Cork's seed capital

In an excerpt from her book 'From the Ground Up', FIONNUALA FALLONdrinks in the salty air surrounding Brown Envelope Seeds, a small west Cork industry run by Madeline McKeever

I’ve always been a nosyish sort of gardener, the kind who, if given half a chance, will peer into other gardeners’ polytunnels to surreptitiously check out plant labels or wander into their potting sheds to have a better look at unfamiliar seed catalogues and unusual garden tools.

Similarly, I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that individuals can garden so differently yet still learn so much from each other by that endless, enriching trade of information, knowledge and experience (as well as the exchange of seeds and plants).

Which explains how my new book From The Ground Up: How Ireland is Growing its Own, came into being. Because the more I heard about the many different Irish kitchen gardens hidden around the country, the more I longed to visit them and to learn from those who gardened them. In 2010, when Collins Press mooted the idea of a gardening book, I finally had the excuse I’d been hoping for. And so my photographer husband, Richard, and I (with our infant twin sons in tow) spent that summer on a sort of horticultural road trip, visiting a total of 16 productive gardens around the country.

The result is an Irish gardening book about people – young and old, amateurs and experts – all of whom share a love of growing at least some of their own food. It’s about why, how and where they grow-their-own, whether that’s on a tiny city balcony, an allotment, a community garden, a school garden, a city garden or a country farm. It’s about their successes, their failures, their favourite tools, their most-hated weeds, their top tips, and the books/ websites/suppliers that they’ve found most useful. And having learnt a lot from every one of them, it’s proof, I hope, that being a nosyish sort of gardener can bring its own rewards.

“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”

– Henry David Thoreau

THERE ARE THOSE who say (not unkindly) that Co Cork is the spiritual home of tongue-twisting toponyms, of obscure and beautiful Irish place names filled with elongated vowels and guttural consonants almost impossible to pronounce.

Certainly, if the very last leg of the journey from Cork city to the west Cork home of Brown Envelope Seeds is anything at all to go by, they may just be right, because the farther you drive and the faster those signposts flash by, the longer and more convoluted those placenames seem to get – Rossnagoose, Mohanagh, Goleen Marsh, Poulnacallee, Ardnagroghery, Ringarogy.

All the while the road twists, turns and narrows, the hedgerows grow higher, denser, lusher, and the wildflowers appear more colourful. By the time you finally turn off the N71 and on to the narrow road (half-covered with grass and not much more than the width of a single car) to follow the signposts for Turk Head and Brown Envelope Seeds, you are in a place of such wonderful remoteness that you wonder for a moment if even Google Earth might fail to recognise it.

It’s here, just a mile or so before the vast Atlantic Ocean forces that same narrow road to a sudden and abrupt stop, that you’ll find the small and slightly tumbledown old farmhouse that its owner, Madeline McKeever, first lived in when she moved to this part of west Cork in 1988. “I came here as a small farmer in search of a place with a milk quota that I could afford,” she says. “Now . . . well, now I think of it as the centre of my universe.”

Speaking purely geographically, that universe is a peninsular one, ruled by its close proximity to the Atlantic and the matrix of small coastal islands nearby. Stand up on one of the 30-acre farm’s high, fern-edged field boundaries, and you’ll catch a 180-degree view of the glinting, gleaming ocean spread out below, of Horse Island and Hare Island to the west, with Sherkin and Clear Island further off to the south. Inhale deeply, and you can almost taste the salty air, while a glance at the scarlet fuchsia hedgerows, fringed with yellow flag irises and purple loosestrife, confirms the fact that the sea is not very far away.

That said, the universe of which McKeever speaks with such deep affection is clearly more than simple geography. By choosing, as part of her long and very personal pursuit of a sustainable and self-sufficient life, to shun the typical 21st-century lifestyle in preference for that of the traditional smallholder, she has gradually and inextricably, but very willingly, bound herself to those 30 peaty acres of west Cork farmland.

As a result, her ties to this part of west Cork are strong and deep, both with the land and with the community. As for the once all-important milk quota that first brought her to Turk Head 24 years ago, it was not, in the end, what has kept her there. Although McKeever did at first keep a small organic dairy herd, selling the milk to the local creamery, “eventually there wasn’t enough money in it to make it worthwhile”.

She gave up dairy farming in 1998, turning half the land over to a plantation of hardwood trees (oak and ash), with alder as a nurse crop.

And while she now keeps a very small herd of organic beef cattle, they are only a tiny part of the farm’s output. “As much as possible I leave them to do their own thing.”

Instead, much of her time is spent running Brown Envelope Seeds, the small but highly regarded, independent, organic seed business that she founded in 2004.

Its humble headquarters are snuggly housed in the farmhouse where McKeever and her family once lived – but instead of the noisy young family that once occupied it, its downstairs rooms are now filled with a couple of old battered desks, two computers, numerous filing cabinets and a raft of books (on the day we visited, a book on the scientist and plant geneticist Gregor Mendel lay open on McKeever’s desk).

The nearby shelves, meanwhile, are stacked high with box after box of neatly filed and labelled seeds. Some are cleaned and sorted, some not. Some (in their eponymous brown envelopes stamped with the logo of The Organic Trust) form part of the catalogued collection, others are purely for the purposes of experimentation – given or posted to McKeever by like-minded “seedies”, often from halfway across the world.

“It’s my version of organised chaos,” smiles McKeever as she shows us around. “You might not believe it, but I do know where everything is, despite the slightly burgled look about it.”

Just yards away from the office is McKeever’s new home, which she built in 2001, and where she now lives with her partner Mike Sweeney – still modest in size and vernacular in design but “cosier, warmer and drier”, as she describes it.

If you wander out of her back door and across the farmyard, past the brightly painted, old milk churns that now serve as plant pots, not far down a grassy path is where you’ll also find the farm’s one-time milking shed. Now mainly used for threshing, winnowing and drying seeds, its inside walls are festooned with the seed producer’s tools – the various meshes, sieves and paraphernalia used by McKeever and Sweeney to clean and prepare the seed – while, more recently, its roof has been covered with photovoltaic (PV) panels that keep the farm almost self-sufficient in terms of electricity.

The first of the farm’s two large polytunnels stands close by, crammed to bursting point with just some of the many vegetables listed in the Brown Envelope Seeds catalogue.

The field next to it is planted with a neat lines of potatoes while, off in the distance, one can just about make out the farm’s small herd of beef cattle leisurely grazing its grassy meadows.

Across the road, in another of the farm’s undulating meadows, and in clear sight of the sea, is the main vegetable garden and yet another well-stocked polytunnel.

Meanwhile, the clucking, cackling and crowing of a motley but very charming collection of chickens and cockerels forms a gentle but constant background hum.

As a first-time visitor, however, what strikes you at once about the place is its surprising intimacy of scale. Brown Envelope Seeds is far smaller, wilder and more ad-hoc than expected, but all the more interesting for it. And as for its owner/founder – part-farmer, part-scientist, part-hippy, part-environmental crusader, while also fiercely intelligent, dry-witted and surprisingly shy – those who know her would surely agree that there’s something of the eccentric polymath about Madeline McKeever.

Tickets are available for the GIY Gathering 2012 (September 15th-16th, various venues in Waterford city). Up to 500 gardeners, growers and food lovers are expected to converge on Waterford for two days of talks, demos, workshops, discussions, debates and forages as part of the Waterford Harvest Festival.

See giyireland.com