The Peter McVerry Trust have a garden section type facility based about 15 minutes from Dublin Airport, in Garristown North Dublin. There’s one gardening employee of the trust that looks after their six acre holding.
They are looking for volunteers who are gardeners, or people who simply like to garden to help out. One could do two hours per week or I’m sure two hours a month. More if you so choose.
If nothing else it sounds to me just a bit more logic than an allotment for those with busier schedules who really don’t have the time or even better for some who maybe were thinking of giving gardening or growing your own a go, it really wouldn’t be a bad place to start to learn the ropes.
I also know that the facility has been used for team building days, most recently by some of the IBM staff in helping to celebrate being 100 years old. [see IBM/ PmcV video] and also for the Google volunteer day.
Joanne Lindsay Martin [Fundraising Officer] and Liam Doyle [Gardener] of The Peter McVerry Trust will be guests on The SodShow this Friday – they explain a lot better than I can the work of the trust and that at the gardening facility and volunteering there as a gardener. I will add the audio in here after.
I returned from my August bank holiday, after four nights camping it out in the great outdoors to a scenario that I thought mildly beyond my belief.
Branches of my plum trees were touching ground level making life really easy for the creatures that aren’t that tall to take a quick nibble of the now purple fruits. The birds, it was obvious to see were quite easily covering the sections a little higher in altitude.
Of a more neglected feel to my great outdoors, the grass was much longer than usual. I’ll very simply put this down to the infrequent yet high enough levels of rainfall and temperatures in their teens that had dappled my sun factor versus rain coat trials, all the while making my grass cutting quite difficult.
But my fruit tree investments are, it seems starting to pay off. The five plum trees from which I have never cropped fruit from before have at last returned a decent harvest. Decent enough I should add to warrant searching for a recipe to prolong their stay in my pantry that is. One should also bear in mind that three of the trees pretty much did nothing at all, but then that’s why I bought five of them.
It goes a little further than that as the pear trees are also starting to dish out their deserts [see what I did there…] and the apple trees, of which I have about four varieties are coming along quite nicely too. Some of them have even started to fall, something I discovered as the ride on lawnmower began to chug slightly across the long grass and the apple squash began to splatter across the nearest window. More chores I thought….
But the trees and bushes aren’t really chores. Not once you plant them that is.
To the other fruits; I have one fig tree and whilst there are some figs, they are nothing really of worth bragging about. Two or three little ones. But in the wee trees defence, it has spent most of its energy fighting the most recent frost it had taken a severe battering from, so I’m more concerned in it getting bigger and stronger for next year than this.
Stepping it down in height from tree to bush, the currants have already delivered and the berries are in the freezer compartment ready for any given Sundays ice cream to be made that little more colourful.
Other than that I have some peach trees, but I have to admit, this pair and I, aren’t really on talking terms at the moment.
As you may have read in my previous writings, I have to move some of the trees come the off season and they’ll also need their usual pruning in a month or three. But then a good decent hair cut never really did hurt anyone and the peaches are top of that pile.
All in all, I look at the fruit I have taken from the investment I made about three years ago now and I wonder, on a sunny Sunday, why would anyone want to go out and start digging the garden so regularly. Why not just dig one hole. And wait.
And in between all of this pondering I’ve got my eye on the brambles that are still in flower flowing out of the neat and not so neatly cut hedges and hedgerows. I’m reminded of my time at the caravan park in Arklow where I spent a lot of my pre-teen summer years. The pots of jam that my Mother used to make when we went picking fruit from the scrub growth I remember eating with a ladle, if I could have fitted it into the jar that is.
This was all so long before I had ever heard of growing your own, or at the very least the cliché of. I somehow seem to prefer planting my my own. Much, much easier I think you’ll agree.
I’ve been looking at my own garden recently. In a sense you might say of a much deeper accord. That is, I’ve been looking at myself and what I have done to my garden space.
Let me break this down before I get into a deep and meaningful conversation with you. I get bored, sometimes, sometimes with the space outside of the four walls I live in. In short, I’ve re-done my own garden around three times in eight years.
Then last year I decided to take a break. A pause. A reprieve of sorts. I went a bit all feng shui. I don’t even know what that means being honest…. I shall rephrase, I let the place go I guess, a bit. Not let it go, just, more bio-diverse, as was discussed last week – my answer to everything that needs an excuse that may be deemed incorrect by the gardeners police society.
That said, I’ve my mind in order as to what I actually want to do. In the words of the great Captain Blackadder
I have a cunning plan….
I don’t really have a cunning plan, I’ve just always wanted to use that line in an article. But I have an idea of what I want to do.
I have trees to move. They are trees that I still want to keep in my garden but they may just end up too big in a while to come. Too big in the space they were originally put in that is, bearing in mind that the garden has changed in outlay since I first planted them. And whilst I do like tree surgeons, I really don’t want to be crossing their palms with silver unnecessarily.
But that’s months away before you can move them Peter, Autumn even…. ?
And that’s a very fair point, but the planning starts now. Because when I move them I’ve now got a space where they once stood. What will replace them ? A children’s swing. And maybe a slide. I don’t exactly know but I think I’d like to make that myself, for my daughter. It’s not so much the making of it that is important to me, it’s just I want it to fit into the setting, the backdrop and the surrounds… think Emmerdale Farm with a [by next year] two year old and you are part way there.
I’d also like hanging baskets. But I need to hang the brackets first. Of course I may need to confer with the powers that be as to their exact location, but in my mind they will go all the way across the front of the house, the entire of it so that when it comes to next summer….. no, hold on this Christmas…. the house will be a home, a family home where people, visitors, friends and the inhabitants of feel, well, at home I suppose.
Christmas ? It’s still flippin’ summer for Jaysus sake…..
I also want to re-design the hen house. Pardon the cliché’d pun, but I want it to have wings. Wings as in that of a building so when they strip one part of the lawn entirely I can let it grow back absolutely wild whilst at the same time I can gate of the other wing. I also want to paint it. Bright. Their house is already pink and white, but the run is just old matt black fading to grey and it doesn’t look so pretty anymore.
The list the more I think of it you see, takes time. And with only fifty two weeks in the year and only twelve of them winter, of which about three are excluded for holidays, even just to do what I have written – allowing one Saturday per weekend means I’ve only got nine days. That is assuming, it doesn’t snow or rain. And more importantly, nine days is not enough time.
I could have figured that one out on my etch-a-sketch….
I need to back track. I need to draw up this wish list and then another list of ingredients and get myself garden shopping.
Some may think that the earlier the evenings the less busy a gardener may become. Not on your nelly. It is the smart garden enthusiasts that prepare now for the seasons to come and I am not going through what I and we all did last year. Which in short was quite depressing and not very nice. It may not be warm in December, but at the very least I can make my home feel warm and inviting.
Rain, hail, sleet or with the help of global warming a heat wave, my house will be homely by December and it’s going to look damn sexy when I am finished. I’m making a list and this time I’m checking it twice. What are you gonna do ?
One of the easiest crops I have ever grown is beetroot. As they take up very little space and require a very shallow depth of soil for root development, I found these left over cavity blocks quite useful for sowing the seeds.
The varyingly named beets or beetroot are a variety of the Beta vulgaris [chenopodiaceae] and it is, you may or may not be surprised to know] the swollen root that we actually eat.
The books suggest a sowing time from about March to July and a cropping period from around June to October, but I have in the past stretched this a lot further past those boundaries. The basis of the recommended times is generally based on low temperatures causing them to bolt. I have personally found that using a bolthardy variety, suitable placing and maybe some covering has seen me through and I generally sow and harvest when I feel it’s the right time.
As you can gather I also pay zero attention to recommended spacings and seed depths. For those who want to know [?] the recommended pH for growing beetroots in 5.9. Once again this is ideal world scenario and as you can also gather I’ve never bought a pH soil testing kit in my life.
Either or if gardening is all about having a go…. then you wont go too far wrong with these guys and you can always leave a comment if you’re stuck.
…one more effing time, I may just spontaneously combust. I’ve had it. I’ve had it the media, with RTE, RTE Prime Time, RTE Frontline, The Week in Politics, RTE news and you can throw your man Vincent Browne right in the middle as he joins the conga party bus just as sure as one more government gaff hits the headlines. This all before I don’t pick up a newspaper.
I watched the youtube clip of Shane Hegarty on BBC news – yes folks, BBC news – as he spoke about the Great Things About Ireland campaign. He yapped about red lemonade and how a wake may turn into a party, our sports and our language…. I began to smile as my mind wondered, child like, as if I was in accounting class on a warm summers day, starring at a single cow in a field…..
I don’t watch the news. I don’t watch much television. I definitely don’t watch anything that may devalue my happy head. On the one hand I spend too much time outside. But I’m happy there. I love camping in the rain. I love climbing trees, still. I love good news. I admire people who smile. I call it the great outdoors for good reason and as I type this weeks piece I’m taking my caffeine in a mug that says Happy Christmas on it. That’s the kind of happy level I like to be and am at.
I’ve realised just how much time I spend outside though. A lot of that is in other peoples gardens I admit. Towards the point, I’ve got a baby girl now and she’s one and a little bit years young. When I was camping in Lough Ennell we sat on the grass together were I played the ukelele for her while Mom was off doing stuff us adults may consider important. I know I like to keep my mind occupied, which can sometimes lead to moments of ponder. The technical term is daydreaming I believe, but Ella held tight to the sleeve of my t-shirt and sang her own or at the very least the unreleased version of whatever choon I was diddling away with. And for a moment I paused…. I wondered why this didn’t or hadn’t happened at home more often, or at all. I’m hesitant to admit some of the other pre-mentioned options.
What the flip is the gardener talking about this week Mary….?
I’ve taken at a look at my great outdoors you see. I’ve been growing vegetables. I have my fruit trees. I have had pieces in my garden like my red satellite bird bath – a satellite, painted red and turned into a bird bath – but these were or are mine. Not hers or ours. And as I delve further into my thoughts, I realise I am now potentially reticent of the old, to me, at the time, gardeners I knew back in the 1980’s. I need to change that, in a way.
I need to plant more pretty flowers. Make the garden a place of intrigue and mystery. With hidden places. Not the stereotypical ‘childrens’ garden ie. a slide in a specific space. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There’s not. But I’d like to have that and so much more. And it’s so easy to do. To design, nee map out the garden in my head.
She will start to walk soon and ask questions and wonder why and explore and…..well that’s what the Haynes Manual on all things Children says and in my mind as I start to doodle I can see that I just need to be impractical. Forget about the manual. Pretend I’m four… easy before you giggle there.
I need to not say I can’t. I need wild flowers growing. Not out of a packet. Just wilderness growing, wild, so I can run through it, even though I might lose things in there. But then I may also find them, which will make me smile. I know she won’t always need to hold on to me to be able to stand you see and then I’ll need a little more than that patch of grass we sat on.
For me, as I see it, the en vogue gig for the general populas may well be growing your own vegetables and it really does have a great role to play in the lives and future of this nations nippers. Very happy I am to see it somewhat take the place of the microwave. But I remember the girls I knew growing up making perfume in a jam jar, with rose petals. I remember making daisy chains. Climbing trees, taking geranium cuttings, picking some flowers for a school teacher…. such simple things, all playing such a huge part in the ever increasing big picture of my time and life not indoors.
As I delve back into my adult head, my horticulturist hat back on I realise that last seasons snow meant that I couldn’t do certain things so that they might be in flower come this year. More than that it meant I lost a season. That means I must now wait until this coming October to plant my trees. It also means the new hedge that doesn’t exist has a valid excuse. But more, even more than that, this time next year Ella will be two going three. A big difference. And if I don’t do the things I should to my garden now, this season…. well, as her Godfather explained to me, she’ll never be that age again.
I was chatting about this with a gardener friend of mine. I was explaining that my chicken coop is painted pink and white. I will of course openly admit I had a lot of that colour left over from a previous garden endeavour. I explained my thinking, my hands almost directing traffic as they flapped about in the air etching the garden into nothing-ness. In jesting, we came to the conclusion that if I had had a baby boy I may simply have needed a set of goal posts.
But the horticultural minds considering poetry as versus trigonometry, both agreed that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the imagination is something that should be applauded and enccouraged, maybe even nurtured. We thought of the seasons, the seasons of nature one needs to pre-empt in order to be able to attract it to your garden so it is there when that time arrives.
Now that I have told myself my story and what I would like that road ahead to have in stock for me…. I think it’s about time I designed a garden for the future and for my family.
I remember some time ago being asked by a Client, who was also a Dad to visit his daughter. She had just bought her first home and had, as he described it an extreme case of the independance streak.
She inherits it off her Mother. Who inherited it from hers…..
He told me.
After a consultation with her and partner a list was drawn up. A wish list, that would make a garden. On the other page, a great big garden doodle. With numbers, arrows and outlines. But, after each item on the list was the ingredients to make that particular piece or space.
The benches, for example, were new railway sleepers, six inch nails, paint and some cement. The planting was seperated into trees, bulbs and then the lower growing plants, bed by bed. The sketch and the itinary were given to the Father. He then framed it and paid me for my time. It was her house warming present and it was hung in the kitchen, by the patio doors.
For each birthday, anniversary or celebration some items, ingredients or were it maybe got a little technical, my time was purchased by the various relations.
Better than the salt and pepper shaker she always wanted. Anyways the garden will be a nice home for that swing I’m gonna make her….
For the weekend that has just passed, Happy Fathers day. And before anyone asks why I didn’t mention Dads day last week….? I of course had to be reminded 🙂 There are reassons why I never buy myself socks.
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