There has been plenty of wind recently, but it hasn't defeated Joy Larkcom. Jane Powers meets the 'Vegetable Queen'
Since her move to Ireland in 2002, the conversation of the woman known as the "Vegetable Queen" keeps swinging back to the same subject. It's not rain (though she now has more than twice as much as at her home in Suffolk). Nor is it slugs and snails, despite the fact that she was collecting over 100 a night for the first six or seven months here. And it's not the lack of frost, nor the longer growing season - both of which came as pleasant surprises.
No, the thing that Joy Larkcom returns to again and again is the wind. And, to be fair, there is an awful lot of it blasting around her and husband Don Pollard's half-acre patch in west Cork. The prevailing wind is from the south-west, and how it prevails: seemingly non-stop, except of course, when it switches around to attack from another direction. "The east wind is the worst, it's bitter, it slices through the garden," she says. "But then we get these vile north winds as well. Oh, and there's the salt damage too - I'd never seen that before. The sea is about 700 metres away. But I suppose you get used to it," she says optimistically.
Optimism is a quality that she has in barrow-loads. Most of us would have despaired at the thought of gardening at all on this salty, windswept plot. "The number of people who said that we wouldn't be able to grow anything!" she laughs. And if there is just a hint of triumph, it is completely justified. When I visited last summer (her second proper growing season), she had perhaps 100 or so varieties of edibles on the go, not to mention 40 espaliered and cordon-trained apples (of 20 different cultivars), and a covetable purpose-built greenhouse full of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, salady things and seedlings (and snoozing cats).
She has taken action against the gales by planting three- and four-deep layers of trees and shrubs that she hopes will be salt- and wind-resistant - a mixture of about 40 deciduous, coniferous and evergreen species. Inside this defence there are infant hedges of evergreen oak, olearia and escallonia. But her greatest weapon is windbreak fencing of mesh material. It embraces the entire garden, swathing it in a gauzy shield of black and green, on a framework of stout timber posts. There are even more windbreaks inside the boundary, fringing the beds of a fan-shaped potager - and lending the garden the look of a horticultural art installation.
While the living screen is growing, the netting diffuses the wind. "It chops it up a bit," explains Joy. And more to the point, it lessens its force. On a blustery day her wind gauge (now, alas, broken) may read 20 mph beyond the fence, but inside the protective mesh, the reading is halved.
Perhaps that's enough about the west Cork wind, although it's hard not to be infected by Joy's preoccupation with it - and her enthusiasm for finding ways to deal with it. As with the rest of her gardening, the wind has become a project, a matter for research and experimentation - and careful documentation.
It is her urge to delve, test and note that makes Joy Larkcom such a valuable garden writer. She has travelled all over the world on the trail of the unusual vegetable, and has studied local methods of growing and commercial operations alike - adapting the best of each process for home growers. Her books on kitchen gardening are laden with the common-sense fruits of her investigations, and are possibly the best in their field. Grow Your Own Vegetables is my constant companion, ready with a reassuring and authoritative word whenever I lose my way in my own tiny potager. Her Creative Vegetable Gardening shows that veggies can be grown stylishly in the smallest of spaces, and The Organic Salad Garden runs from the small, but nutritious, lentil sprout to the towering tree spinach.
Joy's move to Ireland was to be a retirement, but there is little dozing or dawdling in the Victorian farmhouse on the hillside. She is constantly sowing and planting, noting and planning, while Don - the husband - is winning the land in the half-acre with spade, blade or lawnmower.
The garden is cultivated organically, with liberal applications of seaweed collected after stormy weather on nearby beaches. Joy also grows a great stand of comfrey, which she uses to mulch vegetables: "We cut it and let it wilt for a day or two. It makes a good mulch, as it lies down nicely. And we always put it in the trenches before we plant tomatoes, as it's high in potash." The comfrey plot yields three cuts a year, and in early spring its first growth "makes a shelter belt in itself. I plant onions in the lee of the comfrey."
The soil is alkaline, well-drained and stony - and fertile. Too fertile for the mini-meadow that Joy had attempted, but perfect for many vegetables: "The root crops have been amazing. We've had the biggest, loveliest celeriac we've ever had, and parsnips, even when we sowed them late and forgot to thin them." Spinach and chard do well, as do brassicas, "so long as you stake them. We had cauliflower ripped out of the soil early on!"
French beans and runner beans, however, have been a disappointment, having been felled by the terrible trio of wind, cold and slugs. Still, the amount of other produce that has been coaxed out of this once-inhospitable plot is tremendous - ensuring that visitors leave with a basket of beetroot, a couple of courgettes or a bag of spuds.
And while the garden has some years to go before it unfurls itself from the protective swaddle of windbreak mesh, it's beginning to take shape. "The moment I saw it," says Joy, "I pictured a fan-shaped potager, and now when I go out, there is a fan. And the trees are growing. It's enormously exciting seeing a drawing board springing to life."
MEET JOY LARKCOM
Joy Larkcom and Don Pollard open their garden at Donaghmore Farmhouse, Lislevane (four miles west of Timoleague) tomorrow, January 23rd, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Introductory talk at 2 p.m., 023-40010. Admission, €5, all proceeds to the Friends of the Hollies Fund, 023-40010. (A recent fire at the Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability destroyed a newly-built cob house.) See the Hollies website (www.theholliesonline.com) for directions to Donaghmore Farmhouse.
Joy Larkcom will give an illustrated talk, "The Creative Vegetable Garden" in the Parade Tower at Kilkenny Castle on Wednesday, January 26th at 8 p.m. Admission is free. The evening is the first in a series of gardening talks hosted by Kilkenny Castle Park, in conjunction with the OPW