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?

A Cockroach the size of a hubcap and other strange stories

I am eating the odd autumn raspberry

Being back at work is great, don't get me wrong, but instead of being outside gardening, or on here bogging I'm doing endless reading up on new material and typing endless handouts. Mind you its all interesting stuff, soil science and plant science, plant propagation techniques and botanic keys, whatever about the students I am learning loads, and I hope their looks of confusion will soon be replaced by looks of scholarly interest, neurons firing away madly in their brains as they ask me brilliant questions........or maybe not.

The neurons might not yet be firing but one thing we do have in abundance is good craic, everyone is high spirited and happy. Eager to learn and not a bit bothered about getting dirty, so Monday to Friday at least I look forward to seeing them all, and the classes in general are not at all serious or sedate. I keep trying to come up with interesting and fun ways to get them out of the classroom and still deliver the lesson which has led to some memorable moments already!

Tom, Rose and Ann investigate raspberry on the fruit course

One of my groups is incredibly mixed, the type of people reality show people would love for a desert island survival camp.And funnily enough I am incredibly fond of them after only a few weeks. Scholarly questions are all well and good but entertaining, outrageous and wildly crazy ones are even better! One student in particular comes out with the most hilariously entertaining statements right in the middle of class (often completely unrelated to what we are talking about) and though on one level I should try to stop her when she gets going, statements like; "I found a cockroach the other day and I'm not joking you it was the size of a hubcap" are just too good to be true! It's so hard keeping a straight face when she goes off in a wildly politically incorrect rant about cutting away bogs "its just as well to get rid of that old wet bog land is-int it?sure what is it good for?" or makes yet another wild statement about a plant that is hopelessly off the mark, my jaws ache from the sheer effort to keep a straight face. And none of this is helped by some of the others in the group barely holding it together, hiding behind refill pads shaking with laughter.(I must point out we all love her, and she is a great worker so none of this laughter is at her expense)! O lord! the joys of education!

So what have we been doing this week, apart from laughing our arses off?

Emptying old compost heaps and spreading them on beds cleared for the winter then covering them with black plastic until spring.

Disinfecting work surfaces in the tunnels, washing pots, seed trays and labels for use in spring time.

Putting away propagators to keep them dry over winter

Sowing over wintering onions and garlic (root day today lads, great day for it, tomorrow too)

Getting ready to sow green manures, early flowering sweet peas, edible peas and overwintering broad beans

Season of the apple

Better Seamus than me!

Saturday was the day to end all sunny days. Blue skies and warm autumn sunshine, warm enough to bring out the butterflies and bees that darted around the garden on the ivy and in the long grass, get the birds singing loudly, and better than all that it was the perfect day to pick apples.

Marys apple tree in Tallow is probably close to 100 years old,(her house is over 100 years old) but it's incredible just how productive it continues to be. Last year there were no apples, not a one, and she was very disappointed. This year almost by way of apology it has outdone itself, we ran out of fruit crates, ran out of boxes and finished up with 5 kg potato bags!

I have no idea what the variety is. I can only describe it as a cooker that blushes a nice shade of red on the southern side of the tree, not much of a description really, and I have been tempted to have it officially named if I could find someone to identify it. ISSA used to do it but I don't think they offer that service anymore. Just in case anything happens to it I have grafted it a few times and the new "Tallow wonder" trees are doing nicely. My sister in law got her first decent harvest from hers this year. I'm still at the pruning stage with mine, trying to imitate the open goblet shape of the original tree, perhaps the secret of its long productive life. Maybe its thanks to the deep loam soil and mild southern weather of County Waterford, or the walled garden it calls home, protecting spring flowers from late Spring frosts. The trees next door are still producing too despite absolutely no intervention for years and being surrounded by a forest of weeds!

the very best apples get their own VIP box

The great thing about helping Mary is the advanced "apple training" I have got over the last 12 years. After all that time I really understand that a  successful apple harvest depends on a few things, and these are the same things that apply to any gardeners harvest, especially long term storage crops.

First at the picking stage they must be picked with great care (treat them gently "like eggs" to quote Mary), putting them carefully into the collection bucket, leaving aside anything that falls as it is being picked and treating "fallen" apples as windfalls, not for storage.

Once the bucket comes to the ground the apples have to be sorted. Mary has 3-4 categories. Only the most perfect apples made the grade for long term storage, so sorting the apples according to their keeping qualities is really important. Even little holes present the opportunity for rot down the line so any apple with a hole won't make it to the storage shed. The most perfect apples are the VIPs, they are huge, blemish free, fat and satisfying. Most of these can fill a whole apple tart by themselves.

Mary sorting the apples at the apple "factory"

Next are the regular sized  apples, perfect for storage for at least six months although they will need to be checked over regularly.That old expression " one rotten apple rots the whole barrel" is really true when it comes to storing apples over many many months. If you don't check over them regularly you can lose a hole bag or box thanks to one stinker!

The third category is the almost perfect apples, with some small blemish tat means they cant be stored but at least 80-90% of the apple itself is perfectly good. These go into a use quickly category and get sent out to friends and relatives first as they wont keep for much longer than a week or two and will dis improve dramatically after that.

bucket ready for sorting

The last category are the windfalls, lots of bruises, chunks gouged out by birds and wasps and cracks from where they fell and hit the ground. These apples need to be used up asap, and usually Mary , God love her, makes a pile of apple jelly to use them up quickly before they rot away to nothing. For a few devoted apple lovers Mary will send out these windfalls first, with the promise of the better apples to come.

You would be amazed at how many people Mary manages to supply from this one tree. Her extended family in Limerick and Tipperary, neighbours, friends and now a supply extends to my mother in west Clare! Mary wouldn't see a single apple go to waste and I suppose its a testament to living through more frugal times even if on occasion Marys tales of war time rationing ( how many ounces of tea they were allowed!) remind me of Uncle Albert on Only fools and Horses!
 

The honey run

Jack has had a good year, well technically Jacks bees have had a good year. On a visit the other day I was allowed in to "the holy of holies" according to Jack (his honey extraction room) to see the harvest and even better to bottle/jar my own raw fresh honey.

It was a two person operation, Jack pulled the tap and I held the jars underneath. There is something fantastic about a stainless steel trough that yields thick flowing amber goo. The jars filled amazingly quickly and with all the talking we did it was easy to get caught out and find your hands covered in the stuff!! I got 11 beautiful jars full, all packed with pollen. Jack told me that the odd insect leg or egg, might be in here too, none of which bothers me, though my dear husband refused to eat it after I foolishly explained that to him! Regardless of whats in there overtime everything rises to the top where it can easily be scooped out before you dig in. Mind you I saw only small pieces of wax and nothing else in all the jars I filled myself.

Jacks commercial honey is cleaned of all this debris, but for hay fever sufferers like myself its better laden with the offending pollen as it helps build immunity against it in the long run. Once I got home there was only one thing left to do, break out the Greek yogurt, top it with walnuts and pour some of this fantastic honey fresh from the comb into the bowl.Could there be anything better?

is there anything nicer?

To Organise a visit to Jack see the details here Ryan's Honey Farm

Well fed and well watered in Letrim

Planting  winter salads in the glasshouse

"Lovely Letrim my hole!" Mike said when Eileen and myself told him we were off for the weekend to train with Klaus Leitenberger. Klaus who is a GIY Legend lives just under the shade of Benwiskin mountain across the Sligo border on the western tip of Letrim.For those of you who don't know many people deride poor County Letrim which is the least populated county in Ireland( probably because it seems to be the wettest place in Ireland too).In fairness to Mike who flat out refused to come, (he also had a number of cat and wheatgrass sitting duties for Eileen and Orla) he wasn't far wrong.A long sunny scenic three and a half hour drive from Limerick through Clare, Galway, and Sligo ended up cloudy and wet once we got to Letrim!

Maybe if the day had been fine and sunny it would have left a nice impression, but it was raining all bloody day, raining and cold, raining and cold and miserable, I'd go on but I think ye are getting the picture.Last time I was in Letrim for a weekend it rained all that weekend too. Maybe I am just unlucky in Letrim? Maybe it was a slight hangover and lack of sleep ( I'm a cheap night out before one of ye books me into AA).I must be getting conditioned to County Limerick, (being that much closer to the equator) which on the whole is mild and agreeable most of the time. I brought two sets of clothes, thermal winter and optimistic autumn, guess which ones I wore? The winter thermals of course!

some of the humongous tomatoes

In fairness to Klaus and Johanna we got a warm hospitable welcome. In the house fires blazed in all the hearths, and good warm cups of coffee and tea, with scones greeted us inside the door. In all 16 people were on the course across a range of knowledge and ability. What surprised me most was how many of them were absolute beginners, I had expected people with lots of experience here to pick his brain. After all he ran the Organic centre in Letrim, ran a successful market garden in the UK, appears on TV and does talks. Why aren't these lads doing beginners gardening courses first to get the basics and then go on one of these courses? The mind boggles.

The other thing that amazed me was the geography. People had travelled from Northern Ireland, Dublin, Wicklow, Waterford, Galway, Cork, all over the country. I thought we might be regarded as a bit mad for coming from Limerick! Ha!

looking across Johanna's pond to a rain soaked Benwiskin

No matter the weather we got an awful lot out of the day. The course was "Growing in Poly tunnels and Greenhouses" and was focused on what to grow through the winter months.Eileen and I tried to say as little as possible and just take it all in , but I was found myself wanting to ask loads of questions and had to somehow put a lid on it! I would love a few hours with Klaus to pick his brain, and he is so agreeable and nice it would be easily spent. He was still taking questions at half four, long after we should have been finished for the day with all the appearance of not minding at all which really says a lot about him . Johanna was lovely too. She made the most delicious three course meal for us for lunch-it was bloody hard work getting back up and going outside afterwards!

Klaus gives us a masterclass in his outdoor bog garden

So what did we cover?

• We looked at tunnels and how to manage them for year round cropping with examples of how to do it with different succession crops.
• The importance of choosing tunnel and glasshouse friendly varieties to prevent premature bolting, especially with root crops.
• We ran through typical under cover crops with hints and tips for success with sowing them-this was excellent.
• We found out how to make a German hill bed! Amazing stuff!
• We went out to the glasshouse and looked at how it was built. We also did practical work, sowing, transplanting and pruning, and other hard work like tasting varieties of tomatoes, delicious salads and grapes!
• Looked at Klaus's more unusual "Inca"crops, ( like tuberous nasturtiums) and why he grows them
• Discussed the sweetest varieties of Tomatoes to grow and which to avoid!
• Looked at techniques for saving your own seeds, recommended tools and techniques for cultivating good soil
• and loads more!

I have pages and pages of notes! If you get a chance I highly recommend a day with Klaus, Johanna and their lovely kids. The next courses will run in 2014. He only does 4 a year so book early!

For courses and info on Klaus check out his website www.milkwoodfarm.com


Cool stuff I heard of on this class

Ladies check out Wild Wellied Women a group Klaus trained who run a box scheme in Letrim, an interesting model for women who want to grow food together and make a commercial venture out of it. Mary J I'm thinking of your neighbour with the old walled garden for this one, check it out!

It looks weird but Klaus demoed this garden "gark" tool that is some kind of mad cross between a spade and a rake. It is so cool! And apparently unbreakable-you can drive over it.Perfect for the accident inclined gardener!

Read all about what it can do here on the GIY website.

The Garden Wall

endless transplanting.....

I finally hit the wall.
I can't take another day of watering, feeding, transplanting,and fighting endless armies of greenfly. Not another night of slug patrol,or mornings of dog wrangling, cat chasing, blackbird hunting...aahhhhhhhhhh!!!! I'm finally going MAD!!!!

No I'm not really going mad, just fecking knackered. Can't go to bed till late as it's so bright, cant sleep on as its bright too early in the mornings (and any sleep I might get is interrupted by the sound of falcons screaming at all sorts of uncivilised hours). They must be going STARK RAVING MAD in Iceland and Alaska, I'm only in Limerick and I'm going mad. Is there anyone else going mad with me? No? O well then , I'm the only crazy in the village.

beds of first and second earlies doing well

In my more lucid moments I have taken a gander around the veg garden just to see what stage things are at. Last Friday I had the pleasure of the first broad beans for dinner and tomorrow it looks like the first Earlie's will be on the plate. I had an idea to cook all three meals from spuds tomorrow in sheer celebration. It seems so slow this year, so long to wait for a harvest compared to other summers that I could (almost) cry to be finally eating something (see I haven't fully lost it yet) I grew myself. And in an odd ironic twist my new broad bean dinner was accompanied by beautiful calvo de nero kale which was meant to be profusely feeding me through last winter but has chosen instead to be at its peak now, right at the moment when I need to rip it out of the ground for the next crops. Seriously what is going on with our growing year? and why wouldn't you go mad dealing with all this?

beautiful calvo de vero, completely out of season!

Half of this is my own fault, setting too many seeds, stubbornly deciding I must transplant them all. Them being bowed over doing crazy amounts of transplanting and keeping the compost factories afloat. Waking up with a battered back. Ridiculous! The other half is the cold, slow spring. Everything is bloody late.

Then there is the whole new learning curve of the glasshouse, which although brilliant for tomatoes, cucumbers(first one fattening up) and peppers is tricky enough to ventilate correctly, manage water for the plants which are in pots and keep the ever increasing hoard of green and white fly at bay. I have loads of french marigolds scattered throughout the fruiting plants but that doesn't seem to be really helping the chillies although the tomatoes are pretty greenfly free. I even brought in a ladybird larvae, a very unattractive looking insect which I suspect is wrongly accused of all manner of gardening crimes based on its unfortunate appearance. In face these ugly weird baby ladybirds chomp aphids by the hundred (except for the one I brought in on a leaf from the garden-the lazy b****** refuses to work. Fecking insects!

Having a snooze; lazy ladybird larvae

And the slugs, don't get me started on the bloody slugs. You know I'm slug tolerant, I even like them which is really odd for a gardener I know. But If I go out one more night at midnight and collect even more long grey ones, stripey small fat ones(odd drier ones) and skinny black ones that then try to make a break for it slithering through my fingers and up my arm or chew on my palm in a really weird itchy annoying way while I'm leaning over a bed trying to collect a few more....! Where the hell did all these slugs come from?

peas, broad beans and flat leaved parsley

The signs were there,  I found numerous slug egg depots in the soil over the last two weeks(which Seamus enjoyed popping in a disturbing way) but the sheer scale of the nightly hoards is just frightening to behold. Out last night I kept crunching something underfoot on the pathways, eventually I looked away from the plants and looked down to see what looked like a five lane highway in America full of snails! No wonder there are chunks taken out of everything!!!

The solution arrived in the post today, a packet of Nemaslug, currently chilling in the fridge. This is powerful and safe stuff, approved for Organic growers and entirely harmless to all but the slugs, after the initial high "woo hoo my nemaslug has arrived!!" ( which made my husband laugh, well its hardly a winning lottery ticket I suppose) I was driving later in the day and thinking about using it when real guilt set in and I began to feel bad for the slugs! O you can't win, dammed if you do, dammed if you don't. I WILL BE using it though, maybe then I can quit midnight slug patrol and finally get some bloody sleep!

Foxgloves in the fruit garden