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.
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.
We went outside to capture a few of the beautiful colours to be found in the garden at this time of year. We do not belive that you can have too much colour and we never plan any colour schemes. Most plants are allowed to selfseed, mingle and grow to their hearts content.
It is Monday morning and we are contemplating the wonderful weekend we have just experienced. We opened our garden again this year in aid of Amnesty International Ireland. The word that mostly comes to mind regarding this year’s event is love.
One week of July is behind us and it is high time to write about the garden in June. We had a lot of warm and windy weather but not much rain and it took a long time for the annual vegetables to get established. It is still very dry compared to other years and we have spent quite a lot of time watering. The vegetables are finally beginning to put on some bulk.
It is getting close to the time of year when we usually open our garden to the public. For the last two years we have enjoyed having many visitors and collecting money for Amnesty International Ireland. This year we were considering not opening the garden as we have to do a lot of building work while the weather is warm. But over the last few months there has been a lot of interest and questions about it and we decided to open the garden anyway.
I just had to reblog this post from my daughter’s blog. She is on the Autism spectrum and used to be terrified of bees and bumblebees. It is wonderful to see her now, getting close up to these beautiful creatures. 🐝💚🐝
I used to have a fear of bees because I thought they might sting me. In order to overcome this fear I went outside with my camera to search for bees and take photographs of them on flowers. This helped me to stay calmer around bees because they won’t sting me randomly. Bees are very good pollinators and they take nectar from each flower. We have a lot of flowers in our garden and we wouldn’t want the population of bees to decrease and disappear.
Stupid people who spray chemicals all over the place are killing the bees and they are killing themselves.
When we started to work planting our forest garden seven years ago there was nowhere covered outside to escape to in case of a shower. As we have plenty of showers in the West of Ireland, we remedied the situation by building an eco-friendly gazebo from materials that we had available. If you would like to make one for yourself you can find tips and instructions in this post.
