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.
The year of 2019 has come to an end on the land and we wish to summarise it like we usually do, with a photo from each month. It is a huge privilege to live in close proximity with the natural word and we would like to celebrate that here with a photographic journey through the year from the small patch of earth that we are guardians of.
December is drawing to a close and we are delighted to still be harvesting vegetables from the land. Members of the cabbage family seem to be the most reliable for our climate and soil.
We think that the most important thing to do in any garden is to look after the soil. There is so much going on in the ground and the research into this field is we believe yet in its infancy.
As some of you probably have noticed we have not been publishing as many posts as usual over the last couple of months. This is due to some exciting developments and we would like to tell you all about them now.
A couple of items needed a makeover recently in our home. One was an old door that we traded for another old door from a friend a few years back. Due to lack of time it had been left in the shed until now, when it has been transformed into a stylish and original bathroom door. We love recycling and changing furniture and fixtures, creating something useful from something old. The door is perfect for our bathroom and thanks to the glass panels it lets in lots of lovely natural light to the kitchen.
To tell you all the truth September has been a bit of a blur. Two members of our family went off to college at the same time and it does take a while to get used to the new family dynamics. We feel rather like the way Bilbo describes himself to Gandalf in the 1937 novel by J.R.R Tolkien; “Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”
Sometimes days and weeks are filled with lots of smaller projects and tasks. Because our cottage is very small and up until recently there were six of us living here, all the teenagers had their own spaces but the adults had to sleep in a loft bed in the main living area. Now when two members of the family have gone off to college, we are really quite excited to finally, after nearly seven years, be getting a bedroom to call our own. We painted two walls in a shade called wild mulberry and added three flower lamps left over from when our daughter Josie moved into her new space. Surely they can’t be just for kids?
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.
