By: Peter Dowdall
Mar 22, 2013
If you can get your kids interested in the garden then you are giving them a hobby and passion that will last for a lifetime. I remember when I starte...
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By: Suzie Cahn
Apr 07, 2013
"Suffer Vegetables" For most of the year you can’t keep me indoors and for most of the day I can’t sit still, but a certa...
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I've been doing a lot of GIY-related travelling over the last number of weeks, which means I've also been listening to a lot of talk radio in the car. In a single three hour journey, listening to Newstalk (where they have news updates every 15 minutes), you could be bombarded with the news headlines 12 times. That would be fine, if the news was good (is it...
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...
Grr.... Spammers! You may well have seen a few posts by a user called 'Anonymous' who is advertising cheap watches and handbags. Most everybody knows there is no such thing as a free dinner (unless you've grown it yourself!) In the garden we are well used to nipping potential irritants in the bud before they become a problem. Its a good approach to take the same route wit...
The weekend is looming! I’m mad looking forward to the weekend. I’ve just been surfing through the GIY Conference photos and saw the raised beds that quickcrop are selling and its inspired me to roll the sleeves up. I’ve been wanting to get a few more beds down and was waiting for the autumn to do it (.... anybody who knows me is well aware that I am a world class procrastin...
I am going to start this by qualifying that I love cats. I have three very large nice cats that have been with us for over 10 years. Our family have always had them and I think always will. They are comfortable creatures that know the essence of relaxation. Or so I thought, until I started growing veg. The lovely raised beds I had planted, with soil raked to a powder, loads of compost in, ...
Hi all, I started growing my own food for the first time last year. I recently moved to the suburbs and into a house with a reasonable sized garden. The idea of the 1st year was to experiment by growing as many different things as I could. I have had a good deal of success and fun in that year. Essentially all the easy things to grow I did well with, salad, squashes, courgettes beetroot, on...
What was that about the 'invite others' challenge? Last night I posted an update saying it would be great to see 100 people online today! I'm actually ashamed of how low my expectations were.... its not even 9pm and 114 people are signed up. That's 2 more than when I last looked 60 seconds ago! Thought it might be a good idea to highlight exact...
We had our first meeting of the ‘GIY Bray Group’ on Wednesday 11th November , 8pm at the Royal Hotel Bray. Even though it turned out to be one of the wettest nights we have seen in Bray for some time, we ended up with over 100 people at our first event. Following an introduction by Paul Sweetman (our “local champion”) and then a background on GIY in Ireland by Michael Kelly –...
As Mr Kelly pointed in his latest missive, the new website is indeed up and running. I thought it would be a good idea to get a blog going that helps out iron out some of their problems with the site and, hopefully, offer a few tips and tricks to help you use the site as easily as possible. During the course of helping you out I'm pretty sure I'm going to be lavishing a fair amount of p...
DATE 18/11/09 Planted the pea plants (onward) that were sowed a few weeks ago into bed R1 in the polytunnel. Tomatoes were grown in this bed last. Cleaned out the 2 main poultry houses and sprayed for red mite and bedded with wood chips. Noticed that one of the white turkeys looking unwell and as lost weight. Tomorrow I will feed it some boiled eggs and some apple cider vinegar and place...
Hey! got our GIY tramore Tramore group up online tonight with the help of Sally's flashy MAC and my husbands "geektastic" computer knowledge! WInter onions and leeks coming on nicely- made a recession busting cloch from bits of glass and coat hangers!!! lol -and it works!....
It's easy to fall in to the trap of thinking that sowing seeds is something that we only do in the spring - for our first few years of growing we certainly operated that way. A bout of unbelievable enthusiasm in Feb/March/April, sowing seeds to beat the band and then we would pretty much leave it at that. The result of this of course is that you end up with: 1) a fantastic h...
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 yo...
