Recycled Eco Buildings and Wildlife Friendly Food Forest Garden. Mosaics and Glass Bottle Walls.
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.
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.
As we now have past the winter solstice, it is time to look back, remember and be thankful for all that the year brought.
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.
We have had some rather special days in the last week. When we met about 8 years ago, we already had two children each. Since then we have all been living together as one family. It has been a fantastic and rewarding time but sometimes challenging as well.
Foraging is always close to our hearts. It is a very relaxing and fulfilling activity to go out in the search of nature’s free bounty. We like to seek out places far from roads and houses and ask permission form the landowner if it is not on public land.
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