Recycled Eco Buildings and Wildlife Friendly Food Forest Garden. Mosaics and Glass Bottle Walls.
Over the last few years we have extended our old cottage, built a conservatory and are now in the process of renovating and improving our shed to use as a workshop and storage facility. Our aim is for our buildings to have as little negative impact as possible on the environment. We have used reclaimed … Read more Building our sustainable home.
Even before we bought our cottage and piece of land four year ago, we were planning our forest garden. Forest gardens exist all over the world and their history goes back for thousands of years. It is a way of growing mostly perennial vegetables, shrubs, trees, vines and other useful plants in a way that … Read more Gardening in harmony.
My name is Maria. Many of my earliest memories are to do with nature and plants. I remember travelling along a road through a forest in the middle of winter in Sweden and every time the moon glimpsed through the trees I would shout out in wonder “Look at the moon”. This annoyed my big … Read more About the author.
To tell you all the truth September has been a bit of a blur. Two members of our family went off to college at the same time and it does take a while to get used to the new family dynamics. We feel rather like the way Bilbo describes himself to Gandalf in the 1937 novel by J.R.R Tolkien; “Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”
Sometimes days and weeks are filled with lots of smaller projects and tasks. Because our cottage is very small and up until recently there were six of us living here, all the teenagers had their own spaces but the adults had to sleep in a loft bed in the main living area. Now when two members of the family have gone off to college, we are really quite excited to finally, after nearly seven years, be getting a bedroom to call our own. We painted two walls in a shade called wild mulberry and added three flower lamps left over from when our daughter Josie moved into her new space. Surely they can’t be just for kids?
It has been almost a year since we last wrote about the Community Garden that we are part of in our local town, Ballaghaderreen. A lot has happened in that time and we would like to share some of the highlights with you here.
Making leaf mould last autumn.
In today’s world it is quite easy to feel overwhelmed. Climate change, Biodiversity loss and various worrying political scenarios can make us feel powerless and downbeat.
Firstly we must ask our regular readers to forgive us for only writing one post so far in August. Our family is going through big changes with two of our daughters spreading their wings and starting College in September. It has been a month of waiting for exam results, waiting for offers from the Colleges, happiness when both girls got into the courses that they wanted and time spent organizing their accommodation. Our other daughter is starting her Adult Services and she is looking forward to devoting more time to her interest in photography. We are glad to be getting stuck back into the garden work now after a couple of weeks organizing for the future.
A sanctuary is a holy and sacred place. The more time we spend in nature, the more we realize that our sanctuary is all around us. Since starting the work on the land about six years ago we have been working towards creating a place for us, but equally a place where plants and animals can thrive and coexist on fair terms.
