September

Harvest Fair & Compost Demo Free Event. Sun 18th, Cleen Hall, 12-4pm

COOK & DINE Italian, gluten free Vegetarian with Kitia from The Yellow Ducati. Mon 26th, Cleen Hall, €15

Pigs, Part 2 – Processing Sat 6th, Cleen Hall, 10-4pm, €40, includes 2kg sausages. (Part 1+2 together for €55)

Grow For Yourself 6 part workshop, every two weeks. A complete introduction to organic growing at home, both in tunnels & outdoors. Space will be provided for the duration of the course with produce to be kept by you. Saturdays: 13+27 Aug, 10+24 Sep, 8+22 Oct, Knockvicar Garden, 3-6pm, €60

Preserving Make your gluts go further! Extending use of fruit, veg & herbs -includes Jam & Chutney making. Sat 20th, Cleen Hall, 9-4pm, €45                              

COOK & DINE 3 Courses featuring Fresh Fish. Thu 25th, Cleen Hall, 6-10pm, €15

On recession and lettuce

There might not be many of you out there whom I surprise when I say that years bring new fashion trends. In clothing (anecdotal evidence) and in eating too. Of this latter I have first-hand experience, especially if we are talking lettuce. So: let’s.

Lettuce is water, nicely packaged. Whether it is enjoyed in sandwiches, salads, or left behind as rabbit-food on the plate where it arrived as a side dish to spoil an otherwise decent steak, it occupies a sizeable niche in our cuisine. Popular vegetable, it has an amazingly broad range of shapes and colours, and these can make a type extremely fashionable and sought after – or obsolete.

The schoolbook picture of lettuce is the butterhead. A no-offence type it comes in light or darker green, plump and rosy (actually there are red tinged butterheads too). Butterhead represents the olden days, when things were a bit scarcer and black-and white (but summers were summers and winters were winters). Butterhead is Mum’s sandwich, pop music with tunes, butterhead is Morris Minor.

Then we have the fancy lot. The tight, upright, buttery-tasting Cos: public-school-boy of lettuces. Lollo Rossa: dark and musky, like the first Italian holiday (sunburn aside). Basketball-tight icebergs: sadly tainted by their McDonalds reputation. Batavias: crunchy but open, shouting healthiness and weight-loss – we have a lot to choose from. Or do we?

That’s when fashion comes in. You see, as shoes, lettuces get fashionable too. After a wave of Cos Lollo Rossa became the darling of restaurant kitchens. The nineties, we are talking about: finally the economy is climbing out of the deep recession, holidays and other exotic things slowly become accessible, so we need a lettuce that represents it. But hedonism leaves its marks on soul and body – especially around the waistline. This is the time when, in the early two-thousands Batavia breaks through. Now, it’s all nice, except for the commercial grower, who doesn’t necessarily know what is the next favourite going to be. That the grower learns through the sales.

It is recession time now. (Having said that, I just read the Mercedes Benz doubled its profits and sales are booming.) And austerity in the budget, in our everyday life, in the six-o-clock news demands austerity lettuce: the good old butterhead is back in fashion. Let’s face it, with the notable exception of Cos, lettuce tastes like lettuce. They tend to grow with the same speed, so when they reach maturity and cut for sale, they are the same size, weight, et cetera. (Except, again, some Cos, they tend to be tiny.) Yet, as we speak, we have to push the not-so-long-ago fashionable Batavia, Lollobrigida Rossa and every other type, while butterheads are sold in before they can reach proper size.

I wonder what’s next. I mean, we have lovely cabbage, and a lot of it. But cabbage means depression, emergency, draughty houses and possible emigration to England – and I really like it here. Lollo, darling, come back!

July

Poultry Keeping All you need to know to keep Poultry. Sat 2nd, Cleen Hall, 10-3pm, €45

Pigs, Part 1 – Rearing Sat 23rd Cleen Hall + Farm visit, 12-3pm, €20

COOK & DINE 3 Course Vegetarian with Colette. Mon 25th, Cleen Hall, 6-10pm,  €15

Last week of June 2011

Here we are: June is almost over. The calendar month, I mean: we didn’t see much of June weather yet. But two days ago I saw dolphins (not in the garden, but nearby, at the same beach where in May we collected a whole trailer of seaweed), and people say it means good weather. Now, the animals were porpoises, a mother and her calf. Porpoises are the smallest of our dolphins, stocky and roundish creatures, sometimes referred to as ‘sea pigs’. The calf (or piglet?) is even smaller – so whether it means only a little bit of good weather, and kind of funny type too, well … In my opinion a dolphin is a dolphin, and these porpoises were really cute feeding very near the shore, the calf following the mother, so good weather should come, regardless if it is a one-and-half meter funny little creature or the twice as big, post-card bottlenose. (Secretly, as we all, I dream of a pack of orcas, and twenty-nine Celsius for a month.)

We planted out the first batch of winter Brassicas. And fed the slugs: the buggers killed maybe a third of the seedlings overnight. Part of the reason they were so successful this time and situation was the cardboard/straw mulching we use. Mulching simply means covering the ground with something that (ideally) breaks down. In a way mulching is copying a cover of fallen leaves or dead grass: it feeds the soil creatures – and through them, the plants – and keeps weeds at bay. In the case of Brassicas there is an added advantage: it protects against cabbage-root-fly. These flies lay their eggs on the ground surface, right next to the Brassica plant. The eggs hatch, and the larvae dig into the root, causing stunted growth and even the death of the plant. But the larvae cannot dig their way through cardboard, so any cover directly around the cabbage (broccoli, cauliflower, etcetera) plant is a great way to fight them. Great it is, but not without issues.
You see, in Nature ground cover like a layer of fallen leaves is utilised by all sorts of creatures. Including slugs, bless them. Slugs that hide in daytime as they have plenty of predators: birds, frogs, ground-beetles. Who could resist a soft, juicy and slow-moving prey? But nights are safer. So our slugs around the Brassicas remained largely invisible during the lovely daylight hours when we were planting kales and Savoys through the softened cardboard and already breaking down straw, but attacked when the Hour of the Mollusc came.

So: what can we do with these slugs? The most straightforward and handy way is using slug pellets. The pellets (artificially coloured blue-green, so we see they are still where we spread them) are made of some bait-material that slugs just can’t resist – and some poison. The poison, in the case of cheap, non-organic pellets is a range of aluminium-based compounds. They kill molluscs (slugs, snails, bivalves and cephalopods – although the latter two are not very likely to turn up at the cabbage plot), but they are harmful to the slugs’ natural predators too. What’s more: as the food pyramid works, these poisons get more concentrated in the bodies of predators, so we might end up killing creatures that would be our natural allies. In the case of organically approved slug pellets though, the poison is iron-based, so it kills only molluscs. The downside is the price: organic slug pellets cost roughly twice as much as the non-organic ones.

But slug pellets should be only the last resort. If we know the nature of slugs, we can find out how to fight them, using tricks that exploit their weaknesses. One is their habit of hiding during the day. If we offer them hiding places, pieces of timber or cardboard on the ground, we can find them resting there after a night of hard work – and kill them. (The best way is boiling water: it sound cruel, but they are so small that it just turns them into boiled protein in a fraction of a second. Everything else, including the pellets, is slower and presumably more painful.)
Slugs have soft bodies, and they don’t like rough surfaces. Boundaries of stone chips, broken egg-shells or ground coffee leftovers can keep them away from vegetable beds and tunnels. The soft bodies are sensitive to chemical impulses too: the slug is one big tongue. A border of copper, at least 2 inches wide, forms the most excellent slug-proof fence. Other weakness of slugs is their attraction to fermenting carbohydrates. We are talking about the famous beer-trap method, although it doesn’t have to be beer: any home-made hooch does the job: I used to make a brew of yeast, flour and water for this purpose. Then I sunk cut-off bottoms of plastic bottles into the ground, filled them with Moonshine, and then next morning dozens of dead slugs were floating in the stuff. The problem is that there were a few ground beetles floating there too – and I don’t want that. Mind you, a stick in the brew helps: they can climb out while slugs can’t.
As said before, there are a number of animals that eat slugs. Larger singing birds like blackbirds, frogs and hedgehogs are all happy to tuck in – and we can do a number of things to invite them to our garden. Birds appreciate being fed in winter, and keeping cats from taking them helps too. (You can get little collars with bells for the cat.) Frogs like ponds – some people have a small pond in their tunnel just to attract amphibians. Hedgehogs like shrubs, and like to over-winter in piles of leaves and branches.
Keeping a constant pressure on slugs pays off. If a population can build up – it will. But if we keep down the number of breeding parents, the number of offsprings down too.

Keep up! Or keep down. Confusing …