Sitting in the kitchen of the beautiful house that they have built, Helen told me that she was brought up in the house next door, where her mother still lives. Her family farmed and grew a substantial amount of their own food, as did many people farming small acreages in the 1980s.

Leo, on the other hand, is a city boy making his way in the building trade in Dublin as a carpenter but he always had a passion for the sea. In 1998 a friend suggested he might like to try sailing and he ended up in Baltimore getting involved with Glenans Sailing School, loving it so much he stayed on for a second week becoming hooked on sailing as a result. He worked away in Dublin, sailing as much as he could in his spare time until 2008 when the recession hit and the construction world collapsed. He was lucky to sell his house, which he had completely renovated, just before the housing market went into a tail dive and then, at a loose end, he headed to West Cork where he felt at his happiest. He divided his time between Baltimore and Dublin for about a year before getting involved with the Ilen Project and Glenans, also buying an old wooden boat to repair and renovate and it was around this time that he met Helen.

The two of them have created a lovely home for their children on a plot of Helen’s mothers land but before they settled down they spent a year sailing around Europe with their two small girls; at that time the youngest was five

months and the older daughter two-years-old. What an adventure…visiting the Scilly Islands, France, Spain and Portugal. At around the same time as they received planning permission to build in 2016, Leo started beekeeping. His first two hives were placed on the spot where the house is now. He had always been fascinated by bees and learnt a lot from the internet, reading many books and eventually joining the Carbery

Beekeepers Association, but he hadn’t ever had the space or opportunity to keep them until he moved to West Cork. Listening to him talking about his beekeeping journey, how he has studied them, sometimes coming home from work and just sitting by the hives watching their behaviour, learning their habits and flight patterns, it is obvious that what he really cares about is the bees and any spare honey for us to eat is a bonus. He builds his own hives now and keeps his bees in as natural a way as possible. The honey is not heat treated and his bees have access to all the flowers, vegetation and trees around Loch Ine. It’s special. Leo and Helen both work, Leo gardening and building maintenance and Helen works in recruiting for a Swiss pharmaceutical company, luckily working from home. Although Leo is the main beekeeper, the whole family is involved with the honey especially at harvest time. The girls, Aisling and Roisin make the labels for the jars, and most weeks Helen and the girls bring their honey to the market. This is the first year that they have actually sold honey. In the past they have given jars of honey as gifts or swapped with neighbours for eggs or vegetables etc., being part of a small community of local beekeepers and growers who help and encourage each other. Now though we can all taste their honey.

Leo’s honey can be found at The Baltimore Community Producers Market on Sunday mornings from 11am till 2pm

Over the last winter I have been working with a group of like-minded people, doing an online course in Sustainable Community Development. It has been a very interesting experience and I have learnt a lot. The added benefit has been getting to know other members of my community and working on projects together. It gave me the opportunity to work with, and get to know Marie Loviny. I have known about Marie for some time but hadn’t had the chance to meet her properly before.  During the course we were asked to think of a project (or two or three) and Marie has become the driving force of one of our projects, our Baltimore Community Market. Marie was born in Moulle, a small village in the north of France but at the age of 10 moved with her family to South Eastern France, the Ardeche. She loved Art but decided to study Landscape Management, a course that gave her the opportunity to do lots of drawings and would maybe offer better job prospects: After which she worked in the local Tourist office for three years. Though she really loved her job she had itchy feet and decided to go travelling.

She wanted to improve her English so Ireland was a good destination for that and she found a place working as a volunteer gardener on The Inish Beg Estate where she spent three happy months. Having no transport she barely went into Baltimore on that, her first trip. More travelling followed but the draw back to Baltimore was strong. She was offered a part time job at Inish Beg and decided to return, this time throwing herself into the hurly burly that is Baltimore in the summer and getting a job in The Waterfront. Between them, these two jobs have continued to keep her busy over the last few years.

Wanting to learn more about growing, in 2019 Marie enrolled on the Permaculture course in Kinsale but because of Covid she had to finish the course online. Nevertheless, she made some great contacts and met some very interesting people. She had work experience with Madeline McKeever (Brown Envelope Seeds) and still works for her one day a week.

A couple of years ago Marie had the chance to start a garden project of her own; a friend offered her a piece of land to grow on. She fenced it off from rabbits and put up her own tunnel. At first it was just to feed herself but very soon she found that she had enough for friends and started to sell veg boxes and salads to friends and locals. It gave her a chance to learn and realise that this is really what she wants to do. For Marie, it is all about the soil – healthy soil grows healthy crops and she grows organically using a no dig system.

Sadly, she lost the first tunnel in Storm Eunice. Her first plot is very exposed but luckily she had just moved to a house situated in a much more sheltered area with space to put up another tunnel and ground  to grow outside as well.

So she’s back in business now with the two plots but she would ideally love to buy a small piece of land where she could develop her ideas and concentrate on improving the soil and increasing biodiversity.

Marie has been essential in the creation of our community market in Baltimore, she is committed to producing and providing local food for our local community and encouraging others to do the same. Fresh seasonal food with no food miles and low impact on the environment.

She can be found selling her vegetables and salad, every Sunday in Baltimore Community Hall from 11am.

Farmers’ markets have proven to be hugely popular for customers and stall holders alike. On a sunny day nothing could be nicer than strolling around a bustling market with so much to look at, delicious aromas of coffee and cooked foods, and a place to meet friends. 

In a busy market such as Skibbereen it is possible to do the weekly shop  such is the array on offer. But spare a thought for the stall holders who week after week turn up whatever the weather, come rain or shine or cold winter mornings; not to mention the previous day or two spent harvesting, preparing and packing up ready to be in the market for an early start. 

Last Saturday I sat on the back ledge of Mary and Tom Stout’s van, listening to their story and watching their interactions with customers and fellow stallholders. It soon became clear that this kind of life, growing food and selling directly to customers and friends, or swapping with fellow market holders, is not only sustainable but actually what knits the fabric of a community together.

I have known Mary for about 30 years. We were introduced when I joined Skibbereen Country Market as a producer back in the early 1990s. Mary was already very involved in the organisation and continued to be so, long after I left. She grew soft fruit among other things for the Country Market, and the couple’s three children helped with picking and preparing through the long summer holidays. For many years Mary and Tom raised Christmas turkeys and it became a family tradition for us to meet Mary a couple of days before Christmas in a carpark in town to collect our bird. Sadly, (for us) they no longer raise turkeys.

Mary and Tom are a rare breed, theirs is the epitome of a small farm, about 80 acres. Tom laughingly says it’s 50 acres of reeds and 30 of grass but they raise some beef and have a good flock of sheep, though what keeps them especially busy is about an acre and a half of vegetables and soft fruit. 

When Mary stopped milking cows a few years ago she had more time and, having always grown vegetables and fruit for the family, she now had time to increase production so they started to grow to sell. With the addition of a couple of tunnels to give them more scope for year round cropping, they grow a wide range of vegetables and fruit without the use of chemical fertilisers or pesticides. 

It is very unusual to find such things as gooseberries, loganberries and even cape gooseberries (physalis peruviana) for sale, but Mary grows all these highly nutritious fruits. About five years ago she was approached by three young men in Skibbereen market, James, Luke and Robert, who had just opened The Mews restaurant in Baltimore. Mary says that working with them ‘put her on the map’. They now sell to other restaurants such as The Customs House.

Mary and Tom both come from farming backgrounds. Mary’s grandfather was a founding member of Drinagh co-op but she gives her father credit for getting her into vegetable growing when she was a child; despite his busy working life he always grew a vegetable garden for the family. Mary told me a story of when her mother brought home some unusual vegetable plants from the Country Market for him to plant. Back then they had no idea what the plants were, but they turned out to be perpetual spinach, a vegetable that she still grows and enjoys. She continues to be adventurous and is always on the lookout for interesting things to grow, hence the cape gooseberries.

Farming has always been a way of life, not just a way to make a living and small scale farming even more so. Mary and Tom work as a team, living and eating from their land, looking after their mix of animals and poultry and tending their extensive vegetable garden together. This may sound romantic but it’s not, it’s real and hard work and the result is a van full of produce which arrives in Skibbereen Market every Saturday. This produce changes with the seasons; vegetables, fruit, eggs, preserves, the occasional bunch of flowers and even a sack of logs in the winter. And whoever is manning the stall, whether it’s Tom doing the early shift or Mary later after she’s fed the livestock, you will always be greeted with a smile and chat and some great seasonal produce.

Over the last couple of weeks West Cork has been battered by storms. For anyone who grows and depends on polytunnels to make a living, every gale is a cause of  anxiety, but three in a week, well that’s exhausting. Growers need to be resilient and resourceful people and I was lucky enough to meet one such grower recently.

Lea Miklody moved to Ireland 18 years ago from Hungary, initially working as a teacher of young adults with autism and other special needs, but after a few years felt she needed a change, preferably to work outside. She had been brought up on the outskirts of Szombathely, but even with the restrictions of a small suburban garden, her father kept pigs and chickens and grew some vegetables. As a child Lea enjoyed spending time outdoors and playing in the local woods. So it was no surprise that the idea of trying to make her living from growing or outside work started to take hold.

Lea signed up for the well-respected course in sustainable horticulture/permaculture at Kinsale College, and started dreaming of her own patch of ground to grow on. During her time in Kinsale she also took a short course in organic commercial growing with the legendary Jim Cronin in Co Clare. For Lea, this course proved to be very inspiring.

Around the same time she had the chance to move into a mobile home at Gort na Nain, the farm of Ultan Walsh and Lucy Stewart, well known as suppliers of high quality, sustainably-grown fruit and vegetables to restaurants in Cork and particularly Cafe Paradiso. In return for a roof over her head Lea helped on the farm, all the time gaining knowledge and experience. She stayed on the farm for about two-and-a-half years and would have stayed longer if the roof hadn’t blown off her mobile home. 

Looking around for somewhere else to live, Lea heard of a cabin to rent in Ballydehob. She was working in Cork City three days a week as a care worker but  she was still trying to find a piece of land to start growing. After a chat about her need for some space to put up a polytunnel, her landlady suggested she put one up on her land by the cabin, and then things started to move. Not long afterwards she had a chance to take over a couple of unused tunnels not far from where she lives, then later the opportunity arose to take over a group of six tunnels in Lisheen. She now works eleven tunnels in three locations.

Growing in any location has its challenges but working in several different locations makes life even more difficult. Nevertheless Lea  loves her work. She obviously works very hard but it is more than just a way of making a living. She clearly enjoys all aspects of what she does, whether it’s looking after the soil, sowing the seeds or harvesting the fruits of her labour. She, like me, still gets excited each spring when those tiny dry seeds she has sown pop their heads through the soil starting the whole cycle again. For her it is definitely a way of life.

She grows a wide range of produce, based on things she likes to eat herself. Everything from salads and herbs, to all the greens and of course, tomatoes, aubergines and peppers. She loves to try new things and has recently had quite a good crop of sweet potatoes. Pushed for names of favourite varieties, she suggests an aubergine Farmers Long and Bolivian Hairy chili; you’d almost grow it just for the name.

Lea’s produce can be found in a little pop-up shop in Levis’s Bar Balleydehob on Wednesdays from 9.30am-12.30am, in the health food shop in Schull during the summer, she also has a stall at the end of her driveway from about mid March, she sells through Neibourhood food Balleydehob and supplies Budds and the Field Kitchen at Camus Farm For any other information she can be contacted at
coolcahagardens@gmail.com.

Darcie, Mike and their young son Ned moved to Ireland about six years ago. Darcie had been a restaurant manager in London, and Mike, a trained Opera singer working at Glyndbourne. With a young baby and little time to share with him, let alone their neglected allotment, they started to think of a new way of life that would give them an opportunity to grow some of their own food, spend more time with Ned and also have time to explore other ways of living. Mike’s father comes from East Cork and Mike had spent many summer holidays in his fathers cottage. So despite the lure of warmer climes they decided to come back to Ireland. Within about three weeks of moving over they knew that they’d made the right decision and started to look for a property with more land, as they were firmly on the self-sufficient journey by now. In January of 2017 they moved into a small stone cottage with eight acres of land. With plans to grow as much of their own food as possible, they started a vegetable garden with a large tunnel and planted fruit trees and bushes, taking up about an acre of their land. At the same time animals and poultry started to arrive and they now keep goats, pet lambs, a mixture of poultry, pigs, cats, dogs and bees and importantly, a small herd of Irish shorthorn cows and a Droimeann bull. The herd started slowly with one cow, Gertrude, who came along as a steady and reliable house cow. Mike was worried that she was lonely and needed company and so it goes. Soon they were milking four cows and with lots of lovely milk they started researching the idea of making cheese.

Mike does the milking and cheese making. He was very keen to produce a food from scratch, a food that could be preserved and eaten at any time and a food that would add value to the raw ingredients, grown on a farm too small to receive any subsidies. They researched pre-industrial methods of cheese making, recipes with the least interventions, handmade in the simplest way. Using this research as inspiration, they have made a completely unique cheese, Carraignamuc, a Gold medal winner in The Irish Cheese Awards 2021.

The cheese is made from their own starter culture, the raw milk from their shorthorn cows, natural rennet, sea salt and nothing else. The cheese is aged for three to four months developing a natural rind and, speaking from my own experience, it is delicious. A cheese of its place, from their farm. A second cheese, Ri na Mumhan, was developed using the same ingredients, the leftover curds from the larger moulds. By using smaller moulds and then washing the cheeses every other day in a salt, spring water brine, a completely different rind is created making a cheese similar to French Munster, soft and deliciously smelly. The recipe for French Munster is believed to have travelled to France via Irish monks, a cheese now repatriated in West Cork.

With the small amount of land at their disposal it is only possible to keep four milking cows. The calves and followers and their Droimeann Bull are grazed on rough rented ground nearby. The pigs are fed whey left over from cheese making. They use no chemicals on their land and are trying to breed resilience into their herd of heritage breed cows. Everything Mike and Darcie do on their farm is holistic and sustainable and in the best sense, simple. In an age when the pressure on farmers is always to get bigger, buy more land, get bigger machinery, it is really encouraging to see a young family sharing the workload and making a living by adding value to the produce of their land. In the meantime making delicious prizewinning cheese.

Darcie can be found in Skibbereen and Bantry Markets; you can also buy the cheese online; and other outlets can be found on their website thelostvalleydairy.com

With this series of articles I am lucky enough to be meeting and interviewing people who are not only committed to growing good quality nourishing food, but also selling it to us directly in our local markets. Seasonal produce with no food miles, grown in a sustainable way, not wrapped in plastic; Brad and Dee from Lisheen Greens are all those things and more.

Brad was brought up in New Zealand and Australia and, after leaving home, he worked for 23-years in London. He had done a bit of landscape gardening but had no background in farming. He met Dee on a trip to Cork, which proved to be life-changing. Dee is a Marine Biologist and, as their relationship flourished, she agreed to move to London to be with Brad for a limited time while they decided on a permanent location in which to make their life together. Brad says that they started, almost immediately, to look for a property back in Ireland.

The couple were always looking for a rural life, maybe goat farming or even a campsite, but when the farm in Lisheen came up for sale, it seemed the ideal opportunity. While unsure if a life of growing was for them, they were more than willing to give it a go. Luckily there were well-established asparagus beds already on the farm to give them a head-start in their early days. Now four seasons on, they grow a range of seasonal crops from salads and leafy greens and herbs to delicious tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and so on, as well as the asparagus and other seasonal bits and pieces in between. Brad is the main grower, Dee works part time as a Marine Biologist based in Bantry, not to mention caring for the three small children they now have, and they make a great team.

When I ask about the future, Brad is very sure he is now where he wants to be. He is quite surprised how much he loves growing. He has learned a lot along the way, from friends and neighbours who have been really generous with their time and sometimes equipment, but also from actual experience. Getting his hands in the soil, working with the seasons and yes, sometimes making mistakes along the way. He has learned how to be more efficient with his time and learned new techniques for weed control, suitable vegetable varieties to grow and what equipment and tools he needs for optimum production. He loves chatting to his customers, getting to know them and what they need and like. He has decided now is a good time to put up two new tunnels. This will give him space to expand a bit and also give him time to refresh and renew his existing set up. He really seems to enjoy what he is doing and it shows.

Brad and Dee are very happy that they can bring up their family in this wonderful environment, where the children can run through the tunnels grazing and tasting what he’s growing and learning from the nature that surrounds them.

Brad sees their future firmly grounded in Lisheen. He has come a long way in all respects and in his own words, would now be really disappointed if he wasn’t getting out there each day,  growing beautiful vegetables and living off the land.

You can meet Brad and Dee and buy their lovely produce in Skibbereen Farmers Market each Saturday and Schull Farmer’s Market on Sundays through the summer months.

A big driver of change should be local food production. The present global agri-business model is worth a staggering 24 trillion sterling every year, but the reality is that this money is concentrated in the hands of a very small number of very large and powerful organisations. They control everything, from the seeds we grow, to the oil that drives the tractors and the markets that sell the food. Your local farmer gets less of the cut year after year

It would be easy to write a whole article on the problems of modern day agriculture and food production but the bottom line is that it is a major cause of carbon emissions, loss of biodiversity and climate change. Yet it could be so different.There are lots of young and not-so-young people who are making a small living, on sometimes small patches of land, growing in sustainable ways, working with nature and supplying their local communities with healthy food, grown with complete traceability, low carbon footprint and no food miles. 

Over the next few months, I would like to introduce you to some of them, tell their fascinating stories and where you can buy their produce.

For this issue I spoke to Madeline McKeever who founded and runs Brown Envelope seeds. All foods start with seeds, even food for livestock, so where could be a more appropriate place to start.

Madeline was born and brought up on a mainly beef farm in Co Meath. The middle daughter of three, the tomboy, she loved being out on the farm and remembers always wanting a horse. After boarding school she went to Trinity, initially to study medicine; but she changed tack and got a degree in Botany instead. For her masters she studied Vegetation History concentrating on climate change at the end of the last ice age. Perhaps this was unconscious preparation for things to come!

With little prospect of employment in the 1980s, Madeline travelled to America, ending up on an organic farm in Maine. Here she learned organic farming in the summer and continuous cover forestry in the winter. A trip to Johnny’s Seeds in Maine during that time proved to be an inspiration that she drew on later.

She married in 1986 and moved to a small farm in West Cork in 1987.

They started dairy farming with a herd or 12 beautiful Jersey cows. Madeline wanted to make cheese but with two small daughters and the end of her marriage, it became obvious that, logistically and economically, dairying on that small scale was unviable. She stopped milking in 1999.

Turning to beef farming and planting trees, she had time to think about what to do next. Around this time, Madeline and I were part of Growing Awareness, a group organising conferences supporting Organic food production, and from this, we started the Skibbereen Farmers Market. Taking on one of the first few stalls, Madeline had very little to sell and the idea of Brown Envelope seeds took hold. She was growing vegetables and saving seeds for herself so this was just the next step.

From here she obtained her Organic licence and, whilst registering as a seed producer with the Department of Agriculture, she discovered that no one else in Ireland was actually growing organic seeds, apart from the Irish Seed Savers Association – it seemed like an ideal business opportunity.

Working with little help, she gradually built up the business; one of her daughters, Holly, came home to help for a while, but she has recently been elected to the Dáil, making her mum very proud.

Madeline has always concentrated on growing open-pollinated vegetable varieties, that if you had the time and energy, would produce an interesting and varied year round diet in Ireland. But she loves experimenting and you will always find unusual and tempting additions to the catalogue, as well as a very comprehensive list of tomato varieties; my particular favourite.

Madeline’s latest exciting innovation is the creation of a market place website, selling a range of organic and chemical free herb and vegetable seeds from Brown Envelope and various other seed producers across Ireland. This is as a response to Brexit, Covid, and the consolidation of the international seed industry. The aim of this multi-vendor site is to offer a better choice of quality chemical free seeds for growers and gardeners. Madeline’s seeds represent the start of a resilient local food system and you can buy her seeds on www.seedie.ie

At last the hungry gap seems to be over. After a long cold spring the temperature is rising and the growth in the garden is really noticeable. We have had salad much of the time but now we can add new potatoes to the menu along with delicious French beans from the tunnel, sugar snap peas, beetroot, broad beans, and the courgettes are just days away. Although the majority of tomato varieties are still a way off, we have grown a variety this year called Bloody Butcher and yesterday I picked eight beautiful ripe tomatoes. It isn’t the best tasting tomato in the world but we are still in June, as I write this, and to get ripe tomatoes so early is a joy. I have grown this variety before but not in the recent few years. I do remember it as always the first to ripen though. I am also growing a variety called Maskotka for the first time. It is bred specifically for pots and baskets and is very prolific. I grew them initially for my daughters and their families but had a good few left over and just threw them in a corner. I was having a tidy-up in the tunnel and found this heap of really sad-looking tomato plants; not able to throw anything away, I decided to pot them on and put them up on my hanging shelf in the tunnel. They have recovered well and now have lots of fruit on them. I haven’t tasted one yet, but it does seem to be an easy and space saving way to grow a crop of tomatoes. I am really making an effort to try and grow all of our vegetables this year. It will mean careful planning both in the garden and with our menus. Eating and cooking with what is in season is a skill that most of us have forgotten. With the ease and availability of convenience food, who could blame us? But the consequences are beginning to catch up with us: From climate change to those horrific rafts of plastic waste in our seas, not to mention intensive livestock farming and land degradation. I like to think I am a careful shopper but I still seem to accumulate a good deal of plastic. So I am doubling my efforts and what I can’t grow myself I will buy from other local growers and producers. Careful choice of vegetable seed varieties will help to extend the season and hopefully give enough of a crop to allow me to store or process surplus to help keep winter food interesting. 

There are also things that are very hard to buy now, such as gooseberries. I have a few bushes in my garden and they are covered in fruit this year. They are delicious just stewed and served with a little cream and I am going to try and make some gooseberry jam this year. This will be a special treat later in the year when there isn’t much fruit in the garden, and also what a lovely little gift it would be for someone. 

So now is the time to start enjoying the fruits of our labour, enjoying lovely fresh vegetables, herbs and fruit from our gardens before we have to start thinking of saving and preserving our bounty for the winter. It will come soon enough. 

All this has meant a very slow start to the growing season. We are still picking the bulk of our salads from the tunnel while lettuces planted outside are only just beginning to show signs of growth. Pickings from the outside vegetable garden have been very meagre but some of the perennial vegetables I have been growing have really come into their own. I have grown Nine Star Perennial Broccoli for three or four years now and have had good pickings every year but this year it has really come into its own. Some of the small heads have been like little cauliflowers and I’ve made more than one ‘cauliflower cheese’ in the last few weeks. I grew the plants from seed and I cut the stray flowering shoots back so as to stop the plants going to seed and they are still going strong after several years. I have planted them in the flower border, which edges the veg plot where I grow lots of flowers for the pollinating bees and other insects. Also in this border is rhubarb, another favourite spring treat. It couldn’t be easier to grow; plant it in a sunny spot in fairly good soil, don’t touch it for the first year after planting to let it get established but otherwise it looks after itself. The plants tend to push themselves out of the soil when they need splitting and replanting but they can stay in the same place for a good long time before that happens. Many years ago a friend gave me a couple of plants of something he called Babington Leek. I planted it in that same border and forgot about it. A couple of years later when tidying and weeding the border I saw lots of these strappy healthy looking leek like plants. They smell quite garlicky and are a great addition to stews and soups. They start growing in late summer so are well ready to harvest in spring, especially useful when we have used up all our annual leeks. It eventually sends up a beautiful seed head four or five feet high, which gently droops over and drops on the soil ready to start again next year. It has seeded itself in all sorts of nooks and crannies in my garden even in the shade of trees on the boundary. The seed heads can also be split up and scattered into salads like chive flowers, we use it all the time. 

There are many useful and decorative alliums, wild garlic and the strappy three-cornered leek, which also has a very garlicky flavour; both of these we regularly use for making pestos. The latest garlicky addition I have planted is Tulbaghia violacea, a really pretty plant. It is often called society garlic, as although it has a garlic flavour when chopped up raw in salads, it doesn’t leave the smell in your mouth; the flavour also doesn’t survive cooking. There are so many other perennial plants that are really delicious – asparagus, sea kale, globe artichokes, cardoons, the list goes on, and there is now a lot of interest in perennial vegetables. They may prove a more sustainable option in the future, as they don’t require annual cultivation. Many on the list above are considered luxuries but are so easy to grow and we all need a little luxury in our lives don’t we? I think that tonight we’ll have asparagus from our one asparagus plant with new potatoes (out of the tunnel) with a little melted butter and poached eggs from our chickens. What could be better? 

Now, with gently curved slopes, new hedging, vegetable beds, a composting area and a patio for an outdoor table and chairs, the garden has become a new focus for all the family. It has also given my daughter and myself many hours of chat, exchanging ideas, talking of seeds and plants, biodiversity, advice on varieties and so much more. Starting a new garden is both exciting and daunting. While my other daughters are also on the same journey, they happen to live close by and I can give them advice, plants, seeds and cuttings and so on, just as families have done for generations. With Mia, it is harder, but the new garden has brought us closer, with constant photos, lists of suggestions, even phone calls for advice while she is in the garden centre. Starting from scratch has enabled her to consider everything she plants from the biodiversity point of view so the hedging is a mixture with beech, hawthorn, hazel, and rosa rugosa in the blend. Other suggestions for shrubs that are great for wildlife are Berberis darwinii and Ribes sanguineum for early flowers, Ceanothus, Hebes, Buddleia, Viburnums and many others. Now, before I buy a plant I check its wildlife credentials. There is a wealth of information in seed catalogues, gardening books and of course on the Internet. 

Mia’s new garden is full of nooks and crannies and her first instinct was to fill them up, but I have advised her to take things slowly. It is easy to fill gaps with annual flowers, marigolds, nasturtiums, cornflowers and so on (all good for pollinators), this gives time to live with the space and make good choices. I have bought so many plants in the past that have caught my eye, without any idea of where I will plant them. I am embarrassed to think how many never found a permanent home. Now I make wish lists of plants so that if I happen to find myself in a garden centre, I look for plants on my list that are sure to find a waiting spot in my garden. It has only taken about 40 years to learn that lesson. 

I am looking forward, like so many of you, to the time when we can all safely meet again and swap seeds and cuttings and chats about the garden, hopefully in the not-too-distant future. 

Spring is my favourite season, bringing daily changes to the garden, but the workload can also be overwhelming. I am at an age where I have to try to pace myself a little, and one sunny day when I lose track of time and the dog has to come and find me to remind me it’s dinner time, can lead to a day or even two of recovery.  But timing is everything with jobs such as pricking out and potting on tomatoes, so I try to prioritise by pricking at least a couple of trays of salad or annual flowers each day, and gradually working through the 25 varieties of tomatoes we grow. There is also keeping up with the sowing of vegetable seeds, it pays to be organised, a trait I am not generally known for. My loved ones will tell you that this is an understatement. My greatest aid in organising my sowing plan is a planting by the moon calendar. This year I have found one that is in the form of a large poster, decorative enough to pin up on the kitchen wall, which so far has already saved me hours as I haven’t had to search for the book most days which was my normal way of doing things. Whether you believe in the efficacy of planting by moon cycles or not, it certainly puts some structure into sowing plans. I know for instance that today, as I write, is a fruit day and I could sow peas, beans or cucumbers and so on; and by the weekend it will be a root day, ideal for planting potatoes, parsnips or any other root crop. You could explore the subject further, for instance whether it’s a waxing or waning moon, but I am definitely not qualified to go into more detail. I just know it works for me and I follow the instructions.

Spring is also blossom time and the first thing to blossom in my garden was a wild cherry, prunus ‘Woodfield Cluster’. I cherish this plant for its tenacity as well as its really pretty white blossom. I can’t call it a tree, as it was inadvertently pruned, when only a couple of years old. It wasn’t done by me; least said soonest mended. Then it was caught by the strimmer; I don’t use the strimmer either. It is now more or less a shrub, but quite beautiful in full blossom and I saw my first bumblebee of the season happily feasting inside one of its flowers. Long may it survive!

Vegetable seeds are generally very reliable and easy to germinate. Lots of varieties don’t need any heat at all, some just need a warm windowsill but more tropical varieties such as tomatoes, aubergines and peppers do much better with some consistent heat. Lettuce seed can germinate in temperatures as low as 40 degrees Fahrenheit but as a general rule 60 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit would be optimum, and definitely not over 75 when germination will be retarded.  

Flower seeds can be a bit trickier. Annuals are relatively straightforward and most don’t need any extra heat, though it will speed up the germination time for some varieties. Half-hardy annuals do need some help and I find it best to wait a while before I sow things like cosmos and nicotiana, as even if they germinate early, they tend to sit and sulk in cold compost. Perennials on the other hand can be very unpredictable. Some need to be sown in the autumn and left outside covered against the rain but open to cold and frost, which primes them to burst into life when the weather warms up. Some are sporadic with a few seeds germinating straight away and more later on. Some take months or even a year to germinate; then again others will pop through within a couple of weeks from a spring sowing.  

I find growing from seed to be really satisfying and have learnt not to empty seed trays too early if nothing shows through. It is great to experiment with a few different things each year. If nothing grows it won’t break the bank but if you are successful then you can grow many plants for the price of a packet of seeds. It is very rewarding to grow plants that would be difficult to buy, such as Santolina etrusca, a really pretty cotton lavender that I grew from seed and now have enough plants for a low hedge in the herb garden. Some plants such as delphiniums look so much better in groups and are relatively easy to grow from seed. For less than the price of one plant you can buy a packet of seeds and have lots to plant out or swap. Of course there isn’t the instant gratification of immediate flowers but quite a few perennials will flower in the first year if sown early enough and anyway, we gardeners are patient people aren’t we?