Articles

Mindful that Ireland has recently become only the second country in the world to declare a climate and biodiversity emergency, the Grow It Yourself movement has even more relevance now.
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I delivered a course on growing tomatoes at GROW HQ recently, and though I was ostensibly ‘at work’, it didn’t really feel like work to be teaching about growing tomatoes (don’t tell anyone though).
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“Grand bit of spring in the air” the lady said to me as we stood waiting for the pedestrian lights to go green. “It’s lovely” I said and smiled back at her. And it was lovely to be walking along the quays in brilliant sunshine carrying my jacket under my arm. The combination of brighter mornings, longer evenings and mild weather had put a spring in my step and I was feeling chipper. I suspect I’m not alone.
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Most people sow their early potatoes outside in the vegetable patch in March, but if you have a polytunnel or greenhouse you can get started right now for a super early crop (May). Some years ago I went on a course with Jim Cronin over at his smallholding in Co Clare, and he outlined this method, which creates very deep beds and gives you an abundant crop.
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We harvested our Jersusalem artichokes in GROW HQ in the last month and they’ve started to appear on the menu in the café. When I started growing first I was confused about the difference between Jerusalem and Globe artichokes and wondered if it was just different names for the same vegetable. They are in fact entirely different vegetables that bear little resemblance to each other.
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I went on a sobering visit to a couple of our biggest field veg growers this week: Paul Brophy in Kildare who is the largest grower of broccoli in the state and the Weldon Brothers (Martin and Enda) in Swords who supply the majority of the Brussels Sprouts crop.
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Soil. Well, it’s just dirt really, isn’t it? It’s something to be cleaned off our boots and scrubbed off our hands, right? When I started growing my own food, I didn’t have any respect for the soil that the veg was growing in. My focus was on the seed, the plants, the vegetables. The soil was actually a source of annoyance to me - it had to be dug, raked, hoed, rotovated, coaxed and cajoled.
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There’s been a sudden drop in nighttime temperatures which it has to be said can’t be unexpected given the time of year. Still, with the kids back to school as well, it’s a fairly dramatic switch in season from summertime to autumnal.
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One of the great lessons I’ve learned in my time as a GIYer is that the sowing season doesn’t stop at the end of Spring. In fact, if you want a consistent supply of vegetables over the winter, and particularly in the difficult “gap” months of March, April and May, then this is a crucially important time of the year to be sowing seeds.
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Like most GIYers I did a little rain dance with the arrival of rain after nearly a month of drought conditions. What a fickle bunch we are! Don’t get me wrong, I’d much prefer a little heatwave to our more standard climate, but the daily watering outside was somewhat of a chore. I suppose that beautiful warm sunshine by day followed by a decent shower of rain at night would be the ideal weather pattern for this time of the year. That’s not much to ask is it?
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