Treading lightly, one step at a time.
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.
Two of our girls are planning on going off to College in September. It will be a big transition and will take some getting used to on all parts. To make this a bit less daunting we have decided to make each of them a going off to College blanket, a bit of home to wrap up in while doing homework, watching a film or reading.
When I moved from Sweden to Ireland in 2004 I was most struck by the lack of winter. Coming from a place of snow, ice and soil sometimes frozen solid for months on end, I was amazed when the last leaves falling off the trees and the last flowers of the year were met by hellebores, snowdrops and daffodils without so much as a snowflake to separate them. Read more
As we now have past the winter solstice, it is time to look back, remember and be thankful for all that the year brought.
We are now half way through December and have yet to write our post about the garden in November.
Looking back, it was a rather unglamorous month with many grey days and a few heavy duty tasks to be performed. We did a lot of clearing up in different areas where certain plants were expressing a wish for world domination.
Our usual readers might find this post a tad off topic as it has little to do with gardening and building for a sustainable future. We do however think it is an important post as its aim is to build understanding and compassion for all the people affected by Autism in any way.
It is a tale of our oldest daughter Josie, who is autistic and like the rest of the family, a non-practitioner of organized religion. She attended a small Catholic primary school in the West of Ireland and we wish to point out a few of the culture clashes that happened during those years, most of them to do with religion. She remembers these incidents with fondness and quite a lot of amusement and is happy for them to be shared with you here.
It is nice to have something natural and beautiful to look at each day without having to venture out into the sometimes rainy, windy and quite cold November days we are experiencing at the moment.
