I know for many, the idea of growing your own is just too damn daunting but there are certain vegetables and herbs that just won’t fail – I promise. Mint is unbelievable. It is a weed and it will grow anywhere and all year round. It’s such a sturdy plant that if you’re not careful [...]

News alert! My tomatoes have ripened. Okay it doesn’t warrant such drama but I have managed to produce a considerable amount and I am giddy at the thought of eating this free fruit. I want the tomatoes to be the star of the show and I came across this amazing looking soup recipe in The [...]

Bread doesn’t have to mean sandwiches and breakfast toast. As these Nigel Slater recipes show, bread can make a summer salad more substantial or make a side dish more filling. His ‘Salad of peas, beans and bread’ is an unusual combination and the perfect dish if the usual leafy salad doesn’t quite satisfy or fill [...]

Earlier this summer, I wrote about freeganism, where people salvage perfectly good food from being sent to landfill. It’s usually a sandwich or a carrot that was on the shelves just moments earlier, but was then deemed unfit for sale. In today’s Irish Times, Conor Pope has an interesting piece on Mark Boyle, a Donegal [...]

It has been a great summer so far for growing and the strawberries haven’t let me down. They taste unbelievably flavoursome and are the stawberriest strawberries I’ve ever tasted. This is the first year I have grown the fruit and I had no idea that there would be such a bevy of them. In fact, [...]

Well the first of my crops are ready to pick. Unsurprisingly, the peas are the first to make an appearance followed by the lettuce. Peas are plucky little fellas that will keep giving and giving and are unbelievably hardy. I cultivated them from seed in April and planted them outside in May. I also kept [...]

If you have been planning a vegetable patch and cultivating plants over the last month or so, then you’ll be at stage two now. I’m really thrilled with the results considering I was trapped abroad for two weeks but a friend kindly watered them for me and now they are in perfect condition for planting [...]

Note that it is international Grandmother’s Day on April 25th, and for the second year running Slow Food Ireland will be celebrating in earnest. How? By celebrating those precious skills that might otherwise be lost: think, baking cakes, sewing seeds and catching fish. Grandparents, Slow Food Ireland remind us, are the “guardians of inherited wisdom,” [...]

Recently, I sent my partner on a course at Ballymaloe Cookery School, as a birthday gift. The course was called ‘How to Keep Chickens in your Garden’. Result? We now have three baby hens pottering around our back garden, soon to be producing lovely eggs for our family. Darina Allan has plenty of courses like this, like [...]

I moved to the country three years ago and I have been growing my own vegetables and herbs each year. It is so satisfying and you don’t need to live in the country, have a big garden or even have a garden at all. When we lived in Dublin we had cabbage, mint and broccoli [...]