Trevor Sargent’s new book launch

March 28th, 2012

Great evening last night in Hodges & Figgis for the launch of Trevor’s Kitchen Garden – Trevor Sargent’s week by week guide to growing your own food.

 

The book devotes a chapter to each week over 12 months, from the first week in February (Lá ‘le Bríde) to the fourth week in January.  24 guest writers are featured answering questions about food growing and there are over 60 beautiful  fine illustrations which were drawn by Trevor.

Neven Maguire launched the book for Trevor and there was great banter between the two of them,  Seamus Sheridan the cheesemonger provided delicious cheese nibbles.   The book provides contact details of places around Ireland to go to see food grow, as well as a map.

All proceeds from the book go to SEED, (School Earth Education Development) a charity network of demonstration and educational centres so that more food growing courses for kitchen gardeners can be provided, near where people live.

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Sonairte Food & Craft Market

March 26th, 2012

So it was the first Food & Craft Market  yesterday and what a fabulous day we got.  The sun shone from when we began setting up at 9 to the end of the day.  Thank you to Rachael and her guys who helped me get all the tables downstairs and set up for the traders.  Some of the traders had not been in Sonairte since the Christmas markets and really liked the spruce up the place has had…Outside I was opening the gates getting sorted when in came Rita all the way from Portlaoise with her niece and grand niece.  Rita is a candle maker and this was her first market.

She makes disc candles that are just exquisite.  Check out the website for more photos.  www.sonairte.ie.

Katie and Niamh arrived as Rita was setting up – Niamh is an acupuncturist and Katie does Bush Flower Remedies.  Niahm’s practice is called Anam Mai and having the curiosity of the proverbial cat I asked her where the name came from …”Well she said I had been ill six years ago with recurring upper respiratory infections with numerous courses of antibiotics and steroids attending an acupuncturist. The results were amazing and to this day she attends monthly treatments to maintain her health.  Astounded by the results from Traditional Chinese Medicine, Niamh began her studies with the acupuncture Foundation Ireland in 2008. The name “Anam Mai” is derived from the Acupuncture point “Shen Mai”.  Shen meaning spirit in Chinese is substituted with the Irish word “Anam” also meaning spirit.  Mai pronounced May is also significant as it is Niamh’s mother’s name.  May passed away due to cancer seven years ago; this gave Niamh the desire to pursue a career which could promote wellbeing.

Then, John Wilde came in and in a very chilled out way set up his stool and amp and began playing.  John plays a Hiawaiian hollow neck lap steel guitar.  It’s a beautiful looking guitar and the melodic sound of John playing drifted across the courtyards as visitors started arriving and browsing the stalls.  John is a professional drummer and has played with many people over the years but mostly with Jerry Fish and the Mudbug club.

Thanks John and look forward to seeing you again @ Sonairte Food & Craft Markets.

Catch footage of John playing on our facebook page.

Later Paddy Martin arrived in who plays the Uilleann Pipes, Bagpipes, Whistles & Flute and again in a very chilled out way sat down at one of the picnic tables in the courtyard and struck up a tune on the Uilleann Pipes.  Paddy is a gifted piper and musician, he is a soloist with the internationally renowned Cross Border Orchestra of Ireland and has played far and wide.  Later he went out to the field at the end of the Nature Trail Walk and gave us a tune on the bagpipes.   Check out his website www.paddymartin.com.  We will post footage of Paddy playing on our face book page.  Thank Paddy and look forward to seeing you again @ Food & Craft Markets.

It was a great day yesterday all round – there were lots of other stall holders – both home made food producers and craft makers – and loads of visitors, children, families all enjoying the sunshine, walking in the garden, browsing the market, chatting to stallholders, having a picnic or bite to eat in the Cafe and of course calling in to see Geri in the Eco Shop.    The next Food & Craft Market is Sunday 29th April 11am.

Tomorrow evening @ 7.15 the place to be will be Hodges Figgis in Dawson Street for the launch of Trevor Sargent’s book Trevor’s Kitchen Garden – a week by week guide to growing your own food.  The book is being launched by Neven Maguire.

 

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Brent geese

December 16th, 2011

Apologies for the ‘Brent Geese’  image technical issue with our email newsletter service provider.

Sorry Willie for not crediting you with the right image so we shall fix it here and now

Here’s a fantastic photograph of Brent Geese in flight, taken in Mornington recently by Willie Connell.  Let us have your comments at info@sonairte.ie .

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Education Feature – The Eurasian Otter

November 30th, 2011

 

This month’s featured creature is the elusive Eurasian Otter (Latin name: Lutra lutra). 

The Eurasian otter is one of Ireland’s oldest mammals and is the only native otter to Europe.

Otters can be found in lakes, rivers, marshes, estuaries and coastal waters. Occasionally they can also be seen crossing bogs, farmlands, or upland areas. Otters live in burrows they dig into riverbanks called “holts”. These holts often have many different entrances, some of which may open underwater! Otters are excellent swimmers and their webbed feet, thick fur and long streamlined bodies (~90cm head to tail) make them perfectly adapted to spending much of their time in the water. Their long whiskers are also very important for helping them find food underwater or in the dark.

Otters are carnivores and predominantly feed on fish, eels and crayfish. Coastal otters eat molluscs, crabs and sea urchins. They can often be seen floating on their backs while holding food in their front paws when eating. Otters breed in spring and summer, and after 9 weeks of pregnancy, the female will give birth to 2 or 3 otter cubs. The mother feeds the cubs until they are about 4 months old and the cubs will stay with their mothers for between 6 and 12 months.

It is quite difficult to spot otters in the wild, as they are shy and are mainly active at dusk and after dark. Common signs that otters are living in an area include worn pathways leading to the water, collections of fish remains, and black droppings called ‘spraints’ which mark an otter’s territory.

The Eurasian otter is one of the most threatened mammals in Ireland, due to poor water quality, habitat loss and busy roads. The otters in Ireland are protected and are of unique conservation importance as the Eurasian otter has become extinct in much of Europe.

 

Fun Facts:

  • Their large lungs allow them to stay under water for several minutes, although most dives last for just one minute. They swim low in the water, with only their eyes, ears and nose above the surface.
  • Otters are very playful animals and even solitary otters have been spotted playing catch with pebbles.
  • Coastal dwelling otters have to visit freshwater sources often in order to rinse the salt from their fur.

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Harvesting Hazelnuts in Sonairte

November 14th, 2011

Nuts, nuts, whole Hazelnuts…….. Harvesting Hazelnuts in Sonairte

The native Hazel (Corylus avellana), a member of the birch family, is a common shrub growing in Ireland.  It is also known as Hazelnut, Common filbert, Wood nut, Cobnut or Stock nut.    In Celtic beliefs, Hazel was traditionally, the plant of knowledge, its nuts representing all wisdom enclosed within a protective shell. The legend of the Salmon of Knowledge would have us believe that the salmon ate the 9 hazelnuts of poetic wisdom, which fell from the hazel tree growing beside its sacred pool, each nut eaten became a spot on the salmons skin.

 

It is believed that as early as 6000 BC Hazel rods were woven into panels for the creation of wattle and daub walls, similar to those that encase Crannógs.  Wet clay, dung, chopped straw and lime combined with the Hazel rods to provide shelter for our ancestors.

Hazelnuts like other nuts are packed with a fantastic supply of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytochemicals good for health and for disease prevention.  They are incredibly versatile and can be eaten raw as a snack or when baking added to cakes, crumbles, bread, ice cream or meringues.   We have been harvesting the hazelnuts at Sonairte so come and enjoy them.

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Wind, rain and slugs

May 23rd, 2011

That time of year again – you’ve planted out all your tender young vegetables into the garden and the elements and wildlife are wrecking them. Hail is shredding leaves, wind is blowing the beans and peas flat and anything left over is being eaten by the slugs.

To be honest there isn’t much you can do about the weather damage. Pick up the plants carefully, firm them well down in the soil to make their roots secure, put the supports back into the ground – and maybe add a few more. Water them back in well and maybe give them a bit of a feed with well diluted liquid seaweed which helps to harden them up.

If you haven’t put out things like runner beans, courgettes and sweet corn yet there’s still plenty of time. In fact there’s still time to sow them out of doors and get a crop. In the days before polytunnels the last week in May was always the right time to sow these tender crops. Sow two seeds where you want them to come up and cover them with an upturned jam jar, pushing it down into the soil an inch or so for stability and to keep the slugs out. It will help to make a warm microclimate to get them germinated quickly and off to a good start.

And now to those slugs.

On the whole there are less than usual this year. The cold killed a lot during the winter and the dry weather recently hasn’t been good to them either, but those tender seedlings are still proving irresistible to the survivors.

I heard a sad story this morning of a dog that earlier this week had gone out into the field behind his owner’s house and eaten slug pellets. He died in agony before they could get him to a vet. Please don’t use them.

So what can you do? Start with garden hygiene. Slugs need dark, damp places to hide in during the day – tidy up and reduce the number of hiding places. Make sure you have lots of good dense shrubs and hedges for blackbirds and thrushes to nest in and they’ll eat the slugs and snails for you. Keep ducks. They lay as many eggs as hens and eat slugs as well, and on the whole they don’t eat the plants. (Hens eat less slugs and more plants.) Put up barriers – copper rings around favourite plants, copper tape at the edge of raised beds. Scatter crushed eggshells, or horticultural grit around favourite plants – they don’t like to ooze over sharp surfaces.

But the best way I’ve found to lower numbers is simply constant monitoring. Walk around your garden at evening when they come out of hiding with a bucket and collect them – escort them off the premises or use whatever other solution appeals to you. Pick up pots and buckets and remove them from their hidey holes. its surprising how quickly you can get the numbers down.

But don’t use those slug pellets – it might be your own pet next time

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Compost, lovely compost

April 12th, 2011

As Jane Powers told Pat Kenny this morning, if you just pile all your garden waste in a corner and come back two years later you’ll find a pile of good compost. But there are better ways to do it than that.

So what is compost and why should we want to make it? Compost is the gardener’s gold, the ultimate plant food, building the soil for ever healthier growing things. And it is what all living things turn into if you simply drop their dead bodies onto the surface of  the soil. Though we like to be a bit more orderly than that in the garden. All you need is a suitable container, preferably with no base and in contact with the soil, roughly equal quantities of “browns” and “greens” weighted a little towards the browns – that’s high carbon and high nitrogen organic residues to the scientist – and enough water to make it damp but not soggy. So you can use anything from a neat plastic bin to four pallets lashed together – look around on the web and you can find all sorts of patterns to build your own. And then you simply add your organic matter as you get it – weeds, twigs, paper, kitchen waste, whatever comes in handy. Lawn mowings should be mixed with something that will blot up their excess nitrogen such as dead leaves or shredded paper. And it isn’t a good idea to use cooked food or meat unless you want to get close up and friendly with the local rodent population. Build your heap, water it and cover it from the rain – you don’t want too much water on washing all the goodness out of it. If you have a decorative container put it where people can admire it, if its a bit rickety maybe hide it in a corner.

And if you want to be super cool and really watch it all happening invest in or build your own wormery, and use it to compost weed seed free materials – mine gets my kitchen waste mixed with shredded paper. That way you get absolutely perfect weed free potting compost very, very quickly which will save you a fortune when you want to sow your seeds.

 

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Official Opening of County Meath Master Composter Demonstration Site

April 11th, 2011

Date:Sunday 17th April 2011
Venue:Sonairte, Laytown Co. Meath
Time:10am – 5pm
All Welcome – Come Along and Enjoy the Fun
Events on the Day

10am-5pm Sonairte’s gardens, Mustard Seed Cáfe and eco-shop will be
open to visitors.  Traditional Food & Craft Fair displaying and selling
local bakers, crafters and growers produce.

1pm Ann Dillon Gallagher Cathaoirleach of Meath County Council will officially present County Meath’s Master Composter Volunteers with their certificates and open the  Compost Demonstration Site

2pm-4pm Master Composters will be on hand to answer questions on
home composting, to give advice on food waste prevention and how to
set up a compost demonstration site.

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Sowing the seeds

April 11th, 2011

Its that time again – everything is burgeoning madly, the garden centers are full of blossoming plants and you’ve barely got the soil turned over in your own garden.

Relax – there’s plenty of time. Ok, your neighbour may be picking lettuce a couple of days before you but so what. Remember that the soil needs to be warm for seeds to be happy and grow healthily and that we actually had a real belter of a frost last week.

So lets just set down a couple of the basics.

1. Do get rid of the weeds before you start – pull them or fork them out and put them on the compost heap to turn back into plant food

2. Soil or compost needs to be dry enough to crumble easily, damp enough for the seeds  to absorb moisture and germinate, and if you can rake it so that its nice and fine then there will be good contact between seed and soil and your baby seedlings will be up all the quicker.

3. How deep to sow? seeds like to be covered by twice their own depth of soil so a tiny seed just needs a fine sprinkle while broad beans can go down a couple of inches.

4. If you haven’t done any gardening before always sow in straight lines -  then you’ll know which are your plants and which are the weeds and you can pull any weeds that have got mixed in as they come up

5. If the weather is dry water in the evening until your seedlings emerge

6. Protect your baby plants from slugs. You can put out beer traps, surround with copper strips, put down a layer of sharp fine gravel on the surface or – and this is what I find best – simply patrol every evening just after dusk with a torch and pick them up. The disposal process is up to you.

Different types of seeds need to be sown at different distances – look at the seed packet for this information. Remember that with vegetable seeds if you do sow them too close together you can always pull out the extra plants and either replant them somewhere else or put them in the salad.  Some vegetables you will deliberately sow close together and then in a couple of months you can move them to their permanent homes – that way you save time and space because you can grow something else first where their permanent position will be.

I like to use organic seeds – I find they are hardier and more reliable germinators. And I know I’m not importing poisonous seed coatings to my garden. I also like to plant heritage varieties. Heritage varieties are those which are open pollinated – which means you can save seed from them yourself for the future, and which have been around for a long time. There’s a reason for that – they’ve been around for a long time because they are usually a) reliable and b) tasty.

Once your seedlings are up then you need to control weeds. I use three methods – the one I like best is mulching with compost or lawn mowings which feeds the soil and thus the new plants. Onions mulched with lawn mowings have to be seen to be believed they grow so big and healthy. Number two on the list is hoeing – this cuts off the weed roots immediately below soil level so they die where they grew and the worms turn them into plant food. If all else fails then hand pulling is the fall back position. Try and do it when the soil isn’t too wet or you will pull up the seedlings along with the weeds. And then, as I said before, compost the weeds.

And you may, if your garden doesn’t have enough diversity, see other pests besides slugs. I just leave greenfly alone – birds and other insects will hear on the grapevine that there is a good food source and come along and munch them up. Score one for organic gardening. Carrot root fly can be a real problem if you  have things like cow parsley in local hedges. Cover with fleece or insect netting  to keep them out unless you want to find grubs  in your carrots. And as far as I know all species of Irish snail are edible – though some may be too small to bother with.

If peas fail to appear the problem is often mice which actually dig them up to eat them. The traditional method was to take out a shallow trench about and inch deep, soak it with water, scatter the peas thinly along it, cover with holly leaves and then put the soil back. It works quite well. If you have a really bad problem get an old length of guttering, fill it with compost and sow in that and then when your pea plants are about four inches high make that shallow trench and slide the contents of the gutter into it

© kathy marsh@ sonairte 2011

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The Living Garden

March 31st, 2011

Enjoying the new book from Jane Powers of the Irish Times which must be the most gentle and least prescriptive introduction to natural gardening I’ve ever come across. The reader is led gradually into a whole series of cycles from seasons to soil and gradually becomes more involved in how their garden works. I’m not surprised it has received rave reviews from both organic and conventionally minded garden writers.

And like all Jane’s writing it doesn’t take anything for granted. She doesn’t do that annoying thing and simply copy the information others have come up with in the past. Everything is tried, tested, checked and rechecked.

And the photos are a dream. Nearly all very “real” gardens rather than show gardens from Jane’s own tiny garden with hens pecking under the bamboo to June Blake’s lovely garden with all the permanent features built from local and recycled materials.

Both inspirational and an easy read.

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