This is where I will post information and ideas on growing your own food, based mostly on my own experience. I’ve been growing my own food for some years now and find it a great source of pleasure, nourishing for body, mind and spirit.
This is not a political site, it’s just about growing your own food. My political site is at www.trevorsargent.ie.
This site is intended for beginners who want to grow their own food. I know that a great many people want to do this but just don’t know how to get started. I’ll keep things simple throughout; after all, growing food is a simple, natural activity. As well as creating a diary of what I’m doing in my own garden each week, I’ll include some video clips to show you just how easy it is.
So, thanks for visting Trevor’s Kitchen Garden. Come back soon so see how my garden grows. Better still, why not copy what I’m doing and we can compare results!
Early Monday 9th November, before the phones start ringing, I steel an hour in the garden to start a new generation of everlasting cabbage plants. (This is a perennial hardy kale-like heritage cabbage variety obtained from Irish Seedsavers in Scarriff, Co. Clare.) Last spring I put up a video clip of cuttings being taken from the previous years cabbage plants. However I want to experiment and see if the cuttings will root and survive if I plant them now before winter sets in instead of waiting until next spring.
Last spring, I molly-coddled the cuttings by planting them in pots of soil and bringing them on in the glasshouse before planting out in late March. This time I’ll try putting them directly into their newly prepared growing patch. This patch provided a good crop of beans and peas in the summer just gone by. The withered legume vines have gone for composting, the soil levelled and some well broken down composted dug in. The nitrogen nodules on the remaining roots of the old legume plants will, I hope, feed the newly planted cabbage cuttings in the year ahead.
All I need to do now is to pull off the ready-to-use side shoots from the parent everlasting cabbage plant. I tidy up the base of each cutting with a sharp knife. A diagonal cut gives the cutting a sharp point. This point is pushed gently in to the soft soil. I firm in the cuttings one be one and water – voila!
I understand that garlic was briefly discussed at Cabinet recently. Cabinet confidentiality precludes me from going into further detail. However, just like any kitchen gardener, I am keen to meet as much as possible of my own garlic needs from home-grown stocks. With this in mind I am planting a few extra cloves this month myself. I hope to have a few bulbs to spare at harvest time for the Minister for Finance. Whatever else our country is short of during these hard times, at least let us not be short of produce we can grow in ‘Ireland – the Food Island’.
Garlic requires a longer growing season than most vegetables and along with costs and our damp climate, this has meant that garlic is not grown commercially to any extent in Ireland. There is a small amount grown on the Isle of Wight, I understand, but most of the garlic I see in the shops comes from China. The cloves I sow in the back garden however come through a certified seed merchant. In this way I hope they are more suited to growing in this climate than the Chinese grown shop garlic.
If you have a choice of varieties in a garden centre, then Messidrome or Germidour are suited better to November sowing. Printador is more for early spring sowing. I would expect to be harvesting my own crop in July 2010.
The patch for my new garlic bed is alongside the recently sown Radar onions as garlic, onion, leek, shallots etc are all members of the allium family and have similar growing needs. First the garlic bulbs need to be carefully pulled apart and the individual cloves laid out on the freshly prepared seedbed. I have read that a sprinkling of wood ash raked in to the surface brings up the potash levels, but if anything my potash levels are too high so I skip that bit of advice.
With cloves spaced about five inches apart, I sow them each about an inch and a half below the surface. A frost kick starts their root development, I am told but they need a good amount of dry weather to avoid rotting and especially the fungus, white rot. This may explain why there has been so little Irish grown garlic, and how the well-travelled Chinese garlic has cornered the market here.
Nonetheless the challenge of growing garlic in Ireland is an interesting one as I love it in pesto with home-grown basil. However while chewing it raw may be very healthy, I think I’ll stick to chewing an apple a day instead!
The recently sown Radar onion sets are growing well now in the cleared patch from which beetroot was harvested about a month ago. Nearby, last season’s onion patch has now been cleared, some compost mixed in and the soil levelled. This patch will now become the legume patch between now and next autumn.
Broad beans can be sown now in a quarter of my legume patch. A variety well suited to autumn sowing directly outdoors is Aquadulce and it should crop early before the end of May 2010. Along with seeds I need the support structure for the plants to grow up. I have seen broad beans growing without supports but a stormy night could play havoc and flatten them beyond redemption.
My chosen bean support is a purpose built ’tent pole’ with eight guy ropes hanging from the top. These are pegged out in a circumference creating a wigwam type structure. I press two seeds into the soil about a finger deep on each side of each guy rope. Once sowing is complete, I pat down the seedbed and water the area as the weather has been fairly dry in Fingal in the last week or so.
The seed packet is then sealed in a clean dry jam jar and stored in the fridge. The remaining seeds will then be fresh enough next spring for another sowing if for some reason the autumn sown seeds do not germinate in full. Broad bean plants sown in autumn have an advantage being more resistant to blackfly attacks. They generally mature two to three weeks ahead of spring sown seeds.
In the years when we used to get hard frosts, horticultural fleece covering the wigwam support would be a protection. However, I would be surprised to see such hard frosts again given global warming and the mild nature of recent winters.
The growing interest in amenity fruit and vegetable growing has given rise to the mushrooming of initiatives such as www.giyireland.com. In Balbriggan the local Horticultural Society has launched a course of workshops on vegetable growing co-ordinated by committee member, great local gardener [and indeed chef] Judith Chavasse. Her neighbour and veg growing expert Dave gave the first lecture. He emphasised the importance of laying out the growing area, ideally in six patches. One of the patches is for permanent crops like rhubarb (which can be planted now) or asparagus or blackcurrants, raspberries etc.
Five different families of vegetables are rotated annually around the other five patches. There is now an easy way to remember which crop goes in the first patch, which in the second, third and so on. The aide memoire is ‘People Love Bunches Of Roses‘ which gives P-L-B-O-R. So plant potato family crops in the first patch, legumes in the second, brassicas in third, onion family and leeks etc in fourth and root crop in the fifth. When root crops are harvested, that patch gets enriched with compost and/or manure again to take the seed potatoes the next Spring. The same order is observed with each crop family moving up one patch in the rotation.
Thank you to Dave and the Balbriggan and District Horticultural Society for taking the guesswork out of which comes first in a rotation, legumes or brassicas!
Spare time has been in short supply. Any couple of hours free on a Sunday afternoon has been spent in the garden. With the dry mild weather and the wish to be outdoors, the Trevor’s Kitchen Garden.ie site has been neglected. You could say I was saving the blog update work for a rainy day.
This week was ideal for clearing out the spent tomato plants from the greenhouse. The grow boxes of soil which had given a good crop of cherry and brandywine tomatoes were emptied onto the bare patch of soil from where the onions had just been harvested.
Having swept the floor and washed down the glass, I then put back the removeable shelving in the greenhouse. These shelves are now stocked with pots of winter lettuce and basil. Another pot is growing shamrock as an experiment. The floor space is now filled with a three tier strawberry planter which will go outdoors in Spring when next years two tomato plants need their space again. The lettuce pots will also give way to next Spring’s seed trays in due course but not until I have had my fair share of salad sandwiches.
After the joy of winning a first prize in the Naul Horticultural Show for parsley which grows well under the apple tree, I was then brought back down to earth to discover a white fungus on a branch of the apple tree above. I read up on the symptoms in ‘Natural Pest and Disease Control’ by Jim Hay, a Century Paperback from 1987.
The symptoms match apple powdery mildew, a fungus disease which overwinters on the tree in the dormant buds. I cut away the infested branch area using a saw. I took the infected wood indoors to further cut it up for the fire in winter. Some organic growers put bee’s wax on the wound left by the cut, others say leave it to heal on its own. Jim Hay says if the disease persists, spray with a lime sulphur solution immediately after the blossom has fallen in the Spring and again four weeks later.
Meanwhile, I will clear some of the vegetation under the apple tree as lack of air circulating could be a contributory factor in creating conditions for apple powdery mildew which is also quite sticky, a bit like candy floss.
The Naul and District Horticultural Show took place on Saturday and Sunday 26th and 27th of September. These shows are a great place to meet other growers and to see what else grows well in the area. My own garden has tasty produce but only the parsley was deemed good looking enough to form an entry. The Naul Show rules require three stem of parsley to be presented.
So early Saturday morning at 8.30am before attending the usual Saturday clinics in the Constituency Office in Swords, I cut the best three stems and took them to the Seamus Ennis Centre in Naul village about 4 miles west of Balbriggan. John Markham, a renowned vegetable grower from the RHSI gave me a tip to tie the stems first to make them presentable in the display vase.
It was very encouraging to see a first prize sticker beside my entry when I returned later that afternoon. In case anyone is wondering, the judges do not see or know the names of entrants when they inspect each entry.
The garden is beginning to look neglected but is nonetheless very productive with apples, courgettes, tomatoes, parsley, runner beans, cavello nero kale, perpetual spinach and carrots looking and tasting well.
I’m lucky to get time just to keep the grass cut, under glass plants and potted plants watered. Most garden work these days is done late at night indoors juicing the prolific crop of large James Grieve apples. Some juice is frozen for thawing out to drink in months to come. Most is bottled and GIVEN to friends who have dropped a hint that a bottle would go down well. No complaints so far!
However this interest in growing fruit and veg is gathering momentum. As a result, I was invited to speak about ’getting started’ at the Electric Picnic and just last weekend I was honoured to open the first national Grow It Yourself conference held in Waterford Institute of Technology. My home town of Balbriggan was well represented there so I am hopeful GIY Balbriggan will soon be up and running. A network of GIY groups around the country will be a significant way of empowering communities. Even if it does cause me to neglect my own garden, this is a part of the important work which needs to be done to make us a self reliant and resiliant country where healthy diets will reduce obesity related sickness which is wasting 4 billion euro a year and causing otherwise avoidable stress and grief for many.
The ‘Indian summer’ has arrived and high pressure from mid-week on is good news for harvesting and sowing. I open up the seed catalogues therefore and order seeds for autumn sowing such as: 1. Radar – autumn onion sets, 2. autumn shallots, 3. garlic, 4. Aquadulce – broad beans, 5. cress, 6. mustard.
Seeing these sets and seeds becoming established before winter will ensure the spring growth will begin sooner and give me garden produce earlier in 2010. I’m experimenting with growing radish and lettuce in the ‘telephone box’ sized greenhouse by placing window boxes on shelves against a south facing wall under glass. I know David Langan in Rush as a professional grower is able to produce Irish butterhead lettuce for 52 weeks of the year growing under glass, so we’ll see what I can produce in a 2 foot square glass ‘telephone box’.
I hope this spell of fine weather will encourage gardeners with lawns to turn the sod and put in a few onion sets as a start to a new kitchen garden. To further encourage food growing at the Electric Picnic last weekend in Stradbally, Co. Laois, I was speaking on a panels with other growers and Bord Bia about appreciating Irish fresh produce and supporting Irish farmers in the interests of Irish food security. I also handed out a few Radar autumn onion sets to anyone who undertook to sow them when they got home.
Next weekend, I’ll have some time on Sunday hopefully to lift the remainder of my own few mature onions which I will then leave lying on paper indoors to dry before tying them and hanging them in the shed for use over the winter. Juicing garden apples continues and I am giving away bottles as I fill them. An apple juice connoisseur I work with in the Dept of Ag tells me this year the juice is not as sweet as last year which he prefers. Nature provides, I just dispense!
With the onions lifted, I will compost that area, cover it with old carpet and have it ready to sow the broad bean seeds in November. Where the beetroot was will also be enriched with compost and some wood ash in readiness for the new onion sets and shallot sets to be planted in September. I’ll leave the garlic cloves until early December before sowing in colder weather which they seem to like to get started.
Meanwhile, off to Waterford Institute of Technology on Saturday to launch a fantastic new initiative to organise, help and develop kitchen gardens in homes, schools and institutions throughout Ireland. Michael Kelly, the writer and Irish Times journalist the man who planted the seed of what I hope will become as well known as the GAA in every county in Ireland. Michael who wrote ‘Trading Paces’ also has a good website worth checking out if you Google his name.
Last chance before political work takes over to store up the beetroot and courgette crop. I need the ground where the beetroot has been growing to plant autumn onion sets. It suits me therefore to harvest the lot, boil and bottle them in vinegar with some onion and herbs from the garden in each jar. After giving away some beetroots at the Cool Earth exhibition in Dun Laoghaire last weekend, I have enough to make 14 jars full. I shall see how they keep in the cool athmosphere of the attic in the months ahead.
The glut of courgettes growing on my patio requires them to be cooked and stored also. The simplest thing for me to do was just make soup. Again the onions from the garden came in handy and the soup is tasty. The bulk I will freeze for re-heating during the colder days of winter ahead.
Even though the days are drawing in, there is still good light for sowing my weekly few radish seeds alongside the autumn lettuce I planted out. Meanwhile, I’m on the look out for the Radar variety of onion sets which are specifically for autumn planting. I have covered the former beetroot patch with old carpet to keep the soil weed free and warm in readiness for the trusty Radar sets when I can get some.
