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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, OWL-OldWaysLiving@yahoogroups.com
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Can we grow it? Yes we can, together
  • Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:35:51 -0700


Can we grow it? Yes we can, together
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2012/0307/1224312904388.html

Grow It Yourself helps people to grow their own food, in any garden big or
box-sized, and after a while with these enthusiasts, there is a feeling they
have a luxury that the rest of us are missing, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE

IN THE SOUTH Parish Community Centre in Cork city centre, the audience is
rapt. Caroline Robinson, a commercial grower for 16 years, is talking about
vegetables: bolting, whiterot, pheasants taking out whole lines of peas.

How to make your own potting compost – combine 90 per cent cow, sheep and
horse manure, all of which has been left for two years underneath deciduous
trees, with two trowels each of calcified seaweed, wood ash, horn meal (that
is, ground animal horn) and seaweed dust. “My impression is that people are
under-fertilising,” she says. You could hear a pin drop among the audience,
made up of members of Grow It Yourself (GIY).

Robinson demonstrates several types of oscillating hoe. She talks about
planting clover under brassicas, once the brassicas are up, and having
flowers – nasturtiums and borage – for the bees. She talks about the
population density of earthworms, and how ancient Egypt “at its peak”, as she
puts it, had a hundred tonnes of worm castings per acre because of the Nile
flooding; on an ordinary farm these days, you’d be lucky to get one tonne of
worm castings per acre.

She is modest as well. “I’ve now cracked garlic, after about a hundred
years,” she says in response to a question from the floor. “Bulk- up is a
problem for everyone.”

With more than 100 branches of GIY all over the country, there must be two or
three of these events happening every night. The meetings are free. The going
rate for GIY membership is €35 per annum, but that’s a donation and entirely
optional, according to GIY founder Michael Kelly, who started the
organisation in 2009.

GIY now has 12,000 members in Ireland. Some of the unexpected off-shoots of
GIY include group unity, helpfulness and good humour: the very things that
community leaders, psychologists and social engineers sweat blood trying to
create elsewhere.

GIY wants to include everybody. It makes a point of being opposed to what its
new magazine, Grow, calls “horticultural snootiness”, and to the off-putting
use of Latin botanical names.

Larry Murphy, who was once a quartermaster in the Army and who now drives a
bus for Saint Luke’s Day Centre, stands up to talk about a new youth project,
which it is hoped this branch of Grow It Yourself will support. It is in
Douglas, a suburban village of Cork. The Douglas West Garda Diversion Project
helps young people between the ages of 12 and 18, who are regarded by the
Garda as being at risk of offending .

One of the beauties of vegetable growing is surely that it’s the same – or
pretty much the same – for everyone.

Larry Murphy’s daughter Louise is a youth worker on the Diversion Youth
Project. “The young people did gardening last year and it worked out really
well,” she says in a phone call a couple of days afterwards. “The GIY people
will bring gardening expertise, and provide positive, pro-social role models.
They’ll also demonstrate self-sufficiency, and we hope that will have a
ripple effect, because the young people will bring that home with them.”

PEOPLE ARE meant to place their orders for seeds from the Brown Envelope Seed
Company, which is based in west Cork, during the tea break – but it turns out
that there is no tea. The man who has custody of the community centre kettle
is ill. People line up to place their orders unrefreshed.

“I just grow what I like to eat,” says Maura O’Leary. “Sugar snap peas,
carrots, garlic. I like the idea of not being totally dependent on somebody
else for everything, I hate buying sugar snap peas from Kenya. People in the
city don’t think they can grow, but they can. I live in a mid-terrace city
house in Togher. I’ve a small back garden with a 6ft by 4ft raised bed. I got
a friend of mine to make it. Plus a plastic greenhouse.” O’Leary is an
administrator in the public service, and is on the steering committee of this
branch of Grow It Yourself.

Maireád O’Reilly is a midwife. In her house on the north side of Cork city
she has a raised bed of 8ft by 12ft, and she has access to a glass house
elsewhere. Her big successes last year were her garlic and her tomatoes in
the glasshouse. “My cucumbers failed terribly. I want to talk to Caroline
Robinson about that.”

O’Reilly attended the GIY Gathering at harvest time in Waterford last year –
“It was fab” – and it is she who offers the most cogent reason for GIY’s
success. “I suppose it’s growth. Everybody likes growth.”

Barry identifies himself solely by his first name. “I mightn’t come now every
time,” he says. He has grown lettuce, cabbage, carrots and onions. He has
four children. “The three small ones are mad to help, like.” GIY has started
going into schools, he says, so that the children learn about growing food
there. Barry has been unemployed for a couple of years. He used to work,
“Down the quays. A docker.”

Séan Byrne says that GIY, “Is an internet, if you like. It’s instant. I was a
complete beginner.People never seem to forget that they were beginners once.
It gives a great sense of community. I used to go to work, go home, do some
things on a social basis . . . But you’re in a group here, you’re conscious
that you’re part of something. It’s nice to connect with people.”

Byrne’s great success last year was his parsnips: “I’d parsnips for six
months.” His failure was his carrots, which he pulled up by the roots early
on, thinking they were weeds: “I was too industrious.”

His day job is as a post-office clerk and he is slagged there by his
colleagues. “Oh, constantly. They weren’t surprised when I joined because it
fits. They already called me a tree hugger.”

Larry Murphy, who was in the Army for 41 years, is overwhelmed by the
response there has been this evening to his announcement about the Diversion
Youth Project. “There’s been unbelievable comeback.” Even the people who
could not offer to work for the garden said that they would donate seedlings.

Murphy is cautious about the new initiative, which is a bit of a seedling
itself. “It may work out, it may not work out. We’ve never taken on a project
like this before.” Murphy has been involved with this branch of GIY for three
years.

“The thing is that everyone is so helpful and so enthusiastic about it. In
August, in Carrigaline, last year, we had a gathering in the allotments. We’d
sandwiches. We’d dips. We’d a barbecue. And the pride of the people, even if
they’d only a few carrots, it was great, like. Sure, it’s better than
watching Judge Judy and the soaps.”




  • [Livingontheland] Can we grow it? Yes we can, together, Tradingpost, 03/07/2012

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