Finally, got a good load of seeds sown today!!  Nothing direct in to the ground yet, but making a start on seeds indoors which will be planted out in the polytunnel when they are seedlings.  Have a garage outside which we converted in to an office a few years back and it has now been annexed as a potting shed!  Have a large bench in there where the spuds are chitting and a heating mat on which we put seedlings.  Everyone has their own methos of seed sowing - here’s mine.  Sieve compost in to trays, water well, then sow the seed and then add more sieved compost.  I then cover with cling film which keeps moisture locked in, but remove this when the seeds germinate.  So for what it’s worth here’s what was sown today:

In seed trays: aubergine (enorma), tom (brandywine, gardener’s delight and moneymaker), chillipepper (early jalepeno)

In a 150-cell plug tray (each row 10 cells):

2 row lettuce webs wonder

1 row red salad

1 row perp spinach

1 row salad stir fry mix

2 or 3 cells chard

2 row beetroot (bolivar)

2 row radish (french breakfast)

1 row spring onions (white lisbon)

1 row rocket

1 row salad leaf (niche mix)

1 row scarlett kale

2 row celeriac (monarch)

The other notable event this weekend is that we got to harvest the first of our purple sprouting broccoli - and very tasty it was too.  Roll on the spring!

1) Plant dill in with your brassicas as the cabbage white butterfly doesn’t like the smell and will be less inclined to lay its eggs on the cabbage leaves. Dill is great herb to have growing in the garden - beautiful with fish and also great in salads.

2) Marigolds and nasturtiums will deter white and greenfly - so plant them in around your tomato plants. Nasturtium flowers are also very good to eat. Marigolds are also useful near raspberry and strawberries to prevent green-fly.

3) Sow Summer savoury in among beans and peas - deters blackfly.

4) Borage attracts pollinators and is therefore useful planted among courgettes, pumpkins and squashes.

5) Sow chives around your apple trees to prevent scab and wallflowers to attract bumble bees.

6) grow carrots with spring onions or onions to deter carrot fly - but does this REALLY work??!
The idea of companion planting is typically to reduce the impact of pests and diseases on your GIYing. In some cases plants just like being planted next to each other and will fare better than they would do so otherwise. Here are some examples - let us know if you have tried other ones.

1) Plant dill in with your brassicas as the cabbage white butterfly doesn’t like the smell and will be less inclined to lay its eggs on the cabbage leaves. Dill is great herb to have growing in the garden - beautiful with fish and also great in salads.

2) Marigolds and nasturtiums will deter white and greenfly - so plant them in around your tomato plants. Nasturtium flowers are also very good to eat. Marigolds are also useful near raspberry and strawberries to prevent green-fly.

3) Sow Summer savoury in among beans and peas - deters blackfly.

4) Borage attracts pollinators and is therefore useful planted among courgettes, pumpkins and squashes.

5) Sow chives around your apple trees to prevent scab and wallflowers to attract bumble bees.

6) grow carrots with spring onions or onions to deter carrot fly - but does this REALLY work??!

What a wonderful weekend!  I spent yesterday out and about in the garden (finally), ecstatic to be out after the grim weather of the last 8 weeks.  There was (dare I say it) a feeling of spring in the air - that unmistakable, earthy smell of growth and renewal.  There was some warmth in the weak sunshine and it must have reached ten degrees or so while I worked.  I cleared the last of last year’s produce from beds (we still had some beets, white turnips and celeriac in the ground), and got barrow loads of compost from the compost bays to spread on the cleared beds.  It was great to have the feeling of soil in my hands again and I was pleased to see that it was in pretty good nick (not to wet), particularly in the raised beds.  Years of manuring and composting seem to be finally paying some dividends.  There’s good activity in the tunnel too - i was worried I would lose all my peas and beans to the frost, but they’ve bounced back remarkably well and should be ready to transplant from modules in a week or two. 

There’s a spurt of growth in everything in the tunnel - it’s not the lavish growth you expect from spring, but it’s growth nonetheless.  A tightly packed row of rocket that i sowed in late autumn and presumed a lost cause has bounced back to life, and I will be able to pick shortly.  There’s also a definate new season greenness evident in the corn salad (lambs lettuce), claytonia, winter lettuce, garlic, onions and cabbages.  The only dissappointment was with a crop of late carrots (amsterdam forcing) that I sowed in the tunnel in the autumn which were doing well but got eaten during what the media were calling “the cold snap” (does a snap not imply a relatively short spell, perhaps a few days - certainly not a month?) - the jury is out on whether it was rodents or birds that did it.  I spent an enjoyable hour hoeing the soil all over the veggie patch and it makes a huge difference to how the whole patch looks.  Tired, emotional soil returned to its former glory.  The first new season weeds nipped in the bud.  Ah yes, so good to be back.  Of course January/February has a way of biting you in the ass - it felt like spring yesterday, but winter could yet return with a vengence.

Last night we worked out how many kilos of new spuds, onions and garlic we need for this year and i got them ordered today.  We are going to focus again this year on new spuds only (probably Orla, and almost certainly in the tunnel) to thwart the blight.  We’re going to go big on onions though aiming to get 3-400 sets in to the ground.  It sounds a lot but it works out at about an onion a day, which is probably what most households need in the kitchen - our’s does anyway.  Of course the only downside to such a large planting is that if you fail, you FAIL BIG!  But let’s think positive.  All in all we ordered 7 kilo of spuds, 2 of onions (sturon and red baron) and 1 kilo of garlic (printanor).  We also checked back on our rotation plan - a “plan” is a grand word to describe it, as it really is “back of an envelope” stuff, literally - so that we know what’s going where this year.  We follow John Carney’s (of GIY Waterford fame) 5-family rotation based on the mnenomic, People Love Bunches Of Roses.  That is Potatoes, Legumes, Brassicas, Onions and Roots.  These families are then rotated around five sets of beds in that order.  So in year 1, bed 1 has potatoes.  In year 2 it has legumes, year 3 brassicas and so on.  This prevents a build up of diseases and keeps the ground fertile.  It also means that you know what beds need what treatment - ie you dont manure the beds that will take your roots, and you can lime the beds that will take brassicas etc.

On Saturday GIY Wexford got Jim Cronin from the Organic Centre (lives in Co Clare) down to Denis Shannons’ small holding to do a one day course on organic growing and three of us went along.  I’ve been on a course with Jim before and he’s an inspiration.  He’s been a market gardener for over 20 years and his smallholding in Bridgetown is really worth a visit.  Such vast knowledge about growing would be a burden for many, and a licence for arrogance for many more.  But you could not meet a more unassuming, quiet gentleman than Jim.  Thanks to all involved for a great day.

I will hopefully post in more detail some of Jim’s wisdom later, but one thing I found really interesting was his figures on how much land is needed to be self-sufficient for a family of four.  He reckons a tunnel of 40ft by 14ft would produce tunnel crops 12 months of the year, as long as it is well used.  According to Jim, every bed in the tunnel should take three to four crops a year.  His key planting times are:

Now: ie Jan - Apr - for early crops of lettuce, rocket, radish, beets, scallions and new potatoes etc

May - Sept - for regular summer tunnel crops transplanted from modules - e.g. tomatoes, peppers, aubergine etc

August - sowing for overwintering crops like winter lettuce, claytonia, mizuna, spinach, coriander, corn salad, chervil etc.

Outside, he reckons that 30ft by 50ft of ground would be enough to supply a family with enough veg all year round with the exception of carrots, parsnips and potatoes which would run out by Christmas.  A further 200ft by 15ft would be required to be 12 month self-sufficient in carrots, parsnips and potatoes. 

All in all this adds up to less than a quarter of an acre - to feed an entire family, all year around.

Perhaps most interesting of all is that he reckons a mere 8 hours a week would be required to maintain this land and his advice is that we don’t do all that in one go - in other words, spread it out over the week, doing a half hour here and there. 

The potential is mind boggling - if you don’t have this much land or that much time, the key is to focus on what you can achieve.  We often talk at the launch of GIY groups about the idea of the “food acquisition continuum” – at one end of the continuum you have people who have never grown anything before. At the other end you have people who are 100% self-sufficient. Few of us will ever get to the 100% self-sufficiency - and as I’ve said before, you will always have a hankering for a packet of Monster Munch or a Kit Kat.  But does it matter?  Of course not! We believe that any move that you can make towards eating more home-grown food is worthwhile, even if you never reach the goal of self-sufficiency.  Every time you can remove the need to buy something from the supermarket, it’s been a tremendous achievement.  Does it matter that you are still reliant on the supermarket for other things?  No!  Every year, we GIYers get a little bit smarter,a little bit more skilled, a little bit better at this GIYing business - we grow more, we grow better.  Our knowledge continues to catch up with our enthusiasm.  Enjoy the chase!

Happy New Season!

Michael

As if this freezing weather wasn’t trying enough, today we had extra bad news - we ate the last of our frozen peas.  Sure it was wonderful to be eating big mouthfuls of delicious fat, vibrantly green peas in the middle of such a cold spell (we’re not allowed call it a snap anymore cause it has lasted nearly a month), but it was a sombre occasion too, knowing that there will be no more peas for us, unless we are to cheat and buy them of course (we probably will).

Last year, back at the height of the harvest we managed to get a decent quantity of peas in to the freezer.  You don’t really appreciate just how many peas are in a packet of shop-bought frozen peas until you start growing your own and trying to get a decent quantity of them in to the freezer.  When you have a dinner with peas in it, especially if it is of the meat and two veg variety (as opposed to something posher like say a pea risotto), there might be literally a hundred peas on your plate.  Count ‘em!  That’s a lot of peas.  When you grow peas yourself you notice just how few peas there are from each plant - each pod might have say five or six nice fat peas in it and you might be taking say ten pods from a plant at any one time which means that each plant is only turning out about fifty peas which is less than half a portion!  We did a significant amount of work back in the summer one evening, taking the peas from the pods, blanching them lightly and then putting them in to plastic bags for freezing.  It’s enjoyable enough work in fairness (particularly if you approach it in the right spirit), but it’s work all the same.  And so it’s a little dissappointing that we have already (in early January) arrived at the end of our pea supply.  So our “hungry gap” for peas officially begins today.  Booooooo!

I have a tray of peas growing in the polytunnel which we sowed back in Nov - they are an overwintering variety - and they are maybe 2 or 3 inches high so far.  It’s a cheerful site in the tunnel to have something so beautiful and green growing at this time of the year (particularly something that you associate with spring growing) and they seem to have survived the frost so far.  But even with this monumental headstart on the growing season, we still are unlikely to have peas before late May or early June.  Which means our “pea hungry gap” will last a minimum of four months and possibly even five months.  That is a sorry indictment on the number of plants we grew - clearly not enough.

There’s a charming, sprightly 80-something year old in GIY Waterford called Joe Hurley who could teach any of us a thing or five about GIYing.  Joe grows as much if not more than we do in our rural acre, and he’s growing in a small suburban housing estate in Waterford.  He’s very proud of his peas in particular and gets a bumper crop each year - he gets enough in to the freezer to last him right through the winter and spring and he might even have some frozen ones left when the first new season peas arrive the following season.  Now that’s GIYing...!  I was telling Joe about my pea hungry gap and was asking him how many pea plants he sows - I told him proudly that this year I sowed maybe 30 or so (and I thought that was a lot).  With considerable generosity of spirit (ie, he didn’t laugh) he told me that he sowed literally hundreds of them - he sows them in a row, in close together (he doesn’t believe in the spacings that are recommended in books) - as close as an inch - and grows them up chicken wire fencing.  Then he harvests all in one go and fills up the freezer again.

So we know what we have to do!  GIYing New years resolution number one - PLANT MORE PEAS!!

Just wanted to share some photos from the course I attended on Saturday in Clare.  No matter how experienced you think you might be when it comes to veg growing, there’s always more that you can learn.  Attending a course is a fantastic way to re-charge the batteries, meet like-minded foodies and learn some stuff along the way.  Last weekend I dropped in on a course which is run by the Organic Centre on Jim Cronin’s smallholding in Bridgetown, Co Clare.  The course is aimed at introducing beginners to organic growing and takes place once a month for a year, but you can just drop in for one day as I did.

There were about 15 people on the course - a great mix of people from all over Ireland, all enjoying a beautiful day.  Jim has ten acres (i think) and he earns his living from selling to the farmer’s market in Killaloe - he also does courses from his home and also at the Organic Centre in Leitrim.  He has two very sizeable areas of land given over to outdoor vegetable growing and an array of polytunnels of all sizes which even at this stage of the year are choc full of produce.  He also keeps hens, pigs, ducks and of course those magnificent Percheron horses which he uses to work the land (you can read that article, ‘Taking back the Reins’ in the articles section of this site).  Jim is a mine of information (he’s been growing organically for over 20 years) and a thorough gentleman to boot.  We also enjoyed a fantastic seasonal lunch courtesy of Rebecca.  More information if you’re interested from the Organic Centre (http://www.theorganiccentre.ie) or 071 9854338. 

In this first photo Jim explains the secret to growing french beans.

One thing that struck me is how neat everything was.  Also look at this tunnel - it’s the same width as ours, although much longer - but he has paths up the left and right hand side rather than the middle like we do.  Makes sense of course, because in our tunnel the area that has most headroom (i.e.the middle) is being wasted on a path rather than being used for growing things that need height like tomatoes and runner beans.  We may have to revisit that in the winter!

Look at his carrots - I nearly cried!  Mine are piddly by comparison.  He’s a big fan of growing carrots in the polytunnel and recommended a variety called Amsterdam Forcing for sowing in the summer.  They can survive and thrive in very high temperatures.  I ordered a packet from the organic centre so will let you know how that goes!

And then there were the runner beans - the ones in the tunnel were already cropping and about 6ft tall.  I’ve just sown mine and they have only in the last week poked their head above ground!  Never mind.  The key he says is that he gets plants going with heat under them in early spring (e.g. a heated propagation mat) and he also uses Mypex - lots and lots of mypex.  Mypex is that black membrane material that you find in garden centres, being sold in rolls as a weed suppressant.  Well he has it everywhere.  He grows leeks, onions, garlic, tomatoes, courgettes, etc through it - even in the tunnel.  Obviously it keeps weeds down (his point was that it’s cheaper than hiring someone to do the weeding) but it also warms up the soil by about 2 degrees which gives plants a real boost - this explains why his tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers etc look about a month more developed than mine!

Notice how he grows the runner beans up an 8ft cane - when they reach the top he simply pulls them across and lets them grown down the adjoining cane.  He sows three or four runner beans around each cane - they enjoy the support they get from being grown so close together.  Finally see below the pic of the runner beans outside - these will obviously crop much later than the ones in the tunnel so he has a nice continuous supply.  Note the clever teepee design to give the canes support.

There is nothing quite like harvesting spuds - for about 12 weeks we have been nurturing the plants, weeding and watering, earthing up the soil around the stems so that the potatoes won’t go green from the sunlight.  We have been fairly certain that things were progressing nicely and looking at the leafy growth with a good deal of satisfaction - but until you sink a fork in to the ground you are never really sure what type of a crop you are going to have.  And that’s why it always feels like Christmas morning when you go to pick your first spuds - you are carefully unwrapping your pressies in the hope that you will get the present you dreamed of, but you might just get the lump of coal instead....

The spuds we planted outside (earlies and maincrop) are not ready yet but we have been eating spuds from the tunnel for about three weeks now.  These ones were planted back in February (about a month before the ones outside, which are traditionally planted after paddy’s day, i.e. mid March, so that the risk of frost has passed).  Sowing spuds in the polytunnel is a brilliant thing to do for a few reasons - firstly because of the heat in the tunnel you get a really good early crop and because they are earlies, they are out of the ground by June which therefore means you can grow something else (say aubergines or peppers) in that spot once the spuds are grown.  The tunnel spuds are also not at risk from frosts which can blight outdoor spuds in March and April (and sometimes even in May).  We are also in a routine of watering in the tunnel every day which means that the spuds get a consistent supply of water which helps to develop the tubers.  Potatoes also do wonders for the soil in which they are grown - the soil in the polytunnel can get a little tired from the intense heat in there so having a crop of spuds in there every year, works wonders.  The process of earthing up potatoes and the fact that the spuds have a really dense canopy of leaves helps to clean the ground.  Over the weekend I planted some radishes in the soil where I had just taken out some spuds a few day’s previous - the soil was beautiful, really dark and crumbly looking.

New spuds are ready to be eaten in about 3 months, while your main crop spuds will take about 5 months.  The earlies are ready when the little white flowers open on the plants but I think that you would be foolish to take this as gospel - far better to check progress beneath the soil on one of the plants before you go digging up the whole lot (we just harvest spuds as we need them at this time of the year).  Main crop spuds can be left until the foliage has died off.  Mrs Kelly and I always have, well I won’t call them arguments but maybe ‘interesting conversations’ about when to pick our spuds.  She’s always mad keen to get started and can’t see the point in buying potatoes when we have spuds almost ready in the garden - so she goes out and picks them even if the spuds are the size of eggs.  That always drives me mad!  I think it’s worth giving them another few weeks so that they put on a bit of bulk.

Anyway, when harvesting spuds it’s important to have a good rummage around to make sure that you get ALL the tubers out of the soil.  They may be further away from the plant than you think!  If you leave a spud in the ground it will almost inevitably sprout in to a plant next year.  This is harmless enough on the face of it, but you really shouldn’t grow spuds in the same place for about two years, so having spuds sprouting next year in a bed full of legumes or something may cause you disease problems.

New potatoes are potatoes that are harvested before the tubers have matured - from that perspective they don’t really have a skin and therefore don’t need to be peeled.  A rub with your fingers under the tap should be enough.  The only way to eat them in my opinion is to boil em (about 15 minutes will do it) with loads of fresh mint.  Enjoy!

We have pretty poor soil in our garden and as a result have found it pretty challenging to get a decent crop of carrots in the ground.  Carrots like a deep, well-drained fertile soil - to grow those lovely long cylindrical carrots that you buy in the shops you need a good loam (soil that is sort of half way between clay and sand) that is well cultivated to at least a spade’s depth.  Carrots as we know grow down in to the soil and the root grows under the surface - they are persistent little blighters too for if a growing carrot comes across a stone or a piece of hard earth, it will basically try to grow around it by “forking”.  The resulting carrot will be a very odd looking affair which will taste fine but will be a complete nightmare to peel! 

I have found that sowing carrots directly in the soil can be a very hit and miss affair - last year i spent an entire day getting the soil to the state of perfection required.  Perfect consistency to a spade’s depth, not a stone in sight and raked to within an inch of its life.  I carefully sowed a little row of carrot and then waited and waited and waited.  Nothing happened.  I’m fairly sure that the seed was in good nick so i suspect that the slugs may have picked off the little seedlings as they grew.  In desperation of not having a single carrot to look forward to i resorted to buying some carrot seedlings in the garden centre (don’t tell anyone) and transplanted them out.  Now, the purists always say that this will never work.  I was at a veg-growers meeting recently where a poor beginner was telling everyone that she had got some carrots growing in modules and was it ok to transplant them out - and one of the ‘experts’ at the meeting told her that you can’t transplant root crops and that she may as well throw the whole lot in the bin!  Apart from thinking that was a pretty mean and silly thing to say to her (I mean if they all fail, f**k it, at least she tried, and chances are some of them will probably work which is better than throwing them in the bin), I was also thinking that he was incorrect because when I tried it last year we had a great bloody crop, so there!  Goes to show you what the experts know!

So this year I am trying a bit of both - sowing direct and sowing in lenghts of guttering to see if I can transplant them out.  The beauty of the latter is that you seem to get almost 100 per cent success with the germination which is great.  Then yesterday morning i went out to water the tunnel and the lenght of guttering that i had sown the carrots in had fallen over and all the little carrots seedlings were dumped on the ground.  Not a good start.  So I knew that i had to transplant them straight away even though i should have been inside writing for the morning (o well), and I also didn’t have a bed ready for them.  Then I remembered that at one of our food producers network meetings, one of the old hands mentioned a method he uses to get the perfect carrot.  He makes a deep icecream cone shaped hole in the soil with a dibber (or the handle of a trowel) to the depth of about 6 or 7 inches and fills it with potting compost (compacting it gently), then he drops a few seeds in to the compost, covers with a very thin layer of compost and waters lightly.  He reckons that this method produces the perfect long carrot because the root has a depth of top quality fertile material to grown down in to, and won’t come across anything that will cause it to fork. 

So I reckoned this might just work for my emergency transplanting session, even through I was transplanting rather than sowing the seeds.  So I carefully gathered up all the little seedlings, made about 50 holes in the soil (very time consuming), filled them with compost and then very carefully put a little seedling in each one.  I guess we will know in about two months whether it has worked!

If you stand there with your hose spraying your tomato plants like a madman, the likelihood is that you will get water pretty much everywhere except where the plant needs it - i.e at the roots.  And if you spray the foliage of your plants with water, they will scorch in the hot afternoon sun (same goes for potato plants incidentally).  Superficial watering of the surface of the soil is about as much use to a tomato plant as a bucket full of hair - it is a deep rooting plant and therefore needs moisture deep in the soil.  Far better to give the soil a good drenching every few days rather than a light dusting every day.  At the height of summer, tomato plants needs lots of moisture and it needs to be consistent too - if the soil goes from dry to wet and back to dry again it results in the skin of your tomatoes cracking from the stress which is really annoying and causes them to rot quicker. Another problem is that when your tomato plants are at their peak in July and August, they are literally massive plants and it can be hard to get to the base of them to water them properly, particularly if you have them planted two deep in your greenhouse or tunnel as we do.

So here’s a really good tip from a mate of mine (thanks Fearg!) which delivers water directly to the roots deep in the soil, and makes the watering process itself easier too.  When you are finished drinking the milk from one of those big 2l plastic cartons, wash it out - then cut the base off it (this can be used as a slug trap - fill it with beer and place it in the soil).  Carefully dig a deep hole in the soil right beside the tomato plant and put the milk carton in to it, upside down and slanted towards the roots.  It should be deep enough that the top of the container (well the bottom, upside down, oh you know what i mean!) is just above the level of the soil.  Pack soil back in around the outside of the container so that it stays put.  Then when you are watering, just fill up the container with water and move on to the next one - you are guaranteed that you have got 2l of water to the roots of your tomato plants!  Brilliant.

This May has been pretty cold and the evidence of this is to be found in the embarrassingly slow growth of our seedlings this year. May is one of those funny months - you think it’s almost summer but every now and then in the depth of the night a frost comes along to spoil the party and remind you that it’s still spring.  I was driving to Dublin last week and I heard them saying on the radio that there was a particularly heavy frost in Kilkenny the night before.  You might be thinking, ‘well so what?’ - you see frosts at this time of the year can catch many Home Farmers out and spoil the work you have done with their veg seedlings.  They have raised seedlings lovingly since February or March, waiting for the moment when they can plant them out in the garden - May arrives and they think, ‘well surely I can plant them out now’ so they dig a little hole and pop the poor little seedling in to it.  Temperatures by day are between 10 and 15 maybe even 17 degrees and the little seedling is thinking, “my this is nice, I think I shall do well here”, and then suddenly there are clear skies at night and a frost arrives and freezes the arse off the little seedling which never recovers from the shock. 

The process of “hardening off” is therefore a vital skill for any Home Farmer to learn.  You see if you have given your seedlings the 5-star treatment in your greenhouse or on a windowsill indoors for the spring, they are like cossetted little brats, unused to the harsh ways of the world.  Hardening them off is like sending a teenager to boot camp for a week to get them used to life on the other side.  The idea is that over a week to ten days you get them gradually used to colder conditions outside so that if a really nasty cold night comes along, they will be able to put up with it.  You bring them outdoors (unless it’s really nasty weather) and leave them out there for the day - then you bring them back inside at night time just in case there is a frost.  You do this for a week or so, and by the end of it, your little seedlings are hardy little soldiers ready to bear whatever the elements can throw at them.

This all sounds great of course, but if you have a large number of seedlings it can mean a lot of additional work on the Home Farm each morning and evening.  Particularly if you are perpetually disorganised like we are and you don’t have a large tray that you put all your seedlings on - ah yes, that would make life far too simple.  Instead all our seedlings are in pots and trays and lenghts of guttering all of different sizes and we have to ferry them out and in, one at a time.  It feels like an endless chore of collecting up all the pots and trays in the tunnel and moving them out to the vegetable patch for the day and then in the evening we have to do the whole thing all over again except this time in reverse.  Still we take the pain, because of course we know that it is the best way of having thriving plants and big hearty vegetables.

One night last week I forgot to put the seedlings back in the tunnel and I lay in bed deliberating on whether they would be ok if I just left them, but of course I felt bad for them and after ten minutes of profoundly annoying inner monologue I got up, went down the garden in my boxers and a pair of wellies (a good look for me, it must be said) and moved them all in.  It was chillly out, so I was glad I did it. 

The photo above shows you some of our seedlings which will hopefully be planted out this weekend once they have been hardended off properly.  As you can see there are sprouting brocolli (for next spring), carrots and parsnips (in lengths of guttering), beetroot, sweetcorn, red cabbage, peas, celeriac, spinach and leeks - which is basically a lot of fricking work!

One job that we have traditionally been pretty poor at is bringing nutrients back in to our soil each year by adding organic matter.  Our compost heaps are generally a pretty sorry affair - slimey heaps of sludge down the end of the garden where food scraps (happily) dissappear but which are about as much use in terms of composting the veggies as a slap in the face with a wet fish.  This year we got a decent attempt at a 2-bay system going and I stuck religiously to adding layers of green (grass cuttings, veg cuttings etc) and brown (pig and hen-shit, straw etc) - that seems to have worked well but there is a dissappointingly finite amount of compost being produced.  Our veg beds and the tunnel on the other hand, require a huge amount of manure to do them any justice. Most home farmers are in a similar boat and have to beg, borrow or steal manure if they are to secure a decent quantity without paying a fortune for it.  Last year for example we got horse manure from a guy down the road who keeps some horses - he seemed amused when I asked him politely could I take a few bags from the big pile outside the stables and gave me a look that seemed to say why would I mind, do you think I keep it to bathe in or something?

So one Saturday morning Mrs Kelly and I went down to his field in the jalopy and filled about 20 bags, transporting them back to the house in the boot of the car!  Needless to say it was heavy going and the jalopy was smelling none too sweet for months!  Oh how we laughed.  Anyway, the amount that we managed to get gave us only a small covering for a fraction of our beds which was not good enough at all.  In addition, the problem we always have is that we attack the job of manuring too late - after a busy growing season we tend to power down for the winter and only turn our minds to soil preparation the following spring, when of course it’s far too late for the manure to work its magic.  We put the horse manure down in February of this year, covering it with plastic in the hope of keeping weeds down and preventing the nutrients from the manure from leaching away - when we started to use the beds later in the year, the manure wasn’t rotted down properly and so wasn’t as effective.

This year we are far more organised.  I happened to be out walking the dogs in the fields of my farmer friend recently and I noticed a large pile of steaming rotting cow-shite in one of the fields.  I gave him a call, told him I was after a consignment and promised him some bacon/sausages in return.  As it happened my timing was good because under some strange EU law he has to have all this manure out of the cow-sheds by this time of year anyway so he’s mad to get rid of the stuff.  Within a few hours he (very kindly) showed up at our house in the tractor pulling a very large trailor full to the brim with manure behind him.  “Think we will dump it there,” says I pointing to an area in front of the polytunnel, wondering would Mrs Kelly object to a big pile of manure being deposited right beside her washing line? 

Anyway, my farmer friend was amused at how grateful I was to be receiving this special delivery but seriously - take a trip to your local garden centre and see how much they are charging for tiny bags of organic “farmyard manure” - as far as I am concerned swapping some of our meat for tonnes of the stuff is a canny investment.  And you know how much I love canny investments.  Of course after the initial euphoria of having secured the manure we were faced with the rather grim reality of having to move it from its location in front of the polytunnel (and beside the washing line) to its final resting place out around the vegetable garden.  For about four days i would pass it on my way to work in the morning (my office is down the end of the garden) and we would salute each other fondly - well mainly i would do the saluting - “Hello there mountain of shit,” says I - while the mountain of shit would just sit there steaming. 

Then, that weekend we were lucky that there was beautiful, autumnal weather and we got stuck in.  It’s nasty, dirty work but extremely satisfying nonetheless - one of those days where at the end of it your muscles are aching and you feel weary to the bone and yet, strangely, feel sorry that the day is over.  You can see the manure teaming with worms and you know that over the winter they will be dragging nutrients down in to our poor exhausted soil, replenishing it and getting it ready for next year.  With every barrow-load we dream of next spring, when the grim bareness of winter has passed and we can lift of the plastic and start growing afresh in fertile soil.  We got all the beds (bar one or two which still have things growing in them) covered in manure and then covered down in black plastic and the beauty of having this job done so early is that the manure has a minimum of five or six months to work it’s magic. 

The bad news is that after two days of shovelling, and with all beds covered down, there is still a sizeable pile left outside my office.  We still salute each other in the morning as I go to work, but for some reason the interaction is not as friendly as it was. 

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been starting to pick our tomatoes which is a particularly special time for the home farmer.  There are some vegetables that you grow yourself and you really wonder whether it’s worth the hassle, particularly if there are good commercial alternatives available. But given the fact that most of the tomatoes in our supermarkets are the ubiquitous Dutch variety and taste of ....well nothing at all, growing your own tomatoes is absolutely crucial.  When the anally retentive freak that i am sits down at the start of the year to write down the list of veggies to be grown for the year, tomatoes go on the top of the list - they are like the boy that always get picked first for any school soccer team.

The reason is quite simply their taste.  Tomatoes that you grow yourself taste a million times nicer than anything you will buy in the supermarket.  When I pick some tomatoes from our tunnel I am just as likely to have eaten half of them on the way back to the kitchen.  With your own tomatoes you are more likely to want to eat them like you would an apple rather than slice ‘em up and put them in a sandwich.  They are a sweet, sumptuous treat, best eaten warm and freshly picked. 

We grow ours in the soil in the polytunnel - lots of people will say the best way to grow them is in grow bags but i like to think that the sweetness of flavour in ours comes from their unfettered access to soil.  We have successfully avoided disease build up in the soil thus far by planting in a different place in the tunnel each year (the tunnel is essentially 4 quadrants in our heads and the tomatoes go in a different quadrant each year).  There may well be expert growers reading this thinking - YOU FOOL - but it has worked so far for us.

I like being in touch with the seasonality of tomatoes.  I know that our tomatoes are starting to ripen now in July and they will go on producing hopefully in to September and then they will be no more and we will shed a tear.  We will try to extend their “season” a little by storing, bottling etc.  If we have a glut of nice bigs ones they may go in a drawer, individually wrapped in newspaper where they will store for a little longer and take us in to Autumn.  There will be tomatoes on the vine come late summer that can not develop fully because of the shortening days and will have to be picked green - these are ironically our most valued picks because they end up in a rather superb green tomato sour - a sort of chutney or pickle we make with green tomatoes, onions and vinegar that is just out of this world.  We make a bigger batch of this each autumn and each year it appears to be gone by Christmas - the only explanation is that we are eating too much or giving too much away.. Or maybe it is being stolen?!??!? 

Other tomatoes will be made in to sauces for the freezer and will provide the base for many a fine handy pasta dish in the winter.  We may even end up bottling (ketchup) and even canning (if I can get my hands on a canner).  I interviewed the presenter of the Green Light on RTE, Ella McSweeney recently and she told me she grew 64 tomato plants this year.  I thought I had misheard her at first - 64?  Surely not?  But yep, 64 plants she has in pots in her conservatory and green house.  She just loves tomatoes and spends hours in the late summer and early autumn processing her harvest.  We have about 8 plants this year and will have a glut of produce so you can just imagine how much she will get from 64 plants - more power to your elbow lady!

The point is, we are aware of their season.  We try to bend the rules a little and extend things at either end - getting the first seeds going on a warming mat in early spring at one end and by preserving the produce at the other end - but we know that as home farmers we can not grow tomatoes in the winter or spring.  It just doesn’t work.  The shortening days and lack of light and heat won’t allow it.  We remember the long growing season - we recall placing those first seeds in compost back at the start of the year and trying to get them to germinate on a shelf in one of the bedrooms.  We nurtured the little plants over months in pots before they were ready to go out in the soil - just about a foot tall.  We saw them eventually thrive and then practically take over the tunnel - the plants growing up to 5 foot tall.  We trained them to grow up lengths of string hanging from the ceiling so that they wouldn’t fall over when they got heavy. 

We mulched and watered.  We pinched off those side shoots that take away the plants energy.  We looked on with satisfaction and considerable anticipation as the clumps of green tomatoes started to form and then eventually one day in July we got the reward of a single ripe tomato - it was cut in half and shared and savoured.  And then a day later another few were ready and so on until eventually we are eating them every day in salads and sandwiches, making bruschetta etc. 

Having gone through all that it’s not surprising that we would feel a little odd about buying and eating supermarket tomatoes out of season.  Because we know that to produce a tomato in February and ship it from Holland or Israel or South America to Ireland and have it appear ripe on the shelf in the frigid winter months, you have to bend the rules a lot. 

In the commercial world they use all manner of little tricks to prolong shelf life - the tomatoes are often picked green and then ripened in storage or transit by gassing with a hydrocarbon gas called ethylene which triggers the ripening process.  Ethylene is a naturally occurring gas produced by fruits when ripening but it has to be said in this context it is being used in a rather unnatural way.  These tomatoes will keep longer but they will not taste as nice and have a starchier texture than naturally ripened ones.  Their colour tends to be more orangey than the deep red of the real tomato.  Vine tomatoes are an improvement on this - these are the ones you see in the supermarket that are attached to a vine - they are still picked when unripe but ripen gradually in storage because they are still essentially attached to the plant. 

Anyway, my point is that when you get scientists and food producers trying to devise ways to cheat seasonality and nature in order to grow out of season and prolong shelf life you have a situation where the food you are buying has been profoundly messed with.  It is known for example that scientists have developed a way to manipulate tomato genes to increase shelf life while retaining flavour - commercial producers are reluctant to go down this route however because of the widespead resistance among the buying public to GMO foodstuffs.  In the 1990’s Calgene introduced a GMO tomato called the ‘FlavrSavr’ which could be vine ripened without compromising shelf life. It didn’t sell well and was pulled from the market in ‘97 - a rare example of consumers voting with their wallets to end scientific meddling in the foodchain.  But surely it is only a matter of time before GMO tomatoes are revisited - with what consequences I wonder?  When you produce a tomato that can be shipped further and left on the shelves for longer, what is the impact on flavour?  On nutrition? 

If you want to “practice” seasonal food consumption, you could do worse then starting with the tomato.  Grow as many plants as your space will allow - nurture them, harvest, eat and store.  Then give yourself a break from them.  They are not in season, so don’t be tempted to buy them.  When you have sampled the delectable taste of your own tomatoes, I promise you that you won’t find this hard.

You’ve heard I’m sure how it is said that when you buy three bags of groceries in a supermarket you may as well take one of them and fire it out the window of the car (watch out for people on the footpath) because that is roughly the amount of food that rots in the average fridge.  In our house a lot of the time, I feel that we do the weekly shop out of habit more than anything else and we go from aisle to aisle loading up with stuff because, well, we have come all this way with our little bags and sure we may as well.  And besides we love food shopping.

All of which is incredibly wasteful of course and in these leaner times, we could all do with being a little more thrifty.  With the home farm coming in to its own and an abundance (of sorts) of fruit and vegetables available at the end of the garden, I have been fighting that weekly urge to hop in to the car and head for my favourite supermarket. 

This calls for an adjustment of sorts in the kitchen.  It means that when it comes to mealtime we have to find recipes that will fit what’s ready in the garden as opposed to going out to buy produce to fit a particularly tasty looking recipe.  It also means giving up whimsical cooking of the “I feel like X” variety.  If your broad beans are ready today, then thou shall eat broad beans tonight.  Them’s the rules. 

As usual this year there have been a fair share of disasters in the veggie plot, mostly due to our chronic lack of gardening knowledge.  Undeterred we continue to stumble along with blind enthusiasm for the project.  The list of mini catastrophes thus far includes: rocket that went to seed; an entire crop of purple kale lost to the lowly garden slug; garlic that rotted in the ground; rabbits burrowing in our “rabbit proof” raised beds; and most harrowing of all, a never-ending “glut” of blindingly hot and practically inedible giant red mustard leaf (pass the Kleenex please).

Thankfully though there have been small successes too to keep us moving forward (to borrow a heinous phrase), none more so than finding a hardy vegetable that is a sinch to grow, looks great and tastes magnificent:  Ladies and Jellyspoons I give you the majestic kohlrabi.  The name might sound a little odd, and no it has nothing to do with a jewish religious leader.  The name comes from the german word for cabbage (kohl) and turnip (rube).  It is an extremely functional word (like most German words are), describing effectively what the veg is about: it is a member of the cabbage family and it looks like a turnip.  Taste wise we think it is closest to brocolli, certainly far milder than a turnip.  Unlike turnip though it looks amazing while growing - the “root” grows above the ground and is an exotic deep purple colour, almost alien like (see pic).  Visitors to our garden see them and are mightily impressed.  I assume they think we are expert growers. 

We have a heap of them growing in the garden right about now which really makes a nonsense of heading in to the supermarket to buy vegetables just because that is what we would normally do.  This evening I excitedly extracted one from the soil and rushed it inside like I’m Indiana Jones carrying a rare treasure.  I am sure there are recipes that would do this fine root more justice, but I just peel, finely dice and cook it in butter with some fresh marjoram: it is absolutely spectacular.  We had meat with the meal (i.e. the kohlrabi was a side dish) but really you could munch your way through a big bowl of it on its own.  We have also been cheating slightly and using the baby leaves in salads (when the rabbits don’t get them first).

You can plant kohlrabi up to mid August so there is still time.  We have found it easier to start it off in modules and plant out when it gets a little bigger.  Buy a packet of kohlrabi seeds in your local garden centre, stick them in some compost in a seed or module tray, give them regular water and in eight weeks time, you will be able to bypass the veg section in the supermarket, or better still, just stay at home.

I am working on a feature about care farming which is where farms/smallholdings are used to provide therapeutic and employment opportunities for people with special needs.  I met an incredible 6ft 8 Dutchman called Martjn Kajuiter who is head chef in the Cliff House Hotel in Ardmore - he has started a collaboration with St Raphaels Centre in Youghal where he buys their produce.  Really inspiring stuff.  Yesterday I went to visit the Camphill centre in Jerpoint, Co. Kilkenny where they have an amazing community of people of all abilities who live and work together, producing their own food.  The manager there John O’Connor is in to Biodynamics which is like advanced organics - you don’t buy anything in at all in terms of animal feed, manure and compost - it’s all produced there on the farm.  He was showing me his compost heaps and explaining the science behind in and as usual my eyes were glazing over (no disrespect to John, they always do when people talk to me about compost) and i was thinking of our own sluge heaps and how little actual compost we have got out of them

Feeling suitably inspired when i returned from my trips myself and Mrs Kelly attacked the no-go area that is our compost corner.  We spent a miserable couple of hours up to our necks in muck and shit but i am glad to report we have now sorted it out and should be good for compost later this summer.

You can read the article at http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/magazine/2008/0712/1215725808134.html

I have just had a dinner which consisted of a tomato, cucumber, lettuce and rocket salad, new spuds cooked with fresh mint and an omelette with herbs.  It was plain enough fare and yet I was excited enough after eating it to open up the laptop and start typing.  And why, you may ask, would a peasants dinner such as this get me all worked up (apart from the fact that I get pretty effusive after a few glasses of wine anyway)?  Because this is the first time I have eaten a substantial meal where every ingredient was home produced. 

My old friend Hugh Fairly Longname in his River Cottage Cookbook talks about trying to move along the food acquisition continuum.  The far left of the continuum is where you are completely reliant on supermarkets for your food.  The far right is complete self-sufficiency a la The Good Life. 

He pretty much admits (and you would have to agree) that self-sufficiency is probably something we will never achieve in this day and age.  No matter how much you produce in your garden you will probably always have a hankering for the odd packet of Monster Munch or a Twix.  But as George W would probably agree, any shift to the right is a good thing.

To my mind, producing your own food is like giving two fingers to the mediocrity of the modern food chain.  I really dislike the fact that food producers inject water in to chicken breasts to make them appear larger.  Or that most of the herbs in the supermarket appear to come from Israel.  Or that a pre packaged plain old ham sandwich labelled fresh has a list of ingredients about 40 lines long. 

So even the smallest contribution from your own garden, whether it is a boiled egg in the morning fresh from the hens nether regions, a handful of basil for fresh pesto or some fruit for dessert; all these things can be considered little victories in a very large war. 

Mrs Kelly taught be an invaluable lesson once (there were other lessons I am sure, but this one stood out).  I was telling her how much I loved Cherry Blossoms and thought we should get one to brighten up the garden.  She scoffed and told me that Cherry Blossoms were for city trees for city gardens.  For the quintessential country feel, she reckoned we should opt for apple or pear trees which produce equally impressive blooms and also produce crops of fruit in the autumn.  She was right of course (as wives occasionally are). 

It is a sound principle.  There are thousands who I am sure would disagree, but to my mind regular flowers, bushes and trees, while being undeniably nice to look at, just can not hold a candle to the ones that produce things you can eat.  These are the true superheroes of the garden.

We have ditches around our garden which are full of brambles (and blackberries).  A landscape gardener I am sure would tell us to get rid of them and get a wall.  Or a fence or something.  But how could you cut down something that produces fruit for the breakfast table?

You do not have to own a farm or even have a lot of land to bring the joys of food production to your life.  My brother in law who is a farmer always laughs at me when I say that four hens and a polytunnel make me a smallholder.  But the official definition is beside the point.  Being a smallholder is a state of mind. 

If you do not have much of a garden or no garden at all you can still take those little shifts to the right.  A simple herb garden can be grown in pots on the kitchen window.  Tomato plants will grow in your conservatory.  A couple of laying hens can be kept in even the smallest garden.  And you can smile to yourself as a piece of home produced food replaces on the plate something that is processed, mutated, sprayed, over travelled, or generally stressed.

Some of you may recall an earlier feature I wrote on the acquisition and assembly of our polytunnel.  Having got over the initial trauma of its construction, it has proved a revelation (and also a steep learning curve).  Owning a polytunnel is very much like having a pet, they need daily care.  Just like a pet it can not be abandoned for any long period of time.  But why would you want to?  As we move towards late autumn, the tunnel is at its best, resplendent with greenery, lush veggies and fleshy fruits. 

A crop of spuds that was already in the ground when we got the tunnel did OK but it was probably a tad warm for them in there and some wilted.  I had never grown my own spuds before and I am still enthralled at the moment you dig up the plant and rummage in the clay for the potatoes.  It is like opening a present at Christmas. 

Tomatoes are thriving in the humidity and heat.  The plants are about four foot tall now with big thick stems.  Little sweet cherry tomatoes came first and now the beef variety is starting to ripen.  We have so many tomatoes that I have started giving them away but not before we made a big tub of tomato puree for the freezer.  We found a recipe for Green Tomato Sour to use up the ones that fell to the ground prematurely.  My pride and joy is an enormous beef tomato still clinging precariously to the plant.  It is about the size of a grapefruit.  I kid you not.  I should enter it in to a competition. 

The other star performers have been the cucumber and courgette plants.  The cucumber plant is a voracious grower and has produced a steady supply for about two months now.  The skin is kind of hairy and needs a wash before eating to get it smooth the way they are in the shops.  They taste great on their own or as part of cucumber pickle or Tzatziki.

It was probably a mistake to grow Courgettes indoors as the plant gets enormous.  It is like the Day of the Triffids.  We have had courgettes up to two foot long and frankly we did not really know what to do with them.  They are nice in a Bolognese sauce or on their own baked in a cheese sauce.  They may be cut in next years plans.  We have three pepper plants which have produced about five peppers each.  That’s not a lot and since they are compact little plants we will plant a lot more of them next year. 

We have lots of lettuce in varying degrees of readiness.  I reckon if you could keep lettuce, tomatoes and new spuds coming for the summer you would be happy enough.  Anyway, the lettuce tastes great.  At the moment we are on iceberg.  I have also sown a couple of rows of rocket and it has a great peppery taste. 

You can sow peas in a tunnel as early as February but we did not get started until June.  They are really unusual looking plants, with narrow tendrils wrapping themselves around the support canes.  Eating a fresh pea is one of the great moments for any gardener.  You just have to marvel at the pure genius behind a pod design, protecting the delicate peas until they are ready to be eaten.  It makes a mockery of modern packaging. 

Mrs Kelly made a Pea, Lettuce and Mint Soup which was somewhat of a chore to eat but I am sure was spectacularly good for us.  We glowed eerily for days afterwards.  Finally we also have leeks, celery, onions and garlic planted and they are starting to come good.  I am not a big fan of celery and so am watching the plants with suspicion.  Part of me is vexed that they are thriving. 

Outside the tunnel we have a small plot for fruit bushes which started to bear eh fruit in August.  There are gooseberries, rhubarb, blackcurrants, redcurrants and raspberries.  Our strawberry plants had to be moved at the last minute and so are struggling this year but I am hoping they will come good again next year.  The raspberries are great.  Just when you think the plant is finished fruiting, a few more come along. 

There are also two pumpkin plants.  Pumpkins are for more than putting in the window at Halloween.  You can make great pumpkin soup.  Last year we had one in the window which had the smiley face, we then forgot about it and it rotted and the smiley face got all contorted and looked psycho. 

In a few weeks time, the last of the summer produce will be gone.  We will miss it greatly.  The focus will switch to planning and preparing for next year.  We will be more clued in (that would not be hard). 

Every step in our food production adventure has been pure pleasure.  There is no hardship involved.  Only upside.  Roll on the spring. 

It’s ugly, our new polytunnel. And yet it’s also an object of great beauty. For out of it will come - shortly, we hope - potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce and, with luck, some Mediterranean fare: basil, aubergines, watermelons and the like. Polytunnels are often called poor men’s greenhouses, but I like to think of them as good value rather than cheap. Ours is five metres (15ft) wide and 10 metres (30ft) long and cost about €600. A greenhouse of those dimensions could cost €6,000.

So I like to think of the polytunnel as a workhorse and a greenhouse as a show pony. If you want an abundance of vegetables and fruit for the table in difficult Irish weather, get a polytunnel. If you want your garden to be considered for a gong at Chelsea Flower Show . . . don’t.

We got the tunnel for a few reasons, but mainly because our soil is seriously wet. As a result our vegetable plot was usable only in high summer. It gave us a bountiful crop last year but then stood abandoned, untidy and boggy for the better part of seven months. We reckon the tunnel will extend the growing season as well as allowing us to produce some slightly exotic fare. We had a serious problem with slugs last year; our many unpleasant night-time expeditions with bucket and torch convinced us that the vegetables needed a drier environment. The tunnel now stands pretty much where our vegetable plot was; as this is down in a corner of our garden, it’s not too much of an eyesore.

We bought our tunnel from Simon Cummins in Wexford. He delivered it himself, and although he chatted amiably about tunnels in general he didn’t seem to be making any moves to erect ours. I eventually discovered, with some concern, that putting it up wasn’t part of the deal. It basically comes in a kit that includes the frames and plastic. The day it was delivered I laid the aluminium frames out on the ground, about where they were going to go, and, satisfied, headed back inside for dinner. They lay there patiently for a week or two before I got around to doing anything with them. I would see them when I opened the curtains in the bedroom each morning, and sometimes I would just close the curtains again, so I wouldn’t have to look at them.

The tunnel guy had given me a kind word or two of advice and left a suspiciously short page of instructions, but I was confident I could erect the thing. Mrs Kelly knows me well, however - and her mother, who has a polytunnel already, knows life’s realities - so on the QT she organised for some reinforcements to be sent down to help.

Her sister, her brother and his wife duly arrived, and we got started. Her brother in particular seemed to know what he was doing. He got stuck into a complicated-looking procedure that involved running builder’s line around four pegs that marked out the corners. He and Mrs Kelly discussed at length the application of Pythagoras’ theorem to the problem of ensuring the frames were square. I tried to nod in all the right places and look interested. (I didn’t believe my maths teacher when he tried to convince us that theorems would come in useful in later life.) I kept to myself the fact that my plan, had I been left to my own devices, mainly involved “digging”.

Next we drove aluminium tubes into the ground along the boundary (five on each side). The U-shaped frames around which the plastic is going to be stretched are fitted into the tubes (that sentence is easy to write but took a bit of huffing and puffing in reality). We then dug a trench along each side - essentially, you bury the plastic in them, one on each side of the tunnel. We probably should have waited for a warmer, less windy day to do the work with the plastic. It comes in one huge sheet, and it took a lot of effort to position it over the frames and bury it in the trenches on each side. At one stage a gust of wind nearly took the whole sheet into a neighbouring field. It was like struggling with an enormous errant kite. The key with the plastic is to pull it rigidly tight over the frames. Otherwise the wind will catch it (which would be very, very noisy) and water will collect on it. When we were finished, one side in particular looked kind of saggy.

The father-in-law arrived later that evening for a look, and he insisted we dig that side out and start again. He was right, as we got it much better the second time (and he helped, so we couldn’t complain). We leaned on our shovels, admiring our handiwork. It was like Amish getting together to build a house in a day. I felt the warm glow of community, of shared effort. Or that might have been the Deep Heat I put on my back to ease the pain from digging.

The next day I dug out a path down the centre of the tunnel, about half a metre deep. Initially you couldn’t stand up straight in the tunnel, but now, with the path, you can, which makes life more comfortable. It wasn’t comfortable digging, though. Even at this time of the year it’s like a sauna in there when the sun shines. It’s a tropical kind of humidity that warms the bones the moment you enter. (You can imagine how it will be in the summer.) Someone once told me that they hung a clothes line in the tunnel in the winter, to dry their washing. Now that’s resourceful.

The lowered path leaves you, in effect, with a raised bed on each side. The path took me most of a day to dig: 10 metres long by half a metre deep is 60 cubic tonnes of soil (or something like that) to remove by wheelbarrow. Now when Mrs Kelly says “You never do any work in the tunnel” I can say: “I never do any work? Do you not remember how I lost half a stone digging out the path?”

Design flaw number one: I actually dug out too much soil, and the path was below the water table. So when the first really wet day came the path looked like a narrow swimming pool. I got in 40 lengths while I was thinking about how to remedy it. Next up were the doors. Tunnel guy doesn’t supply doors or door frames; he assumes that as you’re up for erecting the tunnel you won’t mind knocking together a few. The last time I went to the local DIY store for wood it was for my much-maligned hen house. When the owner saw me coming this time he praised God and shouted something to his wife in the back about how they would “eat well tonight”. I bought lengths of two-by-four for the door frames, waterproof plywood for the half-doors, and hinges and bolts. I bought more lengths of two-by-four to lay along each side of the path, to keep the soil in the beds from falling out. Mostly I’m just telling you that so I could write two-by-four again. Once I had the frames in place I got the door up in no time with my favourite tool: the electric screwdriver. It’s the only tool on God’s earth that can make a DIY novice like me feel like Handy Andy.

At the moment only spuds and onions are growing visibly in the tunnel. But they provide enough greenery to let the onlooker know that serious food production is going on.

The potatoes were in the ground before the tunnel arrived, but they are thriving now. We have also planted tomatoes, basil, lettuce, scallions, spinach, aubergines and cucumbers. We are watching eagerly for signs of life. Because of the heat in the tunnel, it needs daily watering. Design flaw number two: we didn’t place it near a tap. Our garden hose doesn’t stretch far enough, so until I put an outside tap near the polytunnel we are reduced to going up and down the garden with the watering can. But who cares? These are labours of love. And while we dig and weed and water we dream of the lushness of summer. When our tunnel will be crowded with green leaves, plump vegetables, aromatic herbs and fleshy fruits.