Road Trip June 18, 2008
Posted by Graham in : Gardens, General, Permaculture, Renewable Energy, Yurts , add a commentA recent trip up country took me first to Westport where I called in on the Sustainability Institute, home of the Irish Sustainability Magazine.
Right: Sustainability editor Andy Wilson hard at work
Andy Wilson’s creation of the Sustainability Magazine has been a remarkable achievement, bringing a much-needed serious journal into the Irish environmental landscape. Starting up a new magazine from scratch is no mean feat and the scholarly and well-researched articles on a wide range of topics is to be greatly welcomed. The third issue is out this week. (more…)
Solstice at Derryduff December 23, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Food, Gardens, Permaculture , 2comments
Please try and limit your consumption and reduce your ecological footprint this holiday season, and otherwise have a great time; but if you are not sure what to do with yourselves these long dark evenings and want to both save money AND do your bit for the environment, have a look at this. (thanks to minktoast)
Apologies for irregular blogs the last couple of weeks- loss of my wind turbine in a storm has meant restricted power. Stay tuned for the next installment of the back to nature series in the New year, and in the meantime here are a few notes and photos from recent garden activity:
Garlic This year I have planted two varieties of garlic from The Isle of Wight Garlic Farm - Lautrec Wight and Elephant garlic; 
also a local variety from some neighbours. The Elephant Garlic has to be seen to be believed- one clove is the size of a whole corm of regular garlic. Alliums are easy to grow and ideal for planting through a newspaper and straw mulch -slugs don’t trouble them too much.
I also harvested occa, machua and Jerusalem Artichokes this week.
Machua- tropaeolum tuberosum is an edible tuber originating in Peru. Pretty much pest free and easy to grow, with a climbing habit and attractive orange trumpet-like flowers,I harvested about 6 egg-sized nobbly tubers from each plant, so it is potentially quite productive. This is the first time Ive grown it so I was looking forward to tasting it, but it was not exactly delicious. Plants for a Future says:
“The tubers are quite popular in South America but can probably be best desricbed as an acquired taste”. They recommend freezing them or leaving them in the ground until after a frost to improve flavour.
I thought they had potential as part of a forest garden guild with oca oxalis tuberosum planted around them as a ground cover. Ive been growing oca for a few years now and although not high-yielding it is again easy to grow and tasty. A new Irish site dedicated to oca can be found here. Next year i am going to add Jerusalem Artichokes into the guild for the Machua to climb up -a sort of perennial “three sisters”. The idea is, like the Three Sisters of Corn, beans and squash, you can get three yields in the same space because of their different habits and niches.
Powerdown Roundup November 24, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Environment, Food, Gardens, Peak Oil, Permaculture, Powerdown , add a commentIt has been a busy few weeks and I only now have a chance to catch up by reporting on a few events I have attended over the last few weeks.
On November 8th and 9th I presented an introduction to permaculture workshop at the Tipperary institute, for final-year students on the Sustainable Rural Development degree course.
After an overview of permaculture design principles and some edible landscaping techniques, students were asked to do a design exercise on a proposed permaculture garden outside the canteen.
Making use of some of their proposals I will write up a design for the garden which the Institute will implement early next year. This is an exciting development for the TI and the garden will be partly managed by students on a new degree course starting next September, Environmental and Natural Resource Managment, which will include a Permaculture component. This is a ground-breaking new course designed to provide relevant third-level training to address the coming environmental and resource challenges we will be facing as we continue down the slippery slope of energy descent. (more…)
Seed Saving October 29, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Food, Gardens, General , 1 comment so far
A recent trip to Madeleine McKeever, founder of Brown Envelope Seeds, down near turk Head on the south coast, provided the permaculture class with a fascinating introduction to the world of seed-saving. (more…)
Pumpkin Seeds October 14, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Food, Gardens, Permaculture , 2commentsIf I were only to grow one vegetable, I think it would be pumpkins- easy to grow, nutritious and delicious, many of the smaller varieties- like Pompeon or the orange-fleshed Uchiki Kuri
are as sweet as sweet potatoes and store really well- until March or even April.
This year for the first time I grew a variety more know for its naked seeds- Lady Godiva. This variety is grown for its seeds which are “naked” ie they dont have husks so can be eaten straight out of the fruit, or dried and stored.
A neighbour gave me some seeds late in the season, so I didnt start them until late June but they still did quite well.
Here are the seeds from one of the pumpkins. Highly nutritious in themselves, being rich in magnesium, manganese and phosphorous, and a good source of iron, copper, protein, and zinc, pumpkin seeds store for even longer than the fruit and are well worth growing for this reason.
At the Organic Centre July 14, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Gardens, Peak Oil, Permaculture , add a commentAfter leaving Clare Island last week I continued my travels to the Organic Centre, Rossinver, Co. Leitrim, where I ran a couple of one-day Introduction to Permaculture Courses and spoke on Peak Oil at the Permaculture Conference on the Sunday. Right: mulching and making key-hole beds in the forest garden
Billed by event organiser Phil Wheal as “The Real Live Earth Event” the conference provided a welcome alternative of earthy realism to the extremely surreal spectacle I caught a glimpse of on TV in the flat I stayed in (thanks Wayne!) of Madonna prancing about the Wembley stage invoking the assembled masses to “jump up and down to save the planet”. (The hubris and hypocrisy of Al Gore’s “Live Earth” event has been well exposed by commentators in the mainstream media; suffice to say, small local acoustic gatherings around the (carbon-neutral) campfire would have been more appropriate.)
The two permaculture groups I had on the days before did some work on the Forest garden at the Organic Centre, which is shaping up to be one of the better examples of this gardening genre that I know of in Ireland. (more…)
Permaculture and Yoga on Clare Island July 4, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Gardens, Peak Oil, Permaculture , add a commentWhat will be the likely effects of Peak Oil and energy scarcity on a small off-shore island that has only recently gained some of the comforts and ease of living that a fossil -fuel economy provides? How can the practice of Yoga and Meditation help us reach the levels of awareness that will be required to meet the challenge of a low-energy future?
And what role did the potato play in allowing the population of Ireland to reach pre-famine levels?Right: Ciara, Theo and Graham amongst the trees 
These were some of the discussions I had with Ciara Cullen as her guest at the Clare Island Yoga Retreat Centre during a three-day Permaculture course that I taught there last weekend. (more…)
Bamboo Shoots June 26, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Food, Gardens, Permaculture , 2commentsWhat edible perennial is guaranteed slug-proof, completely hardy in Ireland, grows into an elegant screen, can be used as a climbing support for your beans and also will feed your pet Pandas?
The answer to this can only be bamboo, one of the most exciting and beautiful plants you could grow.
But isn’t bamboo invasive? This is the most common concern, but in fact there are hundreds of varieties of bamboo each with widely varying growth habits: some indeed have highly invasive habits that send out runners sometimes meters away from the original clump, and quickly colonise a whole garden. These are to be avoided! (more…)
Bitter-sweet Harvest May 17, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Bees, Food, Gardens , 3commentsWest Cork bee-keeper Tim Rowe kindly sent me this article he has written highlighting the plight of bees and bee-keepers on account of widespread Colony Collapse Syndrome:
BITTER-SWEET HARVEST – a beekeeper’s year.
It’s been a strange year. Last summer the honey harvest from my bees weighed over half a ton. That’s stacks and stacks of wooden boxes all stuffed with dripping honeycombs, gloriously pungent and sticky. It came as a culmination of a whole lot of work – some of it by me. 
below: Tim at his house near Bantry
The bees had been collecting nectar from early spring, increasing in numbers in time for the main flows of clover and blackberry and heather. At the peak we all worked from dawn to dusk, they in vast numbers frenetically hurtling back and forth, me struggling round in my sweaty bee-suit controlling swarms and adding supers to hives as tall as me. (more…)
Permaculture Garden April 14, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Gardens, Permaculture , 1 comment so farThe original idea of Mollison and Holmgren when they coined the term “permaculture” was the idea that it would be possible to garden and even farm commercially at least to some extent using perennial- and tree-crops that dont need the annual ritual of sowing seeds and raising seedlings. This has been practised for millenium in some parts of the world, particularly south-east Asia and some Pacific Islands as a traditional form of “forest gardening” whereby plants and trees with edible and useful crops were favored and encouraged over time, and replicated more recently in cool-temperate parts of the world starting with Robert Harts’ forest garden and brought up to date with David Jacke’s seminal Edible Forest Gardens
My strategy in Derryduff over the past six years has been to try to establish trees for timber and fruit first, with less emphases on the conventional vegetable garden. Beginners in gardening often put a lot of time and energy trying to grow more fussy things like carrots and lettuce, but never really get the easier perennials started. Right: trees, perennials, climbers, herbs and vegetables in the Zone1 garden at Derryduff
This spring after six years of tree-planting I can begin to see the results as I look across the land and see a scattering of blossom with the promise of fruit later.
Some of the trees with potential edible crops include:
-apples
-pears
-plums
-cherries
-cobnuts
-heartnuts
-walnuts
-sweet chestnuts
-bladdernuts
-amelanchier (left, in flower)
-phyllostachys bisettii bamboo
In addition to the trees and soft fruit I have also been establishing a range of perennial crops that have potential for good yields and require very little work once established. These plants include: -rhubarb -Jerusalem artichokes -Globe artichokes -perpetual spinach -”potato onions” (a large shallot or multiplier onion) -Babbington’s leeks -alpine strawberries -Indian Lilly cana indica
I also am trying climbers including kiwis, grape vines, thornless blackberries, and Japanese Wineberries.
One of the most interesting plants I have just put in is the curious climbing tuber from South America Machua tropaeolum tuberosum
which grows the size of a potato and can be quite productive.
Since this plant prefers to have its tubers in the shade and climbing vines reaching into the sun, it seemed a good idea to underplant it with another South American tuber, Occa oxalis tuberosa
Here, I have used my own bamboo canes to make a simple climbing support for the Machua; an alternative would be to try growing them with a third tuber, Jerusalem artichokes, that could provide a stalk for the Machua vines to climb, thus completing a perennial guild of the traditional “Three Sisters” (corn, climbing beans and squash).
