine surface to sow and plant into. It’s pretty late now, but we’ve...