Most books that you read on vegetable growing talk about the importance of seasonality.  I’m all for it, but since we started the Home Farm, Ireland hasn’t really had a standard 4-season climate at all.  Instead we’ve had a mono-season which I suggest we call Springsumautwin.  Springsumautwin (it’s actually surprisingly easy to say when you practice it a little) is characterised by mild and wet conditions and lasts for twelve whole months.  It’s mild and wet in the season we once called winter and it’s mild and wet in the season we once called summer too.  For the rest of the year it’s, yes you’ve guessed it - Mild and Wet! It’s has the upside of being entirely predictable (always put on wellies and a rain coat when you are going outside and you are usually covered) but the downside of being utterly miserable all of the time.  From a growing perspective it has its ups and downs too - the lack of frost is a good thing early in the season when you are trying to get seeds moving and of course the abundance of water falling from the sky in warmer months means that you don’t have to bother watering things (a considerable time saving it must be said).  But the disadvantages outweigh the advantages to my mind - it’s just so profoundly depressing and THE SAME.  Seasonal weather was created for a reason - if we wanted one climate all year around we would move to Tenerife.

Which is why these last few months have been so exciting to me.  In defiance of global warming and in strict contravention of the meteorological rules laid down by Springsumautwin, this winter has been the coldest and driest we have had in decades.  Ice, frost and generally cold conditions are both friend and foe to the Home Farmer.  They are ‘friend’ so long as they come at the right time - you want them to arrive in the winter months of December, January and February as they help to break down the soil (which means less digging for you) and cleanse it of any nasty infections that may be residing in it.  There are even some vegetables, like garlic for example, that love a good frost.  But frosts are no friend of yours if they arrive later in spring when you are trying to sow things in open ground - they have a worrying tendency to just die.

Still, this morning I awoke to find a covering of, wait for it - actual snow - on the ground and there’s about 8cm of the stuff forecast for the next 24 hours.  Trapped as we have been in the unremittingly tight grasp of Springsumautwin, snow is not something that we have seen much of, so it’s an exciting development.  I am out walking with the dogs in the fields and the snow is blowing in to my face stinging my cheeks.  Though the conditions are indeed inclement, I find myself, not miserable, but euphoric.  Most people who know me will tell you that I am not a naturally chirpy person, but I find myself quite unexpectedly bursting in to song.

Oh the weather outside is frightful,
But the fire is so delightful,
And since we’ve no place to go,
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

I don’t know why a light dusting of snow would make me so happy, it’s just that there was something so unnatural about the long years of Springsumautwin that we endured, and this appropriately seasonal weather just makes me feel that God is in his heavens again.  Hurrah for that!

Trying to grow your own vegetables or to be in any way self-sufficient is a solitary pursuit most of the time which is why it’s called “self"-sufficiency I suppose.  I guess in years to come when I am an expert in these things, that won’t bother me so much but as a relative beginner I find it disconcerting.  Standing in my veggie patch contemplating some sort of mysterious, freaky rust on my celery, I find myself pondering with considerable envy how sweet life must be for people in allotments.  Imagine how handy it must be when you have a query or problem to simply pop your head over the fence to get advice from the grower in the adjacent plot (I imagine him to be a crusty old fella who has been growing for 50 years and won awards for his prize cabbages). 

Spurred on by these regular bouts of daydreaming, last year I went looking for some sort of group or network locally that would provide me with this sort of support.  I was essentially looking for a group of like-minded people from whom I could get tips and suggestions (you know those little nuggets of wisdom that expert growers have learned the hard way but which would never occur to you or I in a million years?) and perhaps even exchange the odd bit of produce if I had a glut.  Most of all I was looking to be part of something which I think is a common ailment in most people.

The Waterford Food Producer’s Network is just such a group.  It is a collection of old hands and novices like me that meets on a monthly basis to hear a talk on some aspect of growing/rearing and so that members can exchange tips, suggestions and ideas (and occasionally barter produce).  The group was only established last summer and organisers were stunned when nearly 100 people showed up at the city library for the first meeting.

It has already proven itself to be a hot bed (sorry) of innovative ideas and one of the best in my opinion is the grower’s meitheal.  The word meitheal describes the old Irish tradition where people in rural communities gathered together on a neighbour’s farm to help save the hay or harvest crops.  Each person would help their neighbour who would in turn reciprocate - they acted as a team (much like the Amish tradition of getting together to construct a house) and everybody benefited in some way from the endeavours.  As well as getting time-sensitive jobs completed in a hurry, the meitheals also built up strong friendships and respect among those involved. 

All of us are aware that modern life can be quite isolated at times, whether you are living in the depths of the countryside or in the middle of a 500-house estate which is why the sense of community which a meitheal implies is so appealing.  Our plan for meitheals within the Food Producer’s Network is that we are trying to build small, local networks of people who would get together regularly in each other’s gardens/veg plots to accomplish a particular job of work and at the same time (a) foster some community spirit, (b) make friends, (c) have some fun, and (d) learn from each other.  Each meitheal consists of about five or six people who live near each other and each member of the group picks some task that they need to do in their garden so that when it is their turn they have some interesting work for the people in the meitheal to get stuck in to - it could be anything:  sowing, planting, harvesting, double digging, rotivating, making raised beds etc. 

The Food Producer’s Network doesn’t get too prescriptive about what work should be done or how long it should take.  However, it has highlighted the fact that it’s probably a good idea to be reasonable and not to work fellow meitheal-members in to an early grave.  Also we have emphasised that it’s very important to keep a growing/rearing theme to your meitheal work - i.e it should be about food production and not some random chore that’s been hanging around for years, like cleaning out a blocked drain or filling a skip.  Meitheal members are encouraged to bring their own implements, e.g. spades, trowels etc so that the person who is hosting doesn’t have to go out and buy a collection of spades for people to work with. 

My own meitheal got started this weekend on a beautiful, frosty December morning.  There’s something incredibly heartening about a gang of people showing up at your gaff on a Saturday morning to work on your vegetable garden.  It’s like being love-bombed or something - I promise you, you just can’t help feeling good about yourself.  A special honorary mention to the meitheal member who arrived on his bicycle with his spade tied to the cross-bar with a piece of old rope and a plate of lovely apple and cinnamon sponge slices in the saddle bag.  Kudos to you Sir for your impeccable carbon-free credentials!

December is an interesting time of the year for a meitheal to visit - there is obviously no harvesting to be done but there are still plenty of heavy/boring/time-consuming chores which lend themselves well to this manner of work.  I decided a good job for my first meitheal would be to clear one of my long raised beds and to plant some winter-hardy onions.  My plan was to remove the remaining crops (a few) and weeds (a lot) and get the bed ready for the onions.  To Mrs Kelly and I that would represent at least a day of hard toil but the meitheal made short work of it and within an hour they were standing back admiring their work and looking for something else to do. (We sowed about 100 onions which I hope will survive the current cold-snap).  While we worked, people were exchanging growing war-stories and talking about what works and what does not work in their own gardens.  All very valuable stuff for the novice grower.

After that we broke for some grub: blaas and sausages cooked up on the barbecue.  The sausages were from our own pigs and we opened a jar of precious, rare (as hen’s teeth) green tomato chutney especially for the occasion.  In the context of this week’s pork scandal, we were probably the only people in the country tucking in to a full Irish that morning and the smell of cooking bangers was irresistible in the frosty morning air (especially when you are ravenous with the hunger).  “Enough guff,” says I when we finished our grub, switching from amiable chef to gruff foreman as quick as a flash. “Back to work!”

Next up we moved on to the remains of a large pile of well-rotted manure which I got from a local farmer to fertilise my soil (see post elsewhere).  Because I had already spent an entirely mucky/sweaty weekend moving about 70 per cent of the manure, it wasn’t a job that I was particularly looking forward to returning to so I had sort of put it on the long finger, perhaps hoping that if I ignored it might just rot away in to oblivion. 

No problem to the meitheal.  The wheelbarrow was filled and emptied God knows how many times and loads of manure were dispatched around the garden (in to the polytunnel where it will shortly take a crop of early spuds, around fruit bushes and apple trees, and the balance to the compost heap).  Perfect, if not particularly pleasant meitheal work.  Much banter about slave labour and how hard I was working them, but you got the impression that they were only messing (I think!).  At least we know that as meitheal chores go, it can’t get much worse than shovelling shit.

We finished up by lunch time and all hands departed, tired but much the happier for their endeavours.  Whether it was the fresh air, the company, the sense of companionship and commuity or perhaps just the fumes from the manure - I couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day.  Next month we move on to another meitheal-member’s garden - I am looking forward to it already.

Just back from a hectic weekend in the Belgian capital, flying the flag for Trading Paces and doing my bit to restore Ireland’s floundering reputation at the heart of Europe!  We got a red-eye flight from Dublin on Saturday morning and arrived in Brussels bleary-eyed in time for breakfast.  Dee Furlong, my great friend and Belgian literary agent (pictured below!!) was on hand at the airport to whisk us off to start a busy day. 

The reading was held in Sterling Books, a beautiful store on Wolvengracht which is close to the Grande Place.  Sterling is a real book lovers bookshop which made it extra-special to be doing a reading there - the kind of place you could easily lose yourself for a few hours, hiding in a corner with a book.  Thankfully people came out of the corners to listen to the reading.  We were a little worried that because the reading was being held on a Saturday evening, it might not get much of a crowd - Brussels tends to empty out on weekends with commission workers heading home to the corners of Europe following a tough week at the office (and I presume this week was tougher than most!).  But we got a great crowd - perhaps drawn by the offer of free booze courtesy of the Irish Embassy or to listen to what our guest speaker (Green Party MEP from London Jean Lambert) might have to say. 

The Green party connection is interesting and happened almost by accident.  When we launched Trading Paces back in April, our own Minister for Food and Horticulture Trevor Sargent was kind enough to come down to Waterford to speak at the launch event.  I was blown away at the time that he agreed to do it - and equally flabbergasted when Jean (pictured below) agreed to come along to the Brussels event.  I don’t want to get all misty eyed about the Greens but here’s the long and the short of it - they don’t have to do these things.  They don’t get a whole lot out of it in terms of votes.  But I think the fact that they are willing to give of their free time (I am sure Jean gave up a weekend at home in the UK to attend) is evidence of how closely they hold these issues to their hearts.

In the press release for the event, we joked that an MEP was needed on hand to existentialise the whole experience for any EU bureacrats in the audience - what Jean did brilliantly in her speech was to link the themes that are touched on (very lightly) in the book with the immense global issues that lurk in the background.  After Jean enthralled the audience, I read an edited version of chapter 8 from the book (the Downsizer’s Dilemma) which discusses the conflict between the two dominant parts of the downsizer’s psyche (well mine at any rate) - the green-fingered environmentalist who revels in downsizing and opting out of the consumer society and the fun-loving capitalist who loves bling and owning lots of stuff.  I think it went down ok.  There were a few laughs at any rate, but perhaps they were laughing at me rather than with me. 

Perhaps not surprisingly given the venue there was some pretty intense questioning afterwards - I thought it would be just you know, read a few pages and then head for the pub.  But no!  People in Brussels are fascinated with this stuff and they know how to get to the bottom of an issue.  I only batted away one question - a rather complex query re the Common Agriculture Policy - which i felt that an elected MEP was in a better position to answer than a lowly hack!  And Jean thought she was on a night off!!  It just goes to show that there is a huge appetite for information and discussion on the whole area of self-sufficiency/down-sizing and it doesn’t matter whether you’re living in the country on five acres or living in a city centre apartment.  Shortly afterwards, we did of course head for the pub to indulge in some of Belgium’s famous beers but that’s a story for another day perhaps.

Incidentally Ireland’s 400 billion euro bank bailout is the talk of the town - mainly, how the f**k is a bailout in a country the size of Ireland costing 400 billion when the bailout in the US is costing only 300 billion more.  Ireland’s GDP is approx $200 billion, US GDP is about 13 trillion!!  As Sarah Palin might say - that boat don’t float.  Still, you have got to admire our chutzpah!! 

Sterling Books have promised they will have a video of the reading and Jean’s speech on their website shortly (http://www.sterlingbooks.be) so will post again when they do.  So all in all, a great success!! My sincere thanks to Eva in Sterling Books, the Irish Embassy in Brussels and Jean Lambert MEP.  Also my thanks to master of ceremonies Dee Furlong (she’s a divil) and her considerable backroom team (!!) for all their help in setting it up. 

We honestly expected maybe 20-30 people to show up on the night.  I was thinking before hand that if we got a core group of 20 people to get involved we would have ourselves a ballgame.  Just before the meeting started I was talking to the first gentleman to arrive about the joys of growing peas and thinking to myself - “my this is going to be nice - a nice little group of veggie lovers chatting about all things veggie”.  And then the door opened and about 10 people walked in and a few minutes later another 5 and then another 7.  And before you could say “hot-diggidy” we had three minutes to go to starting time and there were no seats left (we had 50 seats out) and the punters kept coming.

The staff in the library were unbelievably helpful - printing off feedback forms and ferrying chairs to and fro from all over the library to try and get everyone seated (and of course making the room available to us in the first place was pretty amazing too).  At the end of the night we collected about 75 feedback forms and we can assume that some people didn’t hand feedback forms in, so I think a conservative estimate is 80-90 people.  Imagine that?  80 or 90 people giving up two hours of their Wednesday evening (when they could have been at home having a barbecue in the nice weather) to come along and listen to yours truly waxing lyrical about the joys of growing your own veg.  Now if this was a once-off event you would be delighted with a turnout of that size - but bear in mind this is a network that will meet not just once, but once a month.  We completely underestimated the level of interest so the room was a little cramped to be honest and very hot too (or was that just me?  I was feeling the pressure I must say!)

We had a mixture of young and not so young, old hands and complete beginners.  We had people with no garden at all and people with 5 acres.  All looking to get involved.  How cool is that?!  Of course this is confirmation if ever we needed it that there is a huge appetite out there for accessing and sharing information and knowledge about producing your own food - people are literally crying out for it.  It perhaps says something about a deep desire in all of us to be part of a community too - but maybe I am reading too much in to that. 

So basically once the room was full and I had everyone’s attention I proceeded to bore the arse off them for 45 minutes - ah no I did ok I think, though I have to admit to being slightly thrown by the size of the crowd.  On nights like this the old sales background comes in handy - ability to knock up an average powerpoint presentation helps for example (!!) and I can’t help myself from falling back in to salesman mode when i am presented with a room full of people.  I was only thinking afterwards that since they had showed up in the first place, maybe they didn’t need to be sold to!!  Anyway a sales pitch is what they got basically - I talked about why I thought people should get involved, what they would get out of it etc.  Then we had some questions from the floor, followed by a really interesting talk on organic growing by Pat Roche from the Organic Centre in Co. Wexford.  I am sure people were thinking - “A real expert, thank God...!!”

There was a nice buzz in the room afterwards - lots of people coming up to myself and Eilish saying it was a great idea and that they would be back etc.  We were on a high for hours afterwards!  So where to from here?  Well, we’ve had a quick scan through the feedback forms and I need to go through them in more detail in the coming days to see what people think.  We have about 10 people who have indicated they want to get involved in terms of organising the group so we will meet up in the coming weeks to try and put together a steering group.  After that it’s about putting together content for people to come along and listen to each month.  I want to make sure that we have a mixture of practical and inspirational content - for example in terms of practical stuff, I think we really need a veg expert to stand up and give a talk about what we should be doing in the garden for the month ahead (e.g. it’s March so you should be sowing X,Y,Z and planting A,B,C).  Then the inspirational stuff could be a talk on keeping hens or bees....

Next meeting is at the end of October (date and time to be confirmed).  Stay tuned....

Thousands of people attended Ireland’s first Terra Madre festival over the weekend in Waterford.  Billed as “Ireland’s most important food event”, it was part eco-gastronomy brain-storm and part food festival celebrating artisan and local food production.  The event replicated the format of the International Terra Madre conference which is held in Turin in Italy every two years (and takes place again this October).

A National Organic Conference and over forty workshops were held in Waterford Institute of Technology on Thursday and Friday.  Key policy recommendations from the workshops were presented in a feedback session to Minister for Food and Horticulture, Trevor Sargent TD and Northern Ireland’s Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development Michelle Gildernew MP.  In his address, Sargent told delegates that he was determined to grow the percentage of organic production from 1 per cent to 5 per cent of Irish farmland by 2012 as part of the Programme for Government.

The conference was also addressed by President McAleese who delighted delegates by telling them that she keeps hens and grows veg at the Aras (does she get her hands dirty i wonder?).  In her speech, she spoke fondly of her days at Ballymaloe school (she did the chef course before she became Pres) and consequently of her lasting passion for good, wholesome home made food.  “I asked the President if she would think about starting a vegetable garden in the grounds of the Aras,” said Slow Food Ireland Chairperson Darina Allen who introduced President McAleese, “since I thought this would send out a very strong message about the importance of food in our lives.  Her response was “Ah girl, we already have a vegetable garden and our own hens, and we even have our own fox as well!” (Note that President M was even talking like a Waterford person, saying “girl” at the start of the sentence).

This writer attended a workshop on how to butcher a pig by Ballymaloe chef Philip Denhart on Friday - a wonderful and timely experience (given we just got our own pigs back from the abattoir during the week) which i will hopefully blog on later.  Slow Food Ireland hosted a Feast at WIT College Street on Friday night with a menu of local and seasonal food including spit roast pork, lamb and free-range chicken.  The weather was terrible but the setting (The Good Shepard church) was unforgettable - as was the grub and drink (free wines from Febvre and beers from O’Haras - we drank too much of both). 

Carlo Petrini and Darina Allen both gave lenghty speeches at the feast - the former joked that the pope wouldn’t be too happy that we were dining inside a church, while the latter implored us to buy Irish and local and told us that our weekly food shop is the most important thing that we will do each week.  Allen’s message certainly isn’t populist which is why you’ve just got to love her - she is adamantly unapologetic about saying that we shouldn’t be whining about the cost of free range chickens and then throwing out a third of what we buy (which is the national average apparently).  If you bought a Rolls or a Porchse you wouldn’t fill with it low-quality fuel, so why do we do it to our bodies, she asked?

On Saturday morning there were guided tours of various artisan food producers in the area (the children’s picnic in the people’s park was cancelled due to poor weather) while yesterday in unseasonably glorious sunshine John Robert’s Square hosted one of Ireland’s largest ever gatherings of food producers for a massive farmers market.  It was easy to believe, walking around the square that one was in Italy or France - the sheer range of produce on offer was what differentiated this market from the vast majority that take place in Ireland. 

We thrilled as we walked around from stall to stall and couldn’t help thinking that if this was on every week, we would never need to darken the door of a supermarket again.  Clodagh McKenna and Darina both spoke at the opening.  Standing just yards away from the front door of McDonalds in the square, McKenna cleverly drew comparisons to the fast food served there with the slow food being sold from the stalls - a great way to explain the slow food concept to the sceptical.  Slow Food is all about conviviality and there was a true spirit of conviviality at the market - meeting family and friends, sipping coffee and tucking in to a magnificent sausage roll courtesy of Jane Russel (who was manning her sausage stall herself). 

Of course, things went pear-shaped after lunch with Kilkenny mauling us in the hurling - but at least we had the memories of a great weekend to see us through the depression.  Roll on Turin in October!

For those of us who lie awake at night worrying about the impact of oil running out, a recent opinion piece in the Times ("Simplistic predictions of looming oil drought are wide of the mark") by former Shell Technical Director Tony Allwright was like a balm applied to a persistent itch. 

I have to admit I was blinded by the science in the piece and there were whole paragraphs that I didn’t understand, but I was greatly appeased by the core message - namely that oil isn’t going to run out until at least 2040, and probably much later than that.  The cold hard facts, according to Allwright, are that we have a trillion barrels of oil left and at a consumption rate of a paltry 87 million barrels a day we are (hallelujah) not going to run out until 2040. 

Ah, 2040.  It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie.  It’s a date that’s far enough in to the future that I don’t really care about it - I mean I could be dead by then, or old enough not to need oil in my day to day life.  Being told that oil won’t run out until 2040 is like being told you have an outside chance of developing a heart condition in thirty-two years time.  Sure, it’s bad news but it’s not likely to curb your passion for a diet of breakfast rolls and Red Bull right now is it? 

And anyway, surely by 2040 science and technology will have come to our rescue and created an alternative to oil?  This is what I call my Back to the Future Theory of Oil Alternatives ™ - remember that scene at the end of the movie when Doc comes back from the future and is able to use garbage (instead of uranium) as the fuel to generate the 1.21 gigawatts required to power the Flux Capacitor and facilitate time travel?  This is the happy ending I’m hoping for with regard to energy security.

The other major plank of comfort I took from the piece is that the reserves of oil are not quite as finite as we thought.  Oil companies apparently have ever more sophisticated methods of getting oil out of the ground so pretty soon they’ll be able to access reserves that aren’t even included in that 1 trillion barrel figure - these sophisticated methods are so darn sophisticated they will be able to tap oil in the most unlikely of places, like for example garden sheds where millions of half empty containers of Castrol GTX are languishing just waiting to be utilised.

Let me share an analogy to show you what I think is going on here.  I have four petrol canisters in my garage that I use to fill my lawnmower.  I don’t know why I have four small canisters instead of one big one but that’s just the way I’ve always done things.  I have this rather annoying tendency to move on to a full canister before the current one is totally empty - what can I say, I just get a kick out of that satisfying gurgling noise that the petrol makes when it’s coming from a full canister.  Anyway, long story short, what always happens is that I am cutting the grass and I have just one or two rows left and next thing you know, I come spluttering to a halt.  I head for the garage and discover all four canisters are empty.

But I have a trick up my sleeve - I know that there is some petrol left in the bottom of the canisters and surely if I combine the dregs from all four, I will have enough petrol to get the lawn finished.  Just as I start to execute this cunning plan, there’s a complication.  One of my neighbours arrives - he’s run out of petrol too and he has one of those brand spanking new tractor mowers that consume even more juice than my old jalopy and he wants to borrow some petrol to save him the hassle of going out for more.  And here’s the kicker, I owe him a favour because I borrowed his barbecue recently and burnt a hole in it by mistake.

So I give him the dregs from two of the canisters - he’s not particularly happy with this meagre bounty and we both know it won’t even remotely satisfy his mower’s insatiable appetite for petrol.  And then, wouldn’t you know it, another neighbour arrives - he’s doing a strimming job on the ditch around his house and has run out of petrol too so I end up giving him the arse end of the third canister which leaves me with just one canister for myself.  But praise the Lord, it works!  The mower splutters to life again and I practically run down the final row of lawn with the mower.  I make the final turn - just one row of uncut grass ahead and we have a pristine lawn but then disaster strikes - the mower stops again. 

The moral of the story is this - oil is a finite resource and we’re nearly out.  At the same time, the amount of oil we need is increasing (China and India - those guys are just getting started).  It doesn’t take a genius to know that’s not a sustainable situation.  Oil companies can use all the technologies they want but the bottom line is oil is not a renewable resource.  It may run out in two years, ten years or a hundred years but it will run out. And that has profound consequences for a society that needs lots and lots of cheap oil for, well for pretty much everything.  So we can go ahead and keep trying to squeeze the last drops from the canisters to get the lawn cut, but at some point someone is going to have to go and get more fuel.

On Tuesday Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth” was named “Book of the Year” at the Quill Book Awards in NYC. And so continues Al’s meteoric rise to beatification. Who would have believed it - the dullest man in living memory is suddenly, inexplicably and incredibly cool. A book Oscar, a hit movie, public adulation and editorials throwing love at him. The Inconceivable Truth? The world loves Al Gore.

But it’s not just Gore that has discovered how global warming can do wonders for your street cred. Virgin Boss Richard Branson and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have also graced the front pages of late being praised for their philanthropic endeavours.

It used to be that if you had a couple of billion to give away you gave it to poor people. Or you gave it to Bill Gates and he gave it to poor people. Not any more - these days green issues are where you want to put your spare green-backs.

Branson announced at Bill Clinton’s recent Global Initiative love-in that he was pledging $3 billion to fight global warming. “That’s an awful lot of noughts,” he joked to a beaming Clinton as he signed the document.

The money will come from his travel companies’ profits and will be used to research renewable fuel sources such as emission-less “cellulosic” ethanol which comes from agricultural waste.

You’ve got to admire Branson’s balls - here’s a man who runs airlines giving money to alleviate global warming and then lapping up the plaudits for doing so. You could argue that if he grounded the airplanes he wouldn’t need to bother with all the largesse. But that would be as churlish as giving out about the air-miles that Gore put up while traversing the globe telling people to switch off the lights when they leave a room.

The idea of 747’s crossing the Atlantic powered by pig-shit is a noble goal but his motives are not all sweetness and light. Deep down Branson is a man who can spot an idea whose time has come and therein lies the rub - this is not philanthropy at all, it’s an investment. The money will be used to start companies and fund research. There will be profits made. Probably staggering ones. And it’s a veritable coup from a PR perspective.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin have also jumped on the eco-philanthropy bandwagon. They have set up an organisation called Google.org and given it a $1 billion bursary to tackle global warming issues. Google.org is also ‘for-profit’. It too will be starting companies, engaging in commerce and paying consultants.

Page and Brin appointed Dr. Larry Brilliant (with a name like that, who could blame ‘em) to run Google.org and announced that one of its first projects was to be the development of a fuel-efficient hybrid car engine.

Bottom line - it’s good news for the environment that some of the great entrepreneurial minds finally see the enormous profit potential of providing solutions to climate-change problems. We should be happy about that but let’s drop the “I’m doing it for my grandchildren’s grandchildren” bit. Gore has that covered.

We got our piggies from a guy called Denis Shannon who runs a smallholding down in Wexford.  Denis is one of my heroes and if I had some land and the expertise I would love to be more like him.  I called him a few months back when I was getting the pigs and he happened to mention in the conversation that he had sold off his tractor and was not working the land with horses.  Intrigued I went to visit him to see what the story is...he did a course on working horses back in April in Rossinver (the Organic Centre) run by a guy called Jim Cronin, who I subsequently interviewed too.  Working horses is actually pretty cutting edge technology on a biodynamic or organic farm - though it sounds quaint and traditional. 

Advantages of working horses are: don’t need to worry about rising diesel costs; they can be fed from food produced on the smallholding; they fertilise the soil with their manure; they tread lighter on the soil than a tractor; advocates claim that a day spent behind a horse ploughing or rotivating, while physically demanding, is less stressful/hectic/noisy than a day spent on a tractor.

Really interesting stuff - article about same will appear in the Times shortly.  I also got three new pure bred point of lay pullets from Denis - a Buff Sussex, Rhode Island Red and Barnevelder.  Very attractive little birds they are too.