'The polytunnel was jiggling like a whale with fleas'

ANOTHER LIFE:'IF YOU'VE GOT enough ground to grow spuds for a year, what can they do to you, really?"

This half-jokey mantra of mine popped up as solace on the morning after the storm, as, perched on a stepladder, I applied sticky tape to a flapping rip in the polytunnel. Watching the tunnel jiggling in the gusts like a whale with fleas had been the usual test of resignation.

Some salvaging thoughts of the sort must also occur to the squadrons of small farmers who did, indeed, grow potatoes again this year after years of applying their skills almost full time to distant, now redundant constructions. It was a fine harvest: a friend breaking long-fallow ground in his fields could scarcely believe the heroic size of potatoes that came tumbling out of the ridge, a meal in each.

My own efforts, now somewhat diminished, were well enough rewarded, and sufficient clearings remain between the trees to feed two of us with vegetables with a fair degree of self-sufficiency. As I sowed next year’s garlic in a patch cleared of potatoes I thought of the many following suit as new readers for Fionnuala Fallon’s Urban Farmer column, injecting some reality into the home and property pages.

As people wait in line for municipal allotments even the urban garden offers prospects for growing food, and now, rather than next spring, is the time for breaking new ground. The average suburban garden will not, let’s face it, supplant much of the supermarket bill, but there’s something of great personal reward in growing more than shrubs and gladioli.

There are many good excuses for doing nothing of the kind. “It doesn’t get enough sun,” you may say, but even a few hours a day will keep most of the brassicas happy. Or there are too many roots from hedges and trees, or too much rubble from the builders: start making raised beds, gathering what soil there is into deep ridges between planks. What will the neighbours say? All right, forget it. Otherwise, plan the paths and start carving the lawn into slabs and stacking them under a tree to rot down.

The art of cultivation, making compost heaps, what to sow when, and so on, can be got from books galore, and fine grow-it-yourself websites (such as giyireland.com). Be slow, however, to take online advice from Texas and Ohio.

What usefully can I offer? Perhaps a system. Raised beds, never walked on, are increasingly valued as one ages. A reversible garden kneeler (to be sat upon sometimes, when not kneeling) offers great help in standing up again.

Most of my beds are covered with woven, porous black plastic, pegged down against the wind and smothering the weeds. You make holes to plant seedlings – or potatoes, with no more need to earth up.

A roll of large-mesh sheep wire from the co-op can be cut into sections that, bent over, make frames for low tunnels over the beds. Lengths of white Bionet are stretched over them and pegged down tightly all round. This lets through sun and rain but not cabbage or carrot-root fly or the moths that leave invisible green caterpillars in the heads of broccoli.

The tunnels are kind and warm to seedlings in cold springs and windy autumns – also, it occurs, to town cats (use enough pegs).

Such materials last more or less forever, but the outlay is scarcely a great saving. It may, indeed, also be true that organic and chemically grown food contain much the same molecules of nourishment, but freedom from 57 kinds of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides.

Why, then, go to all the trouble? One rather masculine reason may lie in a middle-digit gesture to Them, whoever, for the moment, one chooses Them to be – the garden as personal stockade, as it were.

And then there’s the yes-you-can, expertise bit, open ended and fraternal and extending to a whole new world of weather, earth, growth and nature’s other lives. You recover some sense of the seasons.

You may also, as I do, leave quite a lot of soil bare, for the sheer pleasure of handling it. Mine is velvety with glacial silt and shell sand; yours may be lumpy and coarse. Winter frosts are great for breaking clods down into the fine tilth the books command, and my hunch is for another freeze (as I write, indeed, the first snow is on the mountain).

Each autumn, as so much of the acre sprawls into decay, I am tempted to wonder where the energy and optimism will come from next spring, in the considerable marathon of growing our own. But energy and optimism spring up from the ground with the first twin peep of leaves.

Eye on nature

While walking in the Comeragh Mountains recently, on a wet grassy hillside beside a conifer plantation, I found three pieces of a soft, lightweight grey substance on the ground. I thought it might be a decaying, empty honeycomb. Helen Lawless, Rathdangan, Co Wicklow

From the photographs you enclosed, they were empty wasps’ nests.

This autumn we have seen new behaviour in the local rooks. Under the horse- chestnut tree they poked at the fallen shells and flew off with whole chestnuts. Later they worked in the tree, knocking at the opening shells until the chestnuts fell to the ground; then they took them away.

Barbara Haskins, Cloona, Co Kildare

I have noticed magpies in our garden raiding the bird feeder or taking bread thrown out on the lawn and hiding it under leaves or behind small logs. Is this normal in birds?

Tom Bailey, Lisbellaw, Co Fermanagh

Yes, for magpies and some others of the crow family.

Every year an autumn crocus pops up in my damp lawn under an azalea bush, where it struggles to survive under the heavy fall of sycamore leaves.

Lynn Hill, Roundstone, Co Galway

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or viney@anu.ie.

Please Include a postal address