New article in Grit magazine

Good news! My latest piece on fruit tree grafting has been published in Grit Magazine; check it out here.

Walking across the bog

“Doctor Ceitinn and I walked right across the bog, with Poll na Cailli west of us and Poll na Chapaill to the east, as far as Mocklers where we had baker’s bread with butter and a strong drop of whiskey.

We walked over the bog collecting wild plants: water-mint, bog-cotton, common self-heal (a small coarse plant with a purple head or flower), common milfoil, which has a thousand petals and a brown stalk.

We saw a lovely girl kneading wet turf. She had slender feet, calves and knees white as bog-cotton. Her father was once a well-off farmer, but the difficulties of life caught up with him; he lost everything, and the landlord took his crops. The tithe-collector took away the table, the pot and bed with him, and they all drove him out to wander the roads – himself, his wife and his handsome young children. That is why he was in a small cabin at the foot of the mountain, and why his beautiful young daughter was kneading turf.

A thousand young boys and girls danced to music nearby, on top of Moinn Rua, a high platform in the middle of Poll na Chapaill. The reddish-brown hillock was shaking under their nimble feet. They are having a fine life here, if it doesn’t end in beggary.

I can see how turf grows. There is a kind of moss called susan, growing in bog-holes, which when it withers turns to pulp. The pulp fills the bog-holes in time, and thus builds new banks of turf. If the susan has not completely withered it is cut with a breast turf-spade, but if it has, is cut with a winged turf-spade. It is spread on the banks to dry. But this is not the best kind of turf. The best is that which, after it has been shovelled up out of the hole onto the bank, is kneaded by the hands of women.”

-- From the diary of Tomas de Bhaldraithe, County Kilkenny, 12 July, 1827. 

Dublin wall

I work across from the Guinness brewery in Dublin, a cluster of massive 19th-century brick buildings with a maze of narrow cobblestone streets, massive wooden gates, alleys -- and many horse-drawn carts for the tourists. It is perhaps not the cheeriest neighbourhood -- damp, pungent, with sunlight falling in thin shafts between the barrelhouses. It will, however, have for one week each March, a man in a giant leprechaun costume.

It does, however, have character -- and if I turn an unexpected corner, I come upon something like this picture. If you can't read it, it says, in giant letters four metres up the wall, "STONE UPON STONE UPON FALLEN STONE," and then in the Irish language, "CLOCH OS CLON CLOICHE OS CLON CLOICHE LEATHA."

I'm not certain what it means, but I like that such a thing exists for its own sake.

Pickled Apples now on Mother Earth News

Good news! My article on making pickled apples is now up at Mother Earth News. Check it out.

The Lake Isle of Inisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Inisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

-- William Butler Yeats.

Community-supported agriculture

Published in the Kildare Nationalist this week. 

When people start their own business venture, they usually prefer finding investors to relying solely on a bank loan – many other people can share in your risk and rewards, and they find it in their interest to help you succeed. Now, some farmers are using this model, finding selling shares of their farm to the people who will eat the crops.

Under a system called Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA), local residents invest in a farm at thebeginning of the year, before the crops have been planted. Typically each family buys a standard share of the farm’s produce, and in exchange they receive a box of crops each week for the rest of the season. What they receive will depend on the time of year, but if a farmer plants enough variety, any weeks’ box will likely have several different kinds of crops, whether delivered in May or October.

Such projects make a farm particularly resilient in the face of global financial crises. A CSA farm does not depend on loans from major banks to continue from year to year, nor do its crop sales depend onthe vagaries of faraway markets. A CSA pays the farmer early in the year, so that the farm does not have to go deeply in debt each year, and it allows the farmer to market their food before their 16-hour days begin.

Sometimes a CSA plan finds a use for plots near towns that otherwise might go unused. They providework for farmers in an age when their numbers are diminishing – and if the community hires young people as hands, they give wages and rural skills to local youths.

In addition, CSAs allow neighbours to form a personal relationship with the person who is growing their food, and allows the farmer to hear and respond to consumer demand quickly, without the need for commissioning survey groups. Since people must invest in the farm, they usually must cometo the farm at least once a year, and get to meet the farmer and see where their food comes from. They must accept a variety of vegetables and learn to cook them.

But perhaps the most important use of such farms is giving a community food that is not flown in from across an ocean -- food that must often be must be sealed in plastic and foam packaging, sometimes preserved in chemical gases, to delay spoilage. We are surrounded by fertile land here in Ireland, yet we import 90 per cent ofour food. If there were an oil crisis, as many predict is beginning now, we would have to rebuild muchof our local agriculture from scratch.

If the farm is next door, the food is always fresh, no rubbish need be generated, and we would not use those thousands of gallons of fossil fuel right away, and do our part to delay a global energy crunch. CSAs can go beyond vegetables as well, to include grains, meat, home-made bread, eggs, cheese, flowers or fruit. Several farmers could join forces to create a regional CSA, coordinating their efforts –one supplying chickens, for example, and another supplying vegetables.

By looking at ways to embrace CSAs in this country, we might be able to stem the gradual loss of our farms and farming families, and to ensure that those that remain not just survive, but thrive.

Back from book-binding

I’m just now back from spending the weekend in the Ox Mountains of County Sligo, a land of lonely beauty like you don’t expect to see outside of a Lord of the Rings film. I was taking a course in bookbinding from one of the few remaining craftsmen of that art. More on that later.

For now, here are a couple of small books I made under his guidance – one covered in calf vellum, the other in deer. They are just first attempts, of course, and filled with mistakes, but they were immensely satisfying to make by hand.

End of winter

The last day of winter for us is St. Bridget’s Eve, and this was a beautiful fresh sunny day, with a gentle wind two points south of west. This last day of winter put on a pleasant appearance as if it were saying, “I was soft and easy with you for the last three months, and now, as we are going to part, let us shake hands with each other in a friendly manner. Good bye!”

On St. Bridget’s Eve the little girls go from door to door with brideogs, images of St. Bridget dressed up in lovely clothes, asking for halfpennies – and getting them – to have a party for themselves, just as the young boys do with the wren in the holly branch on St. Stephen’s Day.

- From the diary of Tomas de Bhaldraithe, 31st January 1827, in The Diary of an Irish Countryman.

The old roots

We like to walk through woods near our house, formerly the grounds of a castle, built in the 1600s and almost destroyed in the 1641 rebellion, rebuilt and extended over the centuries.The home of the baronial family that ruled these lands now lies vacant, its halls of power now open to the sky.

From the nearby lake we can hear the trills of moorhens and the squeaks of coots, tending their chicks in the dense thickets of reeds. On one corner of the lake must once have sat a small boathouse, now covered with rocks like a cairn.

On the top of this mound, its roots winding through and over the rubble, grows a single tree, somehow thriving on the barest of surfaces and clinging to the mound through the fiercest of winds.

Life on the canal

We live along a canal dug more than 250 years ago, to ship turf in barges to the hearths of Dublin. Now, these same canals serve as a home for people -- sometimes families -- who roam up and down the canal, changing the scenery outside their window whenever they like.

My favourite houseboat so far was one that had gardens on its deck, giving the owners a permanent source of vitamins. I'm told that other houseboat owners have cultivated patches of wild edibles along the canal banks in patches, harvesting as they go.