The rotation of crop families is followed but on this scale and with this diversity of crops it needs some explanation for the casual visitor. the diversity of colour and vegetable types is what strikes a visitor as truly impressive.

The fold up bike was the ideal vehicle as the allotments were often up laneways or behind houses in out of the way places. George Harrison grew up in 12 Arnold Grove and his nearest allotment would have been Sturdee Road which was all locked and hard enough to find but was clearly well used. George described himself as the ‘gardener’ in the group so he is my ‘number one Beatle’.

Then I headed for Dunbabin Road, behind King David School close to where the first Beatle  manager, Brian Epstein, lived. Again this site was locked up but clearly well tended and very productive down a laneway surrounded by pallisade fencing as they all were.

Off I headed then down Menlove Avenue where John Lennon grew up and turned up Vale Road where close to John’s childhood home I found another large crop of allotments in the shadow of a beautiful pub bedecked with bulging bright hanging baskets called … (wait for it)…’The Gardener’s Arms’.

Suitably refreshed, I energetically struck out for Mersey Road Allotments near where Paul Mc Cartney grew up on Fortlinn Road. Here I met James about 16 years old and his Dad, Dave,  tending one of 140 allotments there stretching as far as the eye could see on the banks of the Mersey. James was at the locked gate waiting to be let in by his Dad. Each allotment holder has a key and pays annual rent which varies  according to the size of each plot, to the Mersey Road Allotment Association Secretary. This rent is then forwarded to the City Council. James, an incurable Eminem fan, was proud of the dry mud on his boots which are a momento of Oxegen (yes, in Kildare) .   Dave told me there was a waiting list of about 50 for this site and each plot is about 60 by 20 feet in size. An interesting sign on the noticeboard read, ‘HOSES MAY ONLY BE USED TO FILL WATER BUTTS’.

I left James and his Dad, locking the gate after me. and pedalled off towards the city centre to the Dingle area. (No debate about Daingean Uí Chúis over here!) This is ‘Ringo Star territory’ and in front of Buckland Street allotments is a picture of the great man giving all passers-by the two fingers in a sign of peace. I waited at the locked gates until Tom came out carrying a big bundle of rhubarb. Tom stopped to tell  me rents vary there between £17 and £50 a plot and rent was paid to the Allotment Committee locally who passed it on the Council. A notice on the gate read ‘Please do not let children onto the site regardless of whom they claim to be asking to see. The site is not a playground and unaccompanied children running around would invalidate insurance’.

Before leaving Liverpool I took a train to Port Sunlight to see a famous private allotment site on the Wirral. This is where William Hesketh Lever developed his now famous multnational company making soap. His vision was impressive. He built beautiful functional houses for his workers, introduced a pension scheme and other revolutionary benefits in the 19th century and made allotments available and encouraged their productive use.

One of his workers, Albert Wallace, won an award for the Best Allotment in 1892. His prize was two tons of the finest manure! In presenting the award, Mr Lever described Albert’s plot as ‘… well run, efficient and everything in its place…’. I imagine the Sunlight soap came in handy after that presentation!

The first part of the shoot was a chat about organic standards with Sle, Denise and myself. The second half saw Síle and myself picking, washing, cutting and juicing the first apples of the season. Fruit still a bit hard and tarty for juicing on a large scale but my apples will ripen over the next couple of weeks.

Here are a couple of pictures to give a visual flavour of the day.

Thanks to the generosity of Green colleagues in Fingal, I recently celebrated a ‘significant birthday’ with a tantalizing voucher for a small 8′ by 6′ greenhouse which they ordered from The Botanic Greenhouse Company in Swords. (Thank you one and all in the Fingal Greens). It will be winter time when I get to clear a space for this new addition to the kitchen garden, but in the meantime I’m on a learning curve. Suppose you could say I’m studying the ‘greenhouse effect’ in miniature! In farming, the term for growing under glass or in a polytunnel is ‘protected cropping’.

I was delighted to visit Nicky Kyle in Ballyboughal, Fingal, to get her advice on getting the best from a polytunnel or greenhouse. Nicky has been growing organically  for a few decades and her diverse produce sells well at Balbriggan Fish and Farmers’ Market every Friday morning.

The diversity of plants in just one polytunnel we visited was impressive. Even more impressive was the range of varieties of each species.

Here are a few examples:

CHERRY TOMATO; Variety ‘ROSADA’, a very sweet and tasty mini-plum shape available from Simpson Seeds. A lovely smack cut in halves with some hummus.

CHERRY TOMATO: Variety ‘SUNGOLD”, round and bright yellow when ripe and explodes with flavour in the mouth.

BEEF TOMATO: Variety ‘BLACK CRIM’, this year with the good summer, almost size of decent pumpkin, but struggles normally at this latitude, much prefers Sardinia probably!

ALPINE STRAWBERRIES: Variety ‘REUGEN’ good continuous cropper over summer months. Quite soft so need eating soon after picking. (I can live with that!) Grown from seed and bought by mail order from Chiltern Seeds.

FRENCH BEAN: Variety ‘COBRA’ excellent flavour and large pod size when ripe. French beans can be encouraged to crop again following first harvest if leaves are stripped off after cropping which triggers more fruiting I am told.

COURGETTE: Variety ‘Atena’ yield healthy and tasty yellow courgettes and does well as tunnel crop.

GRAPE: Variety ‘LAKEMONT’ seedless white grape which I saw growing well in a bucket sized pot. Mobile enough to put out in warmest weater and lifted back in again to be wintered under cover.

Meanwhile the Mammoth Russian sunflowers are flowering one by one. They are the skyscrapers of the garden and the bees love them. The lavender also is in full bloom and festooned with bumblebees and honey bees. The bees are not in the least bit bothered by me or any other mammal moving about the garden. It saddens me to hear about the phobia people mention about bees and wasps. I would be more cautious about wasps as they can sting and sting again later. However a bee will not sting unless the hive is threatened. After all, a bee dies in a gruesome way once it has stung, laying down its life for the hive.

Bees enjoying the Sunflower

This is the time of year to enjoy the fruits of earlier labour in the garden. However, the forward thinking gardener will be preparing to sow Spring Cabbage, Pak Choi and other salads, Radish every week or two and even Potatoes with harvest at Christmas in mind. Myself, I’ve put in a few more radish seeds and in a tub of soil, some lettuce seeds. Not very confident with the lettuce however as the packet says ‘ will not germinate over 18 degrees’. So fingers crossed. I’m not too worried as the garden is full of leafy plants which when mixed together make very interesting salads, such as chard, cabbage, nasturtium, dandelion, lettuces and various herbs. Even rose petals grown organically make an exotic addition to a salad bowl. As the person who said it said, variety is the spice of life (in as salad bowl).

Apart from the caterpillars the plants need watering and mulching to conserve moisture. Strong plants withstand attacks from predators so watering in the morning is like preventative health care for the plants.

Slugs or no slugs, this weekend was a great time to gather at The Organic Centre in Rossinver, Co. Leitrim for the annual Garden Party on Sunday 18th July,  for growers and eaters of home-grown garden produce. Neven Maguire, the legendary chef from Blacklion in nearby Co. Cavan kept a huge audience enthralled by mouth-watering ways of preparing chard, tomatoes and hake. He made pesto making look really easy. I could see tongues (almost) hanging out as he prepared a delicious tiramisu.

Then  famous vegetable gardening author, Joy Larkcom and her husband Don from West Cork did a fascinating presentation on growing salads of the cut and come again varieties, with good handouts and illustrations on PowerPoint.

The team at the Organic Centre, many of whom are volunteers, provided delicious soups and lunches, teas and coffees, cakes and all manner of refreshments for the 500 or so who came for a great day out in dry warm ‘Lovely Leitrim’.

Hans and Gaby Wieland and Andy Hallewell and all the Organic Centre team were thanked by me at the end of the day just before I pulled the raffle tickets for the Castlebaldwin Donkey Sanctuary. The Centre and the Sanctuary raised a few bob and need to raise much more, I have no doubt both people and donkeys went home happy.

The Organic Centre has some great courses coming up and other events. I learned a huge amount there about picking and preparing mushrooms. Check out their website at www.theorganiccentre.ie and go visit them, they need your support.

Recently I got a present of a role of copper tape which the packet claims will halt advancing slugs and snails. (Thanks Zoe.) Like Sellotape it needs a pot or something rigid to stick on to. Laying it in the soil would not be very effective I’d say. So what I need is the proverbial ring of steel. The next best thing I have in the shed is a riddle, but placed up-side-down on the soil it becomes a ‘ring of steel’ with a wire netting across its top.

I wrapped the copper tape around the edge of the riddle, sowed the seed and covered the round patch of seed-bed with the copper clad ring of steel. Little did I realise the first wrecker to arrive was not a slug but Arthur the cat as the picture  shows. Thankfully, he soon got bored with the novel high-security seed bed and moved on to let the sun warm the newly sown radish.

The variety I sowed are an heirloom variety which are for sale on the Irish Seed Saver website. Called German Beer or Beer Garden, they are a white radish, which I’m told can grow as big as a small turnip. Time will tell.

I get a generous crop from just two blackcurrant bushes – or ‘Ribes Nigrum’ as the Romans (or Michael Palin in ‘The Life of Brian’) might have said! A GIY friend was saying how the birds devour her blackcurrants and she needs to net the bushes. Maybe the variety I use is not so palatable to birds – but I certainly like it, as a dessert, on porridge or as a drink when juiced. I do not have time to make jam from it so I freeze any surplus in batches to use during the year.

I did not know much about fruit bushes when I bought and planted these two bushes in 1996. As luck would have it however, I accidentally gave them ideal conditions. A well manured deep soil and moisture during the summer, a regular mulch of lawn clippings and a pH of around 6.2 . The bushes are planted on the moist banks of the small garden pond so the roots never dry out.

The only snag is the fruit is difficult to reach with all the growth nearby. So I cut out and take away the stems using a secuteurs. I can then pick the mature fruit at the kitchen table. This makes the harvest an easier and more sociable activity. At the table a kitchen fork can also be used to remove the bulk of the fruit which speeds up the operation.

One drink using balckcurrants I have not yet tried is Cassis – apparently it is made from the juice mixed with a dry white wine and I’m told it goes down a treat on a hot day. Let me know if you can vouch for this or if you have other useful tips about  the beautiful blackcurrant.

Trevor Sargent cuts the ribbon at the opening of St. Teresa's N.S. vegetable garden while Principal Pat Furlong lends a hand.

I was delighted to be asked to open the very special vegetable garden in St Teresa’s National School, Balbriggan, last Friday. Principal. Mr Pat Furlong, caretaker Richard along  with Ms Ann Lee, her  pupils, and their parents pulled together to create a spectacular and very productive organic garden, complete with bug hotel and scarecrows. The full range of popular vegetables was looking good and very healthy. After the ribbon cutting and the very welcome cuppa and sandwiches, Ms Lee asked about my own patch. Before long we had a plan in place for her class to walk up the road on Monday morning to see   ”Trevor’s Kitchen Garden’.

Coincidentally, the importance of gardening for good childhood development has been in the news this week following publication of a three year study by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) in the UK. The study was commissioned by the Royal Horticultural Society, a great organization which helps  thousands of schools to establish gardens.

The NFER studied 10 schools in depth in Britain from London city to rural Yorkshire. As well as that, over 1,300 teachers were surveyed over 3 years. This research found that schools which actively use a garden in the curriculum develop ‘resiliant’, ‘ready to learn’ and ‘responsible’ children.

So to talk about gardening developing skills to ensure society has the means to feed itself in the future is but one worthwhile reason to get growing. Here and now, gardening in schools, homes and communities is key to our children becoming well-balanced, healthy, happy and all round well developed individuals. On top of this,  tilling the soil develops qualities of patience, co-operation and entrepreneurship amongst many young people, the reseach found.

Mind you, when the green-fingered pupils of St. Teresa’s National School in Balbriggan called around last Monday, it was enjoyment and adventure which was uppermost on their minds. After a glass of apple juice each, they were in fine voice to sing a few bars of ”The Garden Song’ to ‘robin watching hungrily from his perch in yonder tree’. The video clip below gives some sense of the occasion.