Monthly Archives: September 2011

Bramley Apple cake recipe – scrummy way to use up all those windfalls…

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I was given this recipe for apple cake a couple of years ago by a friend and it’s delicious hot or cold (and a great excuse to eat cake and use up all those excess apples that are dropping off the trees after the high winds):




Ingredients:


190g self raising flour
pinch salt
150g butter or half margarine
1 egg
75g caster sugar
325g Bramley cooking apples
lemon juice
2 tbsp apricot jam
2 tbsp granulated or demerara sugar


Method


Heat oven to 160oC then grease and line a 20cm cake tin which should be at least 7.5cm deep.


Cream the butter and caster sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg. Sieve the flour and salt then fold in to the creamed mixture.


Using a lightly floured board, gently pat or roll out three quarters of the mixture and fit into the prepared tin (warning – very sticky!)



Peel, core and slice the apples and squeeze lemon over the top to keep their colour. Arrange the apples on top of the cake mixture. Heat the jam and brush or pour over the the apples. Sprinkle the sugar over the top.


Roll the remaining mixture and arrange a lattice over the apples (I just covered them completely this afternoon – oops didn’t read the recipe).


Bake in the middle of the oven for 1 hour. Cool on a rack and dust with icing sugar. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

Fun grass heads – gardening project for children

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If you’re looking for a way to get children interested (and some adults) in growing seeds, how about this for a fun project?

Grass Heads.


All you need are some nylon pop socks, compost and grass seeds – permanent markers, felt & wool optional. 



Just place a handful of grass seed into the toe of the pop sock then add compost to whatever size head you desire. Once full, tie a knot in the loose end and snip off the excess fabric. 


Place on a dish and water until the compost is moist, then just add water as required. The grass will keep growing for weeks – months even – so can be snipped and styled frequently. 


Here’s a short time lapse video clip showing you how your grass may grow and die back again in three weeks.


Enjoy!

GIYing and Community Gardening

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This weekend saw the largest annual get together of fruit and veg growing enthusiasts in Ireland at the GIY Gathering and Street Feast.  As part of the Waterford harvest food festival, whether you like eating food, cooking it, watching other people cook it , listen to people talk about it or just growing it, Waterford was the place to be.

I would love to have been there for the whole weekend and participated in many of the delights on offer. The mile long street market, cookery demos, the massive Barbecue gig, let alone the GIY feast and the expert Q and A session with gardening greats on the Sunday, but due to the usual parental taxi juggle could only make it for the Saturday – the GIY gathering – and am so glad I was there for that part at the very least.

GIY yummy lunch

What a fabulous, well organised, inspirational day – what more could a passionate veg grower want than to be in the company of so many equally passionate veg growers for a whole day and get to listen to organic gardening heroes Joy Larkcom and Bob Flowerdew speak too??!!

GIY Ireland, a registered not-for-profit charity, was launched just two years ago and already has over 10,000 people involved and nearly 100 groups around Ireland. Their aim is to inspire people to grow their own food and give them the practical skills to grow successfully – so what better place to launch the new Community Garden Network for Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Bob Flowerdew at the GIY Gathering, Waterford 2011

When I started helping community gardens a couple of years ago I was under the complete misunderstanding that there weren’t many of them in Ireland.

I’d googled and searched yet could only find a handful and they seemed to be in Dublin. As time went by and I started to help more gardens set up, I became aware of a few more, but it still felt lonely out there.

Then Thomas McDonagh contacted me – he was about to undertake a bicycle tour of Ireland, visiting as many community gardens as he could (in November!) to raise money for a trip to Columbia. Thomas blogged about his travels and it was a delight to follow his journey, virtually meet the people he met and look at pictures of other community gardens around Ireland through his regular updates.

And so the seed for a network of community gardeners was planted (npi)…. after Thomas I met up with Ciaran Walsh of GIY, then Suzie Cahn of Carraig Dulra who’d helped ten community gardens in Wicklow, and momentum started to build.

It was with anticipation that on Saturday afternoon a few panelists and a room full of people sat together and discussed the need for a network group, and low and behold, in just 35 allocated minutes ten like minded individuals agreed to help get it off the ground.

We hope to meet up in the coming weeks to make plans and discuss how it will be run, but it was unlikely to happen anytime in the near future without the incredible support of GIY Ireland who will be mapping our findings on their website and hosting a forum amongst other things, and it will need the enthusiasm of fellow community gardeners to help us find everybody!

So, in the meantime if you’re involved in a community garden in the island of Ireland or know of a community garden in your neighbourhood you can leave a comment below and we’ll let you know when the map and network is up and running!

Just when you think you’re on top of everything along comes Powdery Mildew

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Last week in the community garden polytunnel the courgettes were looking fab. I can say that with certainty as we’d closely checked all the plants following the discovery of the red spider mite (see previous post). So the last thing we were expecting this week was a fungal disease, and quite a major outbreak at that.


It’s often the way that during the first year of growing fruit and vegetables everything will perform spectacularly for you. You may be lucky the following year too, but no matter how often you wish or believe otherwise, sooner or later a pest or disease will find your plants and my experience in the Greenside Up garden has been that it will be a different pest or disease each year.

Identifying the pest or disease quickly is the key to preventing a larger, more devastating disaster and there are many books out there to help you do this.

My current favourite is The RHS Pests & Diseases by Pippa Greenwood & Andrew Halstead. It’s full of colour photographs, good descriptions and a great A-Z of pests, diseases and disorders, suggesting ways for tackling them both organically or chemically. 

So, back to the Powdery Mildew….

One of the problems of growing different fruit and vegetables undercover is that they require different growing conditions. Red spider mite doesn’t like moist, humid conditions so it’s often advised to hose down the floors and staging of greenhouses etc to create humid atmospheres… 

…. but then powdery mildew thrives where there’s humid or damp air around the top growth of leaves. This can be very confusing to any of us starting out growing our own! So what do you do???

Mildews and moulds tend to build up where there’s lack of good airflow so keep windows and doors open. Yes, spray the floors and decking if you have to, but try and avoid the water splashing the leaves of your plants.

Ensure there is adequate space around your plants, again to help with air flow and do try to keep on top of the weeding. Lastly, and I can’t emphasis it enough, be vigilant and don’t ignore something if you don’t know what it is hoping that it will go away! (Yep, I’ve done that too…) – it won’t.

Once we’d identified the Powdery Mildew we immediately removed all the badly infected leaves and bagged them up (these weren’t destined for the compost heap). Unfortunately most of the leaves on the two plants had  been affected and we couldn’t remove all of the leaves without killing the plants, so we just removed the very worst. 

An old remedy for Powdery Mildew is to spray the plants with a milk solution (300ml milk, 700ml water mixed together in a clean spray bottle). The enzymes of fresh milk will attack mildew and a stronger solution will result in a foul smell as the milk goes rancid. 

Another is to mix 5g baking soda with 1lt of water.

We didn’t have baking soda to hand but as community gardeners who enjoy the odd cup of tea and slice of tart, we could provide the milk.

Hopefully the milk will do the trick but if it doesn’t, I don’t think any of the gardeners will be too devastated…. even the most avid courgette eaters are secretly looking forward to the day they don’t have to take one home with them again ;) .

Wednesday Wigglers ~ Red Spider Mite

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Yesterday we discovered the dreaded red spider mite in the community garden polytunnel. The first question asked was:


“How Do You Know?“


Initially we noticed a pale mottling on the surface of the leaves of plants, namely aubergines in this case (which the mites have a particular taste for).


As you peer closer, and if you have a heavy infestation as we had, you may notice webs speckled with tiny flakes of dust. As you look even closer you’ll notice that the dust moves and isn’t dust at all, but the tiny mites (they’re less than 1mm long).

So once we’d identified the little pests, the questions flowed:-


“What Do They Do?”


Red spider mites are sap-feeders which means they have a toxic saliva that results in the leaves discolouring. In the case of glasshouse mites, initially the leaves become a dull green but then increasingly a yellowish-white. Eventually leaves can dry up and fall off.


The mottled leaves can resemble a mineral deficiency so if you notice any discolouration in leaves they will always warrant further investigation. 


“So They’re Not Red Then?”


Red spider mites only turn an orangish-red in the autumn and winter months when the adult females hibernate. Until then they are yellowish-green in colour, so no, they’re not the little red spiders that you often see scurrying across paths and brickwork.

“Will they attack everything?”


They have a varied diet, are fond of a wide range of plants in a greenhouse, polytunnel or even indoors. In dry summers they will also feed on strawberries, currents and beans as well as other outdoor plants.


“How did we get them?”


As they’re so easy to miss because of their size the likelihood is that they were brought if from another garden/polytunnel with an infestation.


One of the lovely things about gardening is swapping plants but unless you can be absolutely sure they were grown in a pest free environment, be cautious. Always clean and disinfect pots and containers every year prior to sowing as they can harbour pests, and of course – be vigilant.


I hadn’t been to the community garden over the summer holiday weeks, only returning last week for a tidy and catch up and unless you’ve seen an infestation before, it’s very easy to miss. 


“So what do we do? How do we get rid of them?”


Undercover in warm, dry conditions they breed rapidly so regularly hosing down in greenhouses, etc will help to raise the humidity and give some control. They can over winter though so once you’ve identified you have them, you need to eradicate them before they start to breed again in the spring time.


If you’re gardening without the use of pesticides as we are in the community garden, then biological control is likely to be the most effective method of ridding them.



This means we will be introducing predatory mites Phytoseiulus Persiliis into the polytunnel in the hope that they will target and attack the Red Spider Mites. 


If the infestation isn’t too severe insecticidal soaps can work too.


In the meantime, we’ve removed all the aubergines from the polytunnel and away from the garden entirely as they were heavily infected and we’re keeping a very close eye on the cucumbers that are in the next bed.


We’ll all be looking very closely at our own gardens and polytunnels/greenhouses too and hoping that they didn’t hitch a ride home on any of our clothing.