I first learned the fundamentals of kitchen gardening from my mother, who learned it from her father, a passing-on of traditional skills repeated down through countless generations.
My grandfather’s small, sheltered, neat-as-a-pin Dublin plot was a place where weed-free rows of carrots and lettuce grew next to carefully-staked sherbet -lemon coloured gladioli, and tidy lines of neatly-trained cordon tomatoes and chrysanthemums filled his home-made glasshouse.
But my mother’s country kitchen garden was a less buttoned-up affair where nature often got the upper hand. Far ahead of the game, her bible was a much-thumbed paperback edition of Rodale’s The Basic Book of Organic Gardening, first published in the very early 1970s. While it didn’t offer much useful advice on surmounting the challenges of growing food on a cold, wet, poor-draining, acid soil in an area of high rainfall and cooler-than-average annual temperatures (the solution, she later discovered, was raised beds), it was ground-breaking in its advocacy of a planet-friendly way of gardening.
More than half a century after it first appeared in print a lot has changed in Ireland in terms of how, why and where the country’s kitchen gardeners grow their own food, much of it for the better. We now, for example, have easy access to a wealth of expert advice in print and online. Thriving organisations such as Community Gardens Ireland, Irish Seed Savers, GIY, the RHSI and the UK’s Garden Organic offer valuable support and resources, while the national allotment movement that first blossomed in the early decades of 20th century has been revitalised. Productive school gardens and community gardens have also taken root around the country, many in cities and towns where
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