Recycled Eco Buildings and Wildlife Friendly Food Forest Garden. Mosaics and Glass Bottle Walls.
Today we would like to just share a few pictures with you. Sometimes it is difficult to stay focused and enjoy the simple things in life. We are still in the middle of rebuilding three of our rooms and the house is very chaotic. Because we are building we have not been able to spend time in the garden either. So it is a bit chaotic out there as well. It is easy to feel stuck, bogged down and feel that things are not moving on as fast as you would like.
We are fortunate and very excited to be to part of the creation of a Community Garden in our closest town, Ballaghaderreen. A few months ago we were proud to be invited as members of the committee and since then we have been working as part of a team to realize our shared dream. We are very happy as a piece of land has been kindly offered for our use by Duffy’s Supervalu. Work has started and we are meeting up every Sunday afternoon with a bunch of likeminded individuals to get our hands and wellies dirty but also to share laughs and cups of tea. We are always looking for more volunteers and you can find information about it on the Ballaghaderreen Community Garden Face Book page.
It has been a year since we built our conservatory and now we are not sure how we ever managed without it. Every morning we drink tea in there and when we have guests it is the place we are most likely to congregate in.
Last month other commitments pulled us away from the garden. Apart from us harvesting apples, raspberries and vegetables, the land was left to its own devices for the duration of the month. On the very last day of September we walked around the different areas to get a few pictures for this blog and we realized that the land had not suffered at all in our absence. Sure, it looked a bit untidy and overgrown on the surface, but underneath it was healthy, alive and brimming with wildlife. Maybe that is the biggest lesson we have learnt from looking after and developing our land over the last few years. A forest garden, mimicked on young natural woodland but full of edible and other beneficial plants, is a very forgiving place. Nature has a marvellous way of doing what is best for the land and when you start to work with nature and not against her fantastic things can happen. We wanted more frogs, newts and other wildlife so in addition to our stream we added two ponds. Because of this the slug population is being kept small and is not the major problem it was for the first couple of years.
thegreenerdream 