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 .

]]> http://sonairte.ie/archives/1747/feed 0 http://sonairte.ie/archives/1731 http://sonairte.ie/archives/1731#comments Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:27:55 +0000 admin http://sonairte.ie/?p=1731  

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

And dandelions are wonderful. I like to turn a bucket upside down over a strong plant to exclude the light so that the new leaves grow as pale and delicious as those pointed buds of chicory we pay such a lot for at the supermarket. In fact dandelions and chicory are relatives and recipes for one always work for the other. Even if you don’t blanch the leaves this way they are great in a stir fry and the roots can be dug and sliced thinly for the stir fry as well. Or dried, ground, and used as a coffee substitute. They don’t taste like coffee at all to my mind but they do make a nice drink.

As for dandelion flowers, they take me back to my childhood and Grandad’s dandelion wine, made on St George’s day, April 23rd, when they are usually at their best. Grandad’s version was fortified – he added a bottle of brandy to the barrel when it had finished fermenting. I don’t do that but it is still pretty special, carrying the honey scent of spring deep into the winter.

Just one word of caution – don’t pick from the roadside because of pollution levels, and don’t pick primroses from the wild – even though they may seem plentiful they won’t be if you keep picking them. So grow some in your own garden. Keep splitting the plants and let them seed around and in a couple of years a single plant will begin to take over the lawn if you have the sense to keep the lawnmower off.

Ingredients
100 gm wild garlic
150 ml full fat milk – it isn’t the same with skimmed
1 kg floury potatoes in their jackets, scrubbed
50 gm salted butter
A pinch of sea salt

Method
Boil or steam the potatoes in their skins. While they are cooking wash the garlic and slice it thinly crossways. Put it in a small pan with the milk and bring to the boil. Take it off the heat immediately and leave it to one side – you want all the flavour in the milk and your garlic to stay a nice bright green but be tender. Skin the potatoes and return them to the rinsed pan. Bring the garlic and milk back up to the boil with the butter and sea salt and gradually add to the potatoes, mashing as you go so you have alight fluffy mashed potato streaked with fresh green bursts of flavour. Serve in a pretty bowl with more butter on the side and crystal salt and fresh ground black pepper available.

© Kathy Marsh@Sonairte 2011