GROWING TIME: SPRING HAS SPRUNG!

"People are more keen on making dinner than decorating dinner"

Spring is in the air, and thoughts turn towards growing once again. While the busy full time horticulturalist is always active, those who supply gardeners see something of a spike in interest this time of year.

(pic: the less popular-these-days-but-still-grown-by-experts cape gooseberry)

With the GIY (Grow it Yourself) movement so strong (5000 card carrying active members, 12000 signed up in total); a big shift towards allotments and community gardening, its not the worst time to be in the business of supplying growers with the essentials.

Brown Envelope Seeds and the Herb Garden have all been in business since before the recession. I spoke to each of them about what people buy.

The Herb Garden is a Certified Organic Herb Nursery in the Naul, north County Dublin. They produce a wide range of certified organic herb seed, as well as salad, flower and native Irish wildflower seeds. They also stock a small selection of herb plants.

Denise Dunne of the Herb Garden: “People are more interested in cooking, gardening, organics and natural medicine. I wouldn't link this with the recession. I have noticed these changes gradually creep in since I started 'The Herb Garden' in 1995. I guess TV food and lifestyle programmes, cheaper travel, and greater access to 'world wide' information through the web have all contributed to these changes.”

She continues:

“When I started growing herbs commercially, very few people used fresh herbs, and even less grew their own. Over the past ten years or so, basil and coriander became quite fashionable. In the last two or three years I have had a lot of customers looking for native Irish herbs, and perhaps this is influenced by the recession. Surely it is better to use the plants that grow easily here, and are already adapted to our climate, rather than trying to grow basil all year round. Basil will grow here in the summer months, it just hates our winters.”

“I have nothing against exotic plants. In fact, I love them and I am growing kaffir lime leaf and cardamom on my windowsill. But the current 'mantra' of 'local, seasonal and organic', that is used by many restaurants, applies to herbs just as much as it does to meat, fish, game and vegetables.”

This is, it turns out, a common theme – people want suitable simplicity, and they want challenging exotica. Usually, they want more of the former and less of the latter, but event that varies.

Brown Envelope Seeds began in 2004, from a cattle farm in Skibbereen. Madeline McKeever: “In recent years, cereals and more common sense less exotic, vegetables are popular. Like carrots and parsnips. People are more keen on making dinner than decorating dinner” she adds.

Cereals I found interesting: Brown Envelope supply the non-commercial sector primarily, so how and why are people buying cereal seeds? “ I've only started doing them recently alright” she tells me ” it can be for chicken feed, as a garden backdrop, or for food,”. The latter is, it seems, because people are making their own flour and porridge now.

And why not? Even porridge is processed (de-hulled, cooked) and thus less nutritious before it arrives on the shop shelves, while, concurrently, oat groats are becoming more and more popular with health-aware consumers.

While there is “less interest in West Indian pickling cucumber or cape gooseberry, we do have adventurous gardeners, and they all go through phases, so there is still demand for those sorts of things”.

A recurring factor for both Denise and Madeline is sustainability. Denise doesn't use artificial heating, and this limits her own growing season: she doesn't, for example, supply the Valentine's market with organic cut flowers.

Madeline points out that “we only do small packets, the system here is unmechanised, so we can't compete on price with the bigger companies. However our seeds are open-pollinated, so people can save seed from them. They are acclimatised to here - I don't sell hybrids”.

The Herb Garden: 01 841 3907 Forde-de-Fyne, Naul, Co. Dublin, Ireland.

Brown Envelope Seeds: 028 38184 Ardagh Church Cross Skibbereen Co. Cork

cereal horticulture organic

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