Doing what comes organically

IN the bud burst of willow and hawthorn, a haze of exquisite, silvery green marks out the hidden streams and by roads among the little drumlin hills of Leitrim, making it quite my favourite county in which to listen for the first chiff chaff or willowwarbler. But for a couple of decades, Leitrim has also been a proving ground for sterner stuff human endeavours needing the stubbornness and resilience of the willow just to last from one spring - to the next.

In the mid 1970s, Leitrim attracted a loose colony of settlers with ambitions to try out "alternative" ways of living: they were a hardier lot on the whole than their counterparts in West Cork - less fond of the lotus, not to mention the weed.

Leitrim land was cheap and available, but also some of the worst on which to set up a smallholding: silty, stony, poorly drained daub, dumped in the wake of glaciers. Here the incomers, a mixed bunch mostly from Britain and beyond - set out to do everything the organic way. Having shared, at some remove, many of their principles, and loyally subscribed to their magazine, Common Ground (now in limbo), I can remember how eccentric it was in the 1970s to argue that organic ways had any application beyond ones own back garden. The late Michael Dillon, an old friend and respected, down to earth agriculturalist, looked in on our acre from time to time, and we would inevitably end up debating the matter over a bottle or two of home made gooseberry wine.

If it weren't for intensive, chemical farming and battery hens Michael insisted, the poor of the cities would not have eggs on their table, or eat fresh vegetables, or have meat more than once a week. Organic farming was all very well but it could only work in a two tier market, in which the haves paid special prices for organic food and the have nots ate the rest. He has been proved largely right, as supermarkets fill their special, middle class shelves with "organic" lettuces and apples at a suitable mark up, and as affluent customers overwhelm the networks for organically produced beef, pork and chicken.

But at least there's nothing eccentric now in making the case for growing and farming organically, and raising livestock as naturally as possible. It's an acceptable ideal and a real alternative - one which should find Ireland at the forefront, as part of its green image. Instead Austria, Spain and Germany take the lead and swing official weight behind a drive for organic food, while our own Department of Agriculture and its field advisers seem suddenly to have grown too old, too set in their agric chemical ways, to show much energy for change.

There are, it is true, the premium payments for farmers who become organic producers under the REPS scheme - small farmers, often half way organic already. It's a good advance, but with a fatal implication that organic methods, while good for the environment, are inherently marginal to real" commercial agriculture. This makes it all the more bizarre to be looking up a back lane in Leitrim for Ireland's first general organic training centre, and to find it springing directly from those "alternative", blow in energies of the 1970s.

They are synonymous, in many respects, with the doggedly longhaired, bearded figure of Rod Alston, and his creation of Eden Plants, at Rossinver, from a derelict cottage and a chaos of thorn, and bramble. Working beside a long succession of helpers, he has turned it into a herb nursery to name just the most obvious activity - that hundreds of people every year drive many miles to find.

Back when he began trying to sell herbs part of the vegetable co operative founded by himself and, his Common Ground friends, the Yeats country restaurants saw no point in using fresh herbs when dried were so much more convenient. Now, chefs have built gourmet reputations partly on the produce of Eden, conjuring spicy winter salads from the purslane, rocket, mizuna and coriander that flourish in its polytunnels. Such finesse must have counted with Darina Allen when she joined him on the board of the new Organic Centre.

Another recruit is Alan Gear, executive director of Britain's biggest organic gardening organisation, the HDRA. Its demonstration centre at Ryton, in Essex, draws visitors in their thousands, and something of the same sort is obviously the ambition of the Organic Centre at Sraud, across the valley from Eden, and a separate, non profit enterprise.

It's on 20 flat acres, some of it quite reasonable land, and is backed by an ingenious patchwork of funding, with the EU and Exchequer at one end, and 122 "friends" and commercial sponsors at the other. FAS is putting through the first half dozen local trainees as organic horticulturalists so someone, at least, has faith in what Leitrim and Sraud can do.

The centre is a pretty bare scene just now, with the "model back garden" (salsify, what's that?) beginning to push through their thick mulch of compost. Beside it are two big polytunnels for the serious salad growing, and beyond it the field scale plot for commercial vegetable production. By summer, I am promised, it will look as lush as Ryton.

Attending one of Rod Alston's days, you could ask him how he trained his squad of slug gobbling ducks to walk around, and not over, the lettuces.