ANOTHER LIFE:THIS NEW YEAR, above all, calls for some personal pact with the future, something just between you and the planet and its various ancient gods, says MICHAEL VINEY
When so many wheels of fortune turn out to be spun by bankers and other chancers, there is great comfort in an enterprise that draws on nature's generous credit.
Little in my experience gives such a glow of independence as sowing seeds and nursing them into food.I don't know what you need in your genes to love the soil itself, the soft yield of it under your knees, the gritty flow between your fingers (we are talking better than sticky window-boxes here).
But there is something transcendental in the push of life from each dark, dry speck, lifting and parting the soil with a spear of folded leaves that cleaves into two and then four, and ultimately into a whole fat cabbage or a fountain of foliage with a plump parsnip or carrot underneath.
Making seeds grow is always an astonishment. However dressed up in freshness and goodness of produce, productive exercise and saving money, this is the real subliminal kick for gardeners who grow their own. Tulips and dahlias and pot plants from the garden centre have nothing on a good bed of home-grown leeks.
Whatever the drive, the demand for allotment plots grows apace and will certainly redouble in the months immediately ahead. In the capital last autumn, south Dublin county council had more than 200 people on its waiting list; Fingal had another 500 for the allotments it will open in Powerstown and Donabate this year. Land earmarked for some bypass roads around Dublin will have temporary tenants at €50 for 40 square metres (about the area in my polytunnel).
The land banks of private developers: odd fields, decaying gardens - even that bit in Dublin's Dartmouth Square - may yet earn a modest consolation in 11-month allotment leases. My own introduction to gardening, after all, was in a defunct builder's yard in which my father dug for victory in the 1940s, coaxing beans and peas from chalky soil in beds edged with derelict girders.
Not merely in Irish cities, but in many small towns around Ireland, getting dirt under your fingernails, with the kids in tow, is a new and laudable ambition. In Westport, my local market town, typically transformed with blocks of smart apartments, a Labour councillor has called for provision of allotments in the new town plan, together with a community garden. By a nice irony, a prime open space in the centre of town is the great old garden of the Bank of Ireland, once a fount of fresh vegetables but long up for sale.
The economics of amateur gardening can be questionable, since a booming seed, tool and sundries industry does its best to add cost to growth. An early challenge to the pocket is deciding what seeds to sow, a task complicated by the dazzling range of choices offered by seed catalogues and the racks of packets in garden centres. My own catalogues arrive serially with the Christmas cards, and selection of 40-odd varieties of vegetable to feed two of us for a year is both an enjoyable seasonal ritual and an annual shock at the bill.
The catalogues come from a fair spread of sources, acccumulating over the years.
Thickest and glossiest is Thompson Morgan's, an old and privately-owned UK company that seems to have escaped the maw of the giant multi-nationals that now control two-thirds of the world's seed supply. Its main Irish outlet is Mr Middleton's in Dublin's Mary Street, notable again this year for a remarkable range of seed potatoes, including the blight-resisting Sarpo and Axona.
What makes an "organic" seed is simply its origin in harvesting from a plant grown to organic standards: a benefit sometimes more philosophical than real. Special efforts are made, obviously, by Garden Organic, born of the UK's distinguished pioneers in the field, that sells its seeds through Chase Organics at Skibbereen, Co Cork.
Ireland has its own, thriving Organic Centre at Rossinver, Co Leitrim, with a seed catalogue expanding year by year (theorganiccentre.ie) and the Irish Seed Savers Association at Capparoe, Scariff, Co Clare, whose members specialise in growing and swapping the seeds of vegetables of "heritage" varieties threatened with extinction by the patented hybrids of commerce.
Some gardeners will have nothing to do with the "F 1" hybrids of the catalogues, bred primarily for intensive horticulture: plump, comely, sweet, obedient, disease-resistant plants that reach the same size all at once at predictable harvest dates. The cost of their lengthy development is recovered in the price and the minimal number of seeds in the packet.
To choose old-fashioned varieties, "open-pollinated" by insects and offered by the liberal handful, is to take one's chance on nature's own timing and quality, both of which may be perfectly satisfactory.
Eye on Nature
I saw a flock of about 100 lapwings near Carrickmacross in early December, the first flock I've seen for 15 to 20 years.Fred Fitzsimons, Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan
Lapwings are residents. They are also summer visitors from France and Spain and winter visitors from western and central Europe. Greatest numbers occur in Ireland between September and April, mainly in the midlands and the west, but also on the Wexford Slobs.
When I was putting out bird food with the children, they wanted to know if the birds spend cold days mostly in the comfort of their nests. I would like to have answered yes, but to the best of my knowledge the nests are only used when hatching and fledging. Is this correct?Linda Keohane, Furbo, Co Galway
Birds do not usually use their nests to shelter at night. On cold nights they find holes and corners and hedges that are sheltered and roost. In winter small flocks of wrens bundle into any nests they can find, often swallows' nests, to keep warm. They rotate their positions in the ball of birds so that those in the middle give a chance to those on the outside.
I have recently had two recent reports of this from readers.
Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo; e-mail: viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address.