GARDENS:The downturn has created a revival of interest in gardening, with a huge increase in online forums for e-gardeners
THERE IS A DEFINITE silver lining to this recessionary cloud hanging over us. Or rather, you could call it a green lining: people are starting to garden again. This isn’t the same gardening that was going on in the 1990s, when TV makeover shows triggered an outbreak of what I think of as “gardeneering”: the latest trophy plants, grandiose designs, and much talk of the outdoor room.
No. This time around it is the real thing. People are gardening with intent: to grow food; to connect with the soil; to fill in newly and unexpectedly free hours; to save money; to save their lives. That last bit may sound flippant, but it’s true. Growing plants feeds the soul and puts meaning back into a troubled life. Gardening, because it depends on the rhythms and forces of nature, gives perspective; and because it always produces something, it is rewarding. Gardening, in other words, is a powerful antidepressant.
This recession is like all times of crisis: people are stimulated to try things that they may have previously avoided, and to embrace them with zeal. Such is the case at the moment: with an army of new gardeners mobilised and ready for action. Dispatches from garden centres report that whereas many of last year’s purchases were large items such as barbecues and outdoor furniture, this year sees far more sales of plants, seeds and tools.
There are more gardening courses and weekends on offer than ever before, all over the country: your local garden centre may advise you of some of them. And while you’re there, ask about gardening clubs too, because they all welcome new members (and are full of brilliant men and women of the soil).
New allotments are appearing up and down this island, and are being worked by a growing band of allotmenteers. Two resources for those in search of a plot and information are James Kilkelly’s www.allotments.ie and the Cork-based www.irishallotments.net. The internet is a mighty force in this gardening renaissance, with information to be had from expert websites such as Garden Organic (www.gardenorganic. org.uk) and the Royal Horticultural Society (www.rhs.org.uk) in Britain and garden.ie in Ireland. This last has an online club where members can keep garden journals, post photos, and interact with each other.
The internet is thrumming with e-gardeners sharing tips, debating issues and airing their gripes. Problems are solved more quickly when there are more people to offer possible solutions; and one’s efforts are spurred on when you can tell others about them. (Even I have taken to Twitter, where I’m chirping about my own garden, and posting links to photos I’ve taken of it and of elsewhere: www.twitter.com/powersflowers).
All this cyber chatter is helpful and makes one feel part of a wider gardening community, but it doesn’t actually get the sowing and growing business done. For that, one needs to get outside in the garden, or on to the balcony.
Even a window sill offers room to grow a few essentials in pots: night-scented stock (for its unsurpassed bedtime fragrance), herbs (nothing compares with your own fresh herbs, bouncing with aromatic oils) and salad leaves.
I’ll try not to get indignant yet again about bags of salad leaves (and the exorbitant price per gram, and the toll on the environment), but let me just remind you that for the same price as a package of pre-washed, chilled, days-old leaves you can buy at least one packet of seeds, containing anything between 100 and 2000 seeds.
Each of these seeds is capable of producing the same volume of saladings as one of those pre-packed bags.
Hundreds of euros could be saved by switching to growing your own salads. Charles Dowding, who has written the excellently informative Salad Leaves for all Seasons (Green Books, £10.95) says that the highest yield can be got by picking the outer leaves of a lettuce plant every week or so, so that six or eight leaves remain in the central rosette.
His experiments showed that in raised beds, plants continued to crop for 13 weeks, yielding around 360 grams per plant. Lettuce plants grown in a large container yielded leaves about 60 per cent the size of those grown in the open ground.
If you have access to home-made garden compost (your own or a friend’s), you can stretch the compost that you buy for your pots by making a half-and-half mixture.
Home-made compost is to plants what live yoghurt is to the human digestive system: the organisms within it have a beneficial effect on health.
Besides salad leaves and herbs, many other vegetables do well in pots – if you pay attention to watering and give them the occasional feed. These can be sown now: radishes, chard, spring onions, beetroot, stubby carrots, the dwarf runner bean ‘Hestia’, and the climbing courgette ‘Black Forest’.
Tomatoes, peppers and aubergines are all good container specimens, if you can get suitable varieties. It is a bit late to sow seed now, so look out for plants.
If you have a big garden, there is no limit to what you can grow. Save yourself the labour of constantly planting and re-planting by putting in some permanent food crops, such as globe artichokes, asparagus and seakale. The late-cropping raspberries, ‘Autumn Bliss’ and ‘Allgold’ (yellow fruits), are easy to cultivate because you can cut back all the canes to the ground in late winter, unlike summer raspberries which require more fiddly treatment.
Other plants that occupy space for a long period of time and that require little care other than occasional weeding are leeks, kale, purple sprouting broccoli, cabbage and brussels sprouts.
These last two don’t do well in dry conditions, so if you have light soil, give them a miss, or be prepared to water regularly.
We have a tiny vegetable area, and a small greenhouse (an investment that I would urge you to consider), so we grow crops that are difficult to get in the shops, that taste so much better when fresh, or that are just fun: salad things, beans, early potatoes, coloured-stemmed chard, tomatoes, chillies, courgette, asparagus and a bit of soft fruit. And although it occupies a whole bed for months, we always have purple sprouting broccoli – which is impossible to buy fresh.
I always sow far more seeds than I need, but the resulting plants are perfect for swaps or gifts. Gardening has always flourished on bartering and the giving of little offerings – a rooted cutting, a division off a prized plant, a bunch of home-grown flowers.
Gardening also lends itself to going halves on purchases. You need compost or manure, but not a whole bag? Why not talk to your neighbour and see if you might share? Hell, why not just talk to your neighbour anyway? Communication always helps light the way out of the gloom.
jpowers@irishtimes.com