Sallygarden Smallholding - The Forum For Sustainable Living

My wife and daughter and myself moved to Ireland in December 2006. Well...in actual fact it's a bit more complicated than that. We decided to come and live in Ireland but I wasn't sure about leaving my job immediately so my wife and daughter came and lived in rented accommodation while I commuted back and forth to Liverpool where I worked as a social worker for the city council. I bit the bullet in March of 2007 as flying back and forth from Shannon was killing all of us! Since then we have bought just over two acres of high grade agricultural land and built a cottage on it.

My wife and daughter are English and I am originally from a place called Rathcoole in Co. Dublin. The village's claim to fame when I was small was the horse Arkle which was trained nearby!

Both Penny and myself grew up in the countryside so we have always felt the need to have a bit of land and grow our own food. We have since met quite a few likeminded families doing the same thing.

We want to have pigs and will probably have chickens and rabbits also. One of our friends breeds California Whites. At the moment we are trying to finish the building part of the project which is taking quite a while. I hope we stay as content as we are now and look forward to sharing some of the highs and lows of our adventure in St. Anne's.

Hi there

You are very welcome to the forum. How has your project progressed? Is the house finished now? Did you get your pigs?

We have 2 large blacks (pigs) at the moment we are fattening for the table so our pig courses are up and running at least for another 8 weeks until they head to the freezer.

Keep popping back and sharing your experiences, I look forward to hearing from you again.

Regards, Rebecca

The house is a work in progress, but is almost rounding the corner. We will have chickens within a couple of weeks and hopefully pigs sometime this year. It helps if the sun shines so we will wait and see what sort of progress we make.