Articles

New Year's resolutions sometimes get a bad rap, because they seem to represent the folly and flightiness of the human spirit. We start off the year with grand intentions to eat only salads, walk/run/swim 100 miles a week, and to do Bikram yoga in a sauna until we weigh as much as a baby sparrow. But then by the end of January we've quietly abandoned our good intentions and reverted to guilty, bloated type.
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This year I managed to fill 3 large hessian sacks with spuds for storage and we've been tucking in to them every other day as required. It's very handy to have them there, waiting patiently in the garage for their moment of destiny in the kitchen.
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With Halloween over, the countdown to Christmas is truly on, and as a result we have turkeys back in our garden again. Each year we rear about 4 turkeys, with one becoming the centerpiece of our Christmas Day celebrations, and the balance jointed and put in to the freezer.
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Yesterday morning I went down to the polytunnel to get a few fresh tomatoes to go with our breakfast eggs, only to walk in on a group of birds conducting a daring raid. They had managed to pull a few ripe tomatoes off the plant, and were busy gorging themselves on the fleshy fruit.
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It's hard to fathom, but it's already August and the seed-sowing year is almost over – this month is the last opportunity to sow seeds and marks the end of seven months of fairly intense seed sowing activity that started way back in the dreary days of February
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I know that sometimes I can be guilty of hyperbole, but recently I visited a garden that I think could transform Ireland. One of the recipients of a community food growing grant from AIB via the GIY Get Ireland Growing Fund last year was the Headlands Community Garden.
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Could soil be the new Prozac? This is a question prompted by a recent research study, which found that treatment with a specific soil bacterium, Mycobacterium vaccae, can alleviate the symptoms of depression.
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Each month, I try and think about my seed sowing in two categories. The first category is those veg that we must sow pretty much every month to guarantee a consistent supply (without gluts) – so for example: lettuce, spinach, oriental greens, calabrese etc. Between March and August, I sow a little of these at the start of every month.
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The luck of the crop rotation draw and bad design in my veg patch means that particular veg families tend to have what might be described as ‘off years’ depending on the area they are destined to spend their growing season in. There’s a particular part of my veg patch that is hampered by being simultaneously the closest to the garden perimeter and the lowest point in the garden.
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I am all for taking a decent break from the veg patch in the winter months, and I do very little between late November and February. There are lots of things I could be doing if I was that way inclined, and I know of GIYers that visit the veg patch daily in those times – continuing to sow, grow and harvest despite the short days and inclement weather. I am not one of those growers.
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