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.
People often talk about beautiful autumn colours. We think it is time to celebrate all the colours of spring as well. Although they are not as fiery and bold as the autumn colours, they fill the land with their own special energy. Light green, white, blue and pink is dotted across the landscape.
We were delighted to find that a friend had posted this excellent video from National Geographic on Facebook recently. It showcases the work of Martin Crawford, a Forest Garden pioneer and a huge inspiration to us for the last eight years.
I was lucky enough to be offered a lift back from Limerick the other day by a dear friend. I was even luckier when she invited me to take part in a fieldtrip around the Portumna area of County Galway with her fellow students on the day. Because we encountered great beauty and wondrous beast I decided to avert from the usual subjects of this blog and share a few photos here from the day.
We have had a very busy, but incredibly rewarding weekend. On Friday we went along when three of our teenagers took the bus to Dublin with a friend to take part in the School Climate Strike. It was an incredible feeling to stand in the middle of the energetic, roaring, chanting crowd of the future. We have to admit to a lump in the throat and misty eyes as the eleven thousand students marched through the streets demanding an end to greed and profit being put above survival of the planet on the political agenda. This movement was started last year by Greta Thunberg, a remarkable young woman from Sweden who is now nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Please listen to her TED talk if you have a moment.
A third of March is already gone and it is high time we sum up the last month on the land. February was very mild and lots of plants are putting on substantial growth already. Our kale plants from last year are doing great and we are harvesting small fresh leaves for stir-fries and smoothies on a regular basis.
Today we have something to celebrate. This is our 200th blog post and we are just as excited about our garden and eco-buildings as we were when we started writing about them back in 2015.
