Sowing onions from seed

There can never be enough onions , I wish I had a field!

The sun is shining (between pelting showers) but regardless of the weather today is the day for sowing onions from seed.I finally got my module trays(7cellx12cell) from Garden World at 9am sharp this morning.This year I am trying out module trays on the advise of Klaus Laitenberger who swears by sowing three onion seeds per module and transplanting all three to the next stage before separating them out in the outside bed.Usually I use an open tray and broadcast the seeds, but these Letrim Germans might be on to something, and I'll never know unless I try.

I'm experimenting with compost this year too. I'm trying out a new worm castings compost called Celtic Gold which I got in Raheen Co-op last week.Supposedly the addition of 10% worm castings boosts plant growth by 100%, on the downside the remaining 90% is peat based. Great stuff peat, but not sustainable unfortunately. And while I'm not exactly wearing hemp clothes and living off grid  you can't escape the pressures on our resources.

Seamus has resurrected the heavy duty propagator and it's all set up in the Utility, with only a few cat paw prints so far-Ginger has yet to break in properly to sleep on it as he did last year, knocking pots, flattening seedlings, (well hes a bit large and clumsy)and causing general chaos. This year the plan is to put a cloche over it to make it harder for him to find a way in. But you know cats, they would sit on your head to get a bit of heat, so I'll be dubiously optimistic until I see otherwise. Expect me to post photos of him caught rotten, trying to pretend he is invisible!

Hurricane season

Will I ever get home?

Well lads, what a bloody day.

The centre in Kilmallock was evacuated at 1.30pm when the storm had knocked out the power and heating and people were starting to panic about getting home.Birdie was stranded ( "my fella" as she calls her long suffering husband, was stuck in traffic in Mallow)so I offered to take her home.
Easier said than done!

from Old Pallas to Pallasgreen

We set off at the height of the hurricane, luckily for me Birdie talked non stop distracting me from the wild rocking of the van and absolute howling of the wind outside.The centre of town was closed, a man in a high vis jacket was busy directing cars elsewhere, (afterwards I found out slates and bricks had been flying across the road) so we took an alternate route round the back of the town.It all looked good until the truck ahead of us suddenly pulled in and I flew past him only to find a huge tree blocking the whole road.Birdie did the swearing for me, even berating the council for lack of signs! But a few roads later it became obvious the council couldn't keep up with the rate of falling trees. Every road out of town was blocked and all I could do was drop off Birdie and take myself in resignation to the Deerbert Hotel for a cup of coffee and commiseration with the other people similarly stranded in the foyer of the hotel.

It was like the start of a bad horror film. Strangers stranded in a hotel, the power out, the staff trying to look after everyone as best they could, all eyes on the door for fresh arrivals and updates on yet more roads closed and yet more trees down. I looked out at one stage, watching the trees across the road (luckily there are no trees near the hotel) buckle and flail in the wind, and thought, I'm stuck here for the night!! But two coffees and one old lady later the news arrived; the town had reopened, the winds had dropped, and there might be a way home after all. Woo hoo!

Two hours later I finally got home!

Kilmallock to Bruff Road

It should have taken me 25 minutes, but between trees down, council crews with chainsaws, diversions, power lines flailing like ribbons, floods and deadly back-roads it was the longest commute of my life. I have to take my hat off to everyone on the council crews and the local farmers with machinery and chainsaws who worked flat out to clear the roads. The nicest man I met was near home, a cheerful farmer in a tractor clearing debris off a back road " don't go down there" he told me, "there are five trees down in the next mile alone!". I thanked him profusely and told him to mind himself as we talked casually underneath a huge tree leaning dramatically at a 45 degree angle across the road. He had just picked up his chainsaw to start cutting it down. "Tis a pity about this tree" he said, "I thought it would escape, it stood strong all morning, and that other bloody tree( he tilted his head to the other side of the road) I hoped would fall is still standing!"

The beautiful weeping willow in my neighbors garden that has been the backdrop to so many springs and summers here was the last tree I met across the road as I finally saw home. I cant tell you how sad it made me to see it lying prostrate on the road, it was so beautiful, and I had loved seeing it fill with new leaves each Spring. Not any more. No doubt in the middle of all this chaos, aside from the practicality of clearing roads, people are saddened to lose some much loved trees.

This tree on the Dromkeen back-road took the ditch with it!

I got home, parked up and congratulated myself on still being in one piece. Then I walked around the corner. to..absolute carnage; portable greenhouse shredded, BBQ stripped, roof ripped from the dog house, outdoor furniture stripped, plastic sun lounger half way down the garden in several nonredeemable pieces, cowl from the roof deposited in the hedge but worst of all part of a metal fence(where the hell did that come from?) resting casually against the glasshouse having obliterated half the glass and beheaded several plants on its journey over the hedge. I spent the next two hours with Seamus picking up glass and moving precious plants indoors getting colder and hungrier as hail beat down on us.But good news! the electricity is still on, there is a blazing fire in the stove and I am typing this with Ginger lying across me on one side and Seamus on the other, one purring the other snoring! so for now at least the worst is over.

I hope all of you are OK tonight and in one piece after a unforgettable crazy day . Eliza I hope your beautiful old trees are all still standing.

The end of the lovely weeping willow

Building a pick your own Orchard

Sue Measuring out the beds for the Apple trees

This teaching year may be hectic but is is extremely interesting. Eileen is setting up a Pick your own fruit Orchard in Blackhill Farm with the help of the FETAC 4 students who are studying fruit as their anchor module this year (this means that a lot of the key skills we do in other modules like plant propagation and plant identification are also bound up with the work we do for the fruit module). We have had a great time going on visits to Irish Seed Savers in Clare and The Apple Farm in Tipperary gathering information and learning as much as we can from experts in (no pun intended) the field of fruit. Apart from the fun of going on field trips we actually found out a huge amount about growing Apple trees in particular and we owe a big thank you to Pat at Irish Seed Savers and Con at The Apple Farm for all their advise and help.By the way ye members of the public do all ye can to support Irish Seed Savers in their time of need.

On the estuary near Glin

This Tuesday we went on to the Shannon Estuary near the pretty village of Glin to collect seaweed for the new apple tree beds. The lads have already built some of these beds using the spacings recommended for commercial planting my I.S.S.A. and Con Traas. Eileen had opened some well matured compost heaps to add nutrients and the final job before planting is to put on the seaweed mulch to add lots of trace elements to the soil for the new trees.We were spectacularly lucky with the weather. Up to the night before it was blowing a gale and pouring rain. But the day dawned clear and calm and it was the first true taste of spring watching the sun fall on the fields as we drove through Carrigkerry cross country to the beach near Glin.

The beds ready for mulching the yellow area is weeds dying off under black plastic

It is good fun picking seaweed but the estuary is completely different from the beach. Its full of mud flats which are dangerous in themselves. Walk across the wrong stretch of "beach" and you get swallowed up never to return. Drift seaweed (freely floating not attached to roots or rocks) was few and far between although when we did find it it was exceptionally fine and soft. Most of the seaweed visible at low tide was firmly attached to the rocks or the pebbly upper shoreline.Although initially it looked like just one type of seaweed it turned out we collected at least 10 different varieties. There was slim to no kelp, which is one of the most important seaweeds of all for plant and human nutrition. In all just three pieces were found on the whole inlet beach! A far cry from Seafield which is fairly awash with the stuff.

sea lettuce was in abundance

Still we managed to be a distraction for the locals who periodically drove down to see what we were up to.  No one came over and asked us any questions they just drove down to the pier, parked, watched us for a bit and drove back very slowly watching us all the time. We made a good effort to wave wildly at everyone who ventured down (at least 5 cars I think!), what they made of us up to our eyeballs in mud wrestling with seaweed in January God only knows! Two of the girls speculated on all the affairs, sneaky local goings on and drug smuggling we had interrupted with our mornings work. A few of us wondered what wild stories the locals had come up with about us in the privacy of their cars. How disappointing for us and the locals that life is rarely as exciting as we might like it to be!

The beds covered in their seaweed mulch

We got back to Eileen's farm in time for a hearty lunch followed by the most delicious apple crumble and custard that poor Eileen had made for us the day before. Despite there being less students and more crumble than anticipated somehow they put a good dent in the supplies, proof if any were needed, that sea air (even diluted by the freshwater and air of the estuary) really gives you a great appetite. After marinating for a bit in front of a hot stove we managed to eventually venture back outside into glorious January sunshine. In the Orchard we pulled back our black plastic mulch and were pleased to see the weeds between the rows had started to yellow and die over the last few weeks.We picked up where we had left off on the making of a third apple bed, carefully pulling out weeds (a job made much easier by the use of the mulch) loosening the earth and removing large stones. Eileen opened more compost heaps for us to barrow well matured compost onto the surface of the new bed. Once done it was simply a case of emptying bags of seaweed onto the beds. In all we used about 12 bags for each bed (36 bags in all) with plenty in reserve for the beds yet to be made. We re-covered the entire area with the black plastic and weighted it down once more.The last thing we did was a bit of seaweed identification before hitting for home after a very satisfying day.

If you want to find out which seaweeds are which here are two good sites for Ireland and the UK;
Seaweeds in Ireland
Seaweeds in the UK

State of the Union

Last Black Futsu Pumpkin from stores

Today may be fairly rubbish weather wise but its exactly the type of day to stay in, do big piles of boring paperwork and enjoy a pot of good soup. Unfortunately my pumpkins in stores are down to just a few, and today the last black futsu was sacrificed at the altar of pumpkin, veg and ginger soup. 

No I haven't put in the wrong photo. The futsu started off completely dark green-black at harvest time but has turned this lovely mottled orange colour in storage as it ripened and

Black futsu original colour

matured. It's amazing what a few months indoors can do. This very often throws off new growers of pumpkins who fear something has gone drastically wrong when they see colours changing. Trust me when I say that in my humble opinion its when they start to go soft, smell bad and cry all over the floor that you are in serious trouble. At that stage heed the warning the pumpkin is giving you and Do not eat!

I won't be sowing pumpkin and squash seeds until April but I am getting started on other crops like spuds which are chitting on my new dresser. My sister in law gave it to me when she did a huge remodeling job on her kitchen and afterwards discovered it would no longer fit. It's a beautiful piece of handmade furniture but even better than that it has a long obliging shelf the perfect width for rows of egg boxes with sprouting spuds. To be honest I liked my humble little dresser I bought at auction better with its open shelves and cream colour my mother and I painted it. And I feel bad that its losing its prime spot in my kitchen with no immediate hope of a new home. It suited me if you know what I mean, it wasn't pretentious or brassy just cheerful, simple and homely. This thing is a bit too posh for me, thank God my sister in laws kids scribbled in crayon and slightly thrashed it, I feel I have permission to paint it and soften the look of it! Plus its twice the size of my humble charlie. I'm ungrateful, I know!! I just like furniture you can live with, not have to mind. Already it's hard work keeping the new cats from jumping up on it to steal chillies!

 

Chitting first earlies

This year Garden World on Ellen street in Limerick city are doing 70+ varieties of potato! I seriously do not have the room for that amount in my garden but Chris one of my former students is set to grow about 74 varieties and is planning on another spud tasting open day at his farm. Last year he had people tasting spuds from early morning to 1am at night! It's a fantastic idea and I will be sure to mention it when he sets a date for this year. Hopefully it won't go all Copper faced Jacks on him on the day.

What I am going to try this year is growing spuds in potato grow bags and in large containers. Although I have always been very dubious about it- it is one way of maximising the types you can try in one growing season.A few of the new super fast spuds like "swift" and "rocket"are the ones I am most curious about. The have shorter foliage, tighter plant spacings and promise an even earlier crop. Definitely worth a try.

Obey the moon-sow leafy crops today

today's seeds for sowing

Hi lads! into battle we go. Today is my first sowing day of 2014. According to my bio-dynamic calendar it's leaf crops; spinach, early hardy cut and come salad crops, rocket, texel greens, and micro greens; dark opal basil, green sprouting broccoli and rocket victoria. I'm using root grow mycorrhizal fungi in each seed tray to help them get going. It's a bit early in the year so I think they will take all the help they can get! That said everything in the cold frame and the broad beans in the glasshouse have started to grow again, under glass today its a nice 10c so I hope the temperatures will continue like this for these salad crops once they are transplanted out. I'm putting all of them under cover to crop. It's still too cold to plant them outside, though I will have to harden off the broad beans soon, they are pushing roots out through the very large pots I gave them!

If you are making plans for sowing this month using the moon my plan is;

Fruiting crops like early peas and beans, chillies and tomatoes on Monday the 20th January
Root crops like onions  on Wednesday the 22nd January
Flower crops like broccoli,  sweet peas, verbascum, and foxgloves on Friday 24th of January

Happy sowing!
Please order your seeds from The Irish Seeds Savers Association who need all the help they can get this year. Or better yet become a supporter. It's unthinkable that they should fail so please do all you can to help, even small orders can count.

If you have old packets of seeds and you want to ckeck their viability you can do this simple test that my FETAC 5 group carried out yesterday;

1. Lightly moisten a paper towel. Then, fold it in half.
2. Place 10 seeds on the paper towel. Then, fold the towel in half again to cover up the seeds.
3. Stick the paper towel in a plastic sandwich bag and seal.
4. Write the seed name and date on the bag. Then, store the bag in a warm spot (on top of the refrigerator works well).
5. Check the bag each day to see if any seeds have germinated and to re-moisten the paper towel, as needed.
6. Continue checking the bag until you reach the germination time listed (e.g. 7 days) on your seed packet.If its not listed on your seed packet check it online from seed companies, it varies dramatically from each seed to the next so don't guess! check it out.
7. Count how many seeds germinated. Use this to determine your percentage of viability. If, for example, 8 of your 10 seeds germinated, that would be an  80% viability.
8. If you decide to use your seeds, plant extra to make up for the seeds that aren't likely to germinate.

Coming around again

The sun; so near and yet so far away

Did you ever get the feeling that no matter how well intentioned you are there is always something getting in the way of the things you want to do? January should be renamed "the road to hell" littered with the good intentions, drunken new years resolutions and half arsed ideas of what you will do with the clean sheet of the new year. One of my many good intentions is to be a better correspondent, a regular bi or tri-weekly blogger as I used to be. Push work firmly to one side, get on with the business of blogging, forget about teaching! making money! feeding cats! blog at all costs. Hold me to it, and we will see how long the resolution lasts....

At this time of year I miss the light of home. One decided advantage to having no impediment for miles around is the pure spectacular light levels in the house and in the garden even on the shortest days of the year. On this slope the sun begins to disappear gradually through October shortening its stay each day until one frosty day in November (when the skies are blue and the sun busy dissolving ice crystals in the valley below) you wake up to a quiet gloom, the fields a stiff grey white, ice in puddles refusing to melt and time suddenly seems to stand still.Does anyone remember the Greek legend of Persephone? Condemned to spend months underground and only allowed back overground to bring the flowers of spring? That's what it feels like here. Going underground for November, December and January.

So January becomes the month of watching. Watching for the sun to begin its reappearance in the southern sky. Because of the extinct volcano between me and the sun, monitoring the light; what times it "breaks the hill" each day, where the light falls and how long its rays last becomes supremely important each year and for some strange reason no less compelling at the years go on. Just today at lunch time I noticed the sun finally break the top of the hill at 1.06pm hitting light squarely into the back of the kitchen wall, onto the last bed in the vegetable garden (bed no 5) and in jagged stripes across the apple orchard on the front lawn. What always amazes me is how this light stretches out, at first only lasting for 20 minutes until by degrees it begins earlier and earlier each afternoon and lasts later and later each evening.Never mind your hippies banging drums at Newgrange on December 21st, this is my gardens winter solstice, and the sun is finally coming round again.Somehow it spurs you on and gives you the enthusiasm you need for the busy time that lies ahead.If you pay attention too you will know which parts of the garden warm up earliest. Important stuff when it comes to sowing the first veg crops in February and March.

ready to go....

 So what does lie ahead ? The seed stock-take has been done, with seeds graded into each calendar month for sowing and the box for January filled with early hardy varieties of sweet peas, lettuces, salad crops, tomatoes,broccoli, micro greens, flowers, broad beans, onions and chillies. The moon calendar has been consulted and each date marked on the kitchen calendar for the different crops to sow that day. The seed labels used in the garden last year have been brought indoors, washed, pencil markings erased, and  put into bundles ready for sowing over the next three weeks. The plan for the garden rotations has been drawn up although the debate rages on about how many beds potatoes should get and in an effort to solve the problem it looks like I will trial potato grow-bags and tubs this year for first earlies anyway. Since students squeezed for space often ask me about it I'm definitely in need of trying it out. In about two weeks the shop on Ellen street will have over 70 varieties of seed potatoes so its important to have a plan (so I don't go crazy when I get inside the door!!). If you were so inclined you could work out exactly how many seeds to sow for absolutely everything you were going to grow and lay out every piece of ground for them well in advance. Can you imagine being that organised? me neither! But it dosen't stop me trying to get there every new year.

End of the line

The restored "Gardeners cottages" garden at Doneraile

It's tricky, I find, to type with a cat stretched across your lap, an awkward barrier between you and your laptop, his furry ginger head firmly wedging your right elbow to the couch. So excuse me if my grammar and spelling take a turn for the worst,or my spaces are uneven; today I am left handed, one fingered and handicapped by the weight of a fat purring cat. I'm getting the odd flex of claws into my leg too but compared with THE BITE ON THE ARSE I got earlier from a neighbors dog on an innocent evening walk being kneaded is positively relaxing!! I was furious/shocked/frightened(all three simultaneously it seemed at the time)  but I have calmed down now. I'm almost looking forward to the spectacular bruise tomorrow. "Almost" I said! after all you have to find the funny side in everything.

Before the dog bite I was out walking at the close of the day. There is something about this time of the year, a kind of pause as everything grinds to a halt. November is the end of the line. The Summer and the Autumn are both over. Dark nights stretch ahead. And despite roses lingering on in the borders, chillies in the glasshouse, and roots and greens in the vegetable garden, an air of finality, death and decay hangs over everything. Molds and mildew take hold, stems rot, glass inside holds condensation and moisture all day, the patio looks dirty and cold-everything feels perpetually damp.

It's a bit too early for seed catalogues and almost too late for cleaning up, (though to be honest I have 99% of my own cleaning up yet to do) but it's about the right time to look back over the growing year, assess what was good and bad, and make a big batch of chutney while thinking about what you will grow next year.

The Good

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes! In hanging baskets, outdoors in the vegetable garden, indoors in the glasshouse. A great crop, huge yields and fantastic flavour, eaten in salads, made into roasted tomato soup and given away to delighted neighbours, family and friends.The best year ever!

In hanging baskets Seamus grew yellow and red tumbling tomatoes, the yellow had by far the better flavour but both fruited superbly. The yellow tomatoes also made amazing pasta sauce and looked lovely on pizzas.

Outside I grew Glacier, Totem and Aurora. All of which fruited well ( the slugs developed quite the palate for them at the later end of the year) When picked and cooked together they made the best tasting, smoothest tomato soup I have ever had.

In the glasshouse too many tomato plants jostled for the best positions. We learned a valuable lesson about space, half the amount will be grown next year! In the Tomato Jungle were Anais Noire, Rainbow, Brandywine, Golden Queen, Sweet Millions, Sungold, Weissbehart, Marmande, Tigerella, Broad ripple currant, Chocolate stripe, Yellow submarine and Gardeners delight. Sungold and Sweet Million were probably the sweetest  of the cherries. Golden queen was the loveliest salad tomato while brandywine, while only having a few fruit per plant has such enormous fruit with such great flavour that they are well worth the effort.

The Bad

Sweetcorn. It did not pollinate well, swell properly or crop well. Likewise pumpkins were wildly hit and miss. Not a good year. I'm curing the Hunter butternut squashes, a small crop of small sized fruit it must be said, but Eileen did not fare much better indoors in her tunnel. Other pumpkins I managed to harvest include one fair sized marina di chioggia, two decent green Latvian Pumpkins thanks to Liliana, Dace's mother, four small Japanese black futsu pumpkins, one tiny Hopi Pale grey and three cute but small New England Sugar Pies. Not a good year at all!

The ugly

Potatoes, or rather a lack of potatoes. Not the first earlies, they were lovely, not the second earlies they were lovely too, but the main crops-O Lord the flaming maincrops!As I dug my maincrop beds I turned up rotten spud, after rotten spud, after yet another rotten spud filled with tiger worms, burrowing  millipedes, tunelling slugs and any other insect that could stick in its head for a snack. The first lot of Tibet's were great but one of the stalks had next to nothing underneath and the two potatoes that did come up were soft turning pink after a few hours on the surface. I looked it up. Its called " Pink rot". Nice. Another soldier in the blight army. I found some depressing information about it on the UK potato councils website here.

Thank God for the Tibet's, or we'd be spud-less. I have a bag in storage but the odds of them lasting to Christmas day are fairly poor. They are a lovely baked and roasted potato, better than mashed though that's not bad either. There were a few Pink Fir apple too, God what an astonishingly delicious potato! Pity most of them rotted away to nothing.There is always next year, although I am seriously rethinking growing maincrops at all now.

Gold star

But the gold star has to go to the Brussels sprouts currently forming , I have two of the finest plants I think I have ever grown with an enormous crop of sprouts running right up the stems of both. And the final award must go to the Black Tuscan Kale, the same stuff I threatened to pull out of the ground earlier in the summer , its still growing strong, has reared two lots of caterpillars this summer and is producing a wonderful crop of delicious green leaves still. Its now two years old!

Great runners up

The golden berry pineapples are still producing fruit. The Kilkenny pearmain apples- we had the first decent crop of an absolutely delicious eating apple. There was an outstanding crop of Keegans crab eating apples, Eckinville Seedling cooking apples and Lough Key crab apples too, but they are solidly reliable any given year. Finally there is still a fantastic crop of beetroot (in the ground), as are the leeks and believe it or not there are still raspberries, peas and courgettes fruiting. Is it the end of the line after all?