It has been too long since I updated these pages. My only excuse is that as a volunteer I often face the choice between spending my time gardening at Sonairte or writing about gardening at Sonairte and since gardening won’t wait that is the activity that wins.

Today in the garden we should have a sign out saying “Danger, falling apples”. I don’t know if any of our farmer’s market visitors yesterday got hit but I was certainly pleased to see more than one picking up a windfall and polishing it before checking out the flavour. I hope they went on to buy more of them from the stall. Some of our most delicious apples are very fleeting in their season of ripeness – this week it is Lady Sudely and Worcester Pearmain that are perfect eaters and Ecklinville seedling that is the perfect baking apple (despite its slightly spotty skin – a characteristic of the breed). In two weeks time it will be Beauty of Bath, Irish Peach and Grenadier. Those apples we can’t sell fresh are prepared and frozen for use in our pies and jams all winter.

Meanwhile we are all hard at work getting the winter herb and salad crops into the ground both out of doors and in the tunnels. The first problem is the slugs. This has been the worst summer for slugs that any organic grower remembers and, reluctantly, we are resorting to the use of ferramol based slug pellets in the polytunnels, after our first planting was completely wiped out. Ferramol will not hurt any species except slugs – it simply turns their appetite off. For the rest of the garden we will continue to trap and escort off the premises. We are also having a problem with cabbage white butterflies on the brassicas. We should have put a fine meshed net in place earlier in the summer – a complete solution to the problem. Instead we are having to make regular checks for the eggs and remove them.

We grow chinese greens, endives and chicories, many varieties of hardy lettuce and herbs such as coriander, parsley and dill in the tunnels all winter as well as many of the perennial herbs which survive outside without difficulty but give us cosmetically improved leaves indoors which some of our customers demand. As the summer crops such as tomatoes, cucumbers and sweet corn finish in the tunnels we will be planting more and more of these but they all do well out of doors as well, especially if you can give them a fleece cover.