Recently in In the Garden Category

Forget growing your own vegetables - keeping chickens in the back garden is one of the fastest growing hobbies in Ireland. But how easy is it to make sure you have your own fresh-from-the-hen free-range eggs for breakfast? Caroline Hennessy shows you how on SilverCircle.ie.

Useful Contacts
Elaine Mackey runs regular courses on keeping chickens from her home in Ballinteer. More information is available on her website www.keepingchickens.ie or via email: elaine@keepingchickens.ie

Friendly forums with lots of useful information on keeping chickens:
www.poultrykeeper.co.uk
www.keepingchickens.myfreeforum.org

Chicken housing and equipment:
www.omlet.co.uk
www.fingerprint123.com
www.chic-hens.ie
www.sophieshens.com

With Little Missy turning one on Friday, we thought it was time to get her a few pets. Four pets, specifically, of the clucking, squawking Rhode Island Red variety. Between foxes and disease, we said good bye to the last of our original four hens in November and have really missed having our own delicious, fresh, free range eggs. Now, with LM getting to a stage when she can eat eggs for herself - the younger pair in my family were brought up on daily lunchtime "guggy" soft-boiled eggs - it was time for the next round.

Last time I found it relatively difficult to get started so here are a few pointers if you are thinking of getting your own hens.

• Mrs Fleming in Kanturk (064 7751154) was, again, our source for a couple of cardboard boxes which contained a foursome of lovely healthy crooning hens at €12 apiece. Last time we got point-of-lay pullets, aged about 16 weeks, but they still took their time to actually produce an egg. This lot were already laying so we got one on their first day at the cottage.
• They hens are back in the house and run that we bought from Fingerprint Wood Products in 2008 for around €480. It was well made and is still going strong but we do need to paint it with wood preserver after two years in the wind and wet.
• We feed them with a mixture of rolled oats, rye, barley and layers' pellets that we buy in large bags from the local co-op and store in a couple of plastic rubbish bins. Getting organic and non-GM feed is not easy. We also supplement their diet with fruit scraps, vegetable peelings and, while we're still making it for breakfast, dollops of porridge. Like all the other cottage residents, our hens have always loved porridge.

Having used random bowls (actually giant Ortiz tuna tins recycled from my time in Urru) for their feed and water last time round, we finally managed to source a decent, gravity drinker and a treadle feeder from MacEoin General Merchants in Kerry. They also stock Vermx herbal wormer, something which I found very difficult to source previously, and the Husband picked up a roll of electric fencing for his continuing anti-rabbit defences. Delivery - shipping cost €8 - was very prompt, even down to the courier, who knew the house from the Husband's homebrew orders, leaving the box in the shed when we weren't home.

• As regards books, we relied on the poultry chapters in John Seymour's Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency and The Smallholder's Manual by Katie Thear. Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills also has a section on keeping hens. And it's also good to have a copy of an egg cookery book handy. Four hens = lots of eggs.

Bring on the tortillas, poached eggs, meringues, mousses, mayonnaise and, of course, many, many cakes!

When Madeline McKeever's dairy farm proved uneconomic, she started saving her own seeds out of financial necessity. Now her company, Brown Envelope Seeds, sells a wide variety of organic seeds, all saved on her west Cork farm. She talks to Caroline Hennessy about turning adversity into opportunity. Read the interview on SilverCircle.ie.

Contact details: Brown Envelope Seeds, Ardagh, Church Cross, Skibbereen, Co Cork.
Email: seeds@brownenvelopeseeds.com
Web: www.brownenvelopeseeds.com
Blog: brownenvelopeseeds.blogspot.com

Despite the current cold snap and impossibility of actually doing anything about it, I've been looking at the raised beds in the garden and trying to plan for the summer to come. Last year we went on an inspirational (and very affordable) two-day gardening course at Glebe Gardens with Jean Perry, learned lots - and really enjoyed the flapjacks!

This year Jean is running an extended series of gardening courses including The No Dig Vegetable Plot, Vegetables for Small Gardens and Herb Gardening for Use in Cooking and First Aid for around €60 per day, including a delicious vegetarian lunch.

You can find out more about the courses on the Glebe Gardens website, follow Jean in the garden on her blog at The Glebe Journal and read her advice on tackling garden pests the organic way in this article I wrote for SilverCircle.ie.

If you grow your own fruit and veg, you can turn your garden gluts into winter treats. Caroline Hennessy has some useful tips and a few straightforward recipes for pickles and chutneys on EveryMonday.ie.

The Little Sister, who finishes college early on Fridays, was around yesterday so we took Little Missy for a walk that turned into an impromptu blackberry picking expedition.

Not being very organised, we had to use LM's hat for a basket, gathering (and eating) the berries while we strolled down the road. Blackberry season seems to be going on for ages this year, with a sunny September ensuring that there are plenty of fruit for eating and for cooking with rather than the usual one-or-the-other situation.

Our hatful of spoils, gently simmered with a little water and mashed with a banana, turned into an easy lunch for Little Missy. She devoured it (with a little help from the Little Sister!), lumps and all, making appreciative humming noises all the way through. Would that feeding babies will always come so easily.

Seasonal? What is seasonal? If you were to look in my garden at the moment, you might think that courgettes (and a few caterpillar-eaten cabbages) are the only things that are in season but my shortcomings as a gardener might not be best representative of what vegetables are available at the moment! Take a look at a farmers' market veg stall (or at a better managed garden) and it's easy to see that carrots and parsnips, the brassicas - broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower - main crop potatoes, runner beans, rhubarb and even Irish-grown peppers are all plentiful right now.

But it's not so easy if you do most of your vegetable shopping at the supermarket. With anything you could wish for in the supermarket all year round (I'm especially pointing the finger at you, tasteless Peruvian asparagus), it is sometimes difficult to know what you should be buying - unless you have prior knowledge. Bord Bia have just launched Best In Season, a website that focuses on promoting the fruit and vegetables that are available during their natural Irish season. Buying vegetables from Irish producers, whether organic or not, is vital unless we want to wake up some day and realise that all of our fresh produce is shipped in from overseas, leaving us at the mercy and whims of big business.

Their Best In Season calendar - divided into vegetables, fruit, salads and herbs - can be downloaded and printed off, there are recipes (including a great one for Smoked Mackerel and New Potato Salad), videos and links to a list of farmers' markets and the fantastic Agri Aware Incredible Edibles school growing projects. Well worth checking out.

With many thanks to the Best In Season people for the fabulous basket full of seasonal Irish vegetables.

I started growing my own vegetables when I was about 11. After a long winter hording my pocket money, poring over seed catalogues and haunting the seed display in our local hardware shop, I bribed my younger brother to help me dig a few beds in the overgrown back garden. An early adopter of raised beds, my growing spaces were enclosed with random pieces of wood that we filched from around the house when our mother's back was turned.

As it had been long neglected, the soil in the sheltered space was like black gold and everything I planted thrived, including - to my surprise - a set of tomato plants That summer we actually had enough sun to ripen a lot of the fruit, much to my mother's delight. She was always a sucker for real tomatoes after her own childhood experience of discovering the sweet taste that they had when picked ripe from the vine.

Despite that summer's sun, there were still plenty of unripened tomatoes left on the plant at the end of the summer so, ever the busy child, I picked them all and decided to make Green Tomato Chutney. Unlike jam making, which requires a little skill to figure out the setting point, chutney is child's play. Peel, chop, mix in saucepan and simmer (gagging at the vinegar fumes!) until it resembles something you might like with cheese: an easy make for any age. Only one thing - at the time, we weren't a chutney-eating household. I never did know what happened to all my lovingly filled and labeled jars.

This year was the third year in a row that we've had to pull up a collection of tomato plants without actually getting to eat a single tomato. What can I say? We're optimists. We just keep on trying. The plants had seemed very happy when they were planted out in the raised beds this year, putting on a great growth spurt. There were plenty of flowers that set well, swelling into a substantial amount of little green marbles, just ready for the sunshine. But it came too late. When we uprooted the plants to make room for a late planting of leeks on Sunday, I collected those green fruit and, now an affirmed chutney lover, decided to see if Green Tomato (and Apple - needed to bulk it up) Chutney is worth eating.

With some windfall cooking apples from my mother's orchard (a grand name for the few elderly, nettle-bound trees that still produce fruit!), this is the recipe that I used. I can't yet tell you if it's worth it or not as the chutney has to mature for at least a month before we eat it but it certainly uses enough vinegar to fumigate a whole house, never mind a small cottage! Best made on a day when you can leave all your doors and windows open. You can play around with the green tomato/apple ratio - I only ended up with a scant kilo of tomatoes so balanced it out with the apples.

...you just might find there really is such a thing as a free lunch. Discover wild mushrooms, or berries for a juicy jam in the untimate foodie treasure hunt. By Caroline Hennessy for The Irish Mail on Sunday on Sunday 13 September 2009.

No matter how busy things were for my Grandad, there was always time to go looking for mushrooms in autumn. If he spotted a patch of them down the fields, he would gather his army of grandchildren, supply us with buckets and lead us to the spot. We'd spread out, eagle-eyed for the tell-tale whiteness of field mushroom caps, bringing them back to Grandad for inspection. Once he saw that we had our eye in, he'd head off to another job on the farm, letting us scour the field before bringing our bounty back to the warm kitchen to be peeled and cooked for supper by my mam and aunts.

As a child, every walk in autumn was a feast waiting to happen. My cousins and I picked blackberries for Nana's jam, every second one a treat for ourselves, hunted for the tiny wild blueberries - known to us as hurts, to others as fraocháns - on walks in the hills, bit into crab apples for dares, puckering our mouths up against their astringency. I quickly learned how to tell if a blackberry is infested with worms and, when bringing in the cows for milking, how a grass stalk can be threaded with an unexpected find of mushrooms.

Sloes for soaking in gin, rose-hips for syrup and rowan berries for jelly: autumn was always my favourite time of the year. Growing up in a house where all jams and preserves were homemade, I was early indoctrinated with the benefits of getting something for nothing - never mind if it took hours in the process! I pored over old recipes, excitedly introducing elderberries into apple jelly and had to be discouraged from trying to make hedgerow wines long before I reached legal drinking age.

You can gather wild food all year round but the bright, crisp days of autumn make it the best season for variety and sheer flavour. If you're a nervous novice, there are many foraging courses on offer that will open your eyes to the abundance of edible food available - and remove the fear of picking and eating the wrong thing.

Aisling and William O'Callaghan at Longueville House in North Cork host an annual mushroom hunt in the grounds of their 18th century country house that is very popular with beginners and families. Aisling O'Callaghan attributes the origins of the hunt to her chef husband's own interest in wild food: "he was always foraging. [William is] a real hunter-gatherer and then he cooks everything that he collects. It's something we do with friends and with our kids." On the hunts, when mushroom expert Jim Fraser leads groups through the woods and fields that surround Longueville House, they have found a wide variety of edible fungi including ceps, chanterelles, girolles, blushers, chicken of the woods and hedgehog mushrooms. For those people worried about the possible dangers of mushroom picking, O'Callaghan has reassuring words: [Jim] will always have a chat beforehand to say this is what the poisonous ones look like and please do not pick. We also have a safety code and they're briefed on that so they're well prepared. It is vital, especially with children."

Although the hunts have been taking place for the last eight years, recently O'Callaghan feels that there is a lot of interest in going back to the simple things: "People love to come out and feel that they're learning something on the day. There's nothing as nice as tearing off down there with the dogs and the kids and the freedom of it. It's a fantastic day's entertainment."

For children who spend a lot of their lives indoors, going down to the woods and fields to look for berries and mushrooms is a completely new and very enjoyable experience. Keen forager Rachel O'Grady from Askeaton, Co Limerick feels that our lives have become so packaged that the tradition is in danger of being lost. "Children aren't taught anything, parents don't know what to pick," she comments. But there is a way of making a new tradition. "Get people out in the countryside, walking around and observing what's growing," O'Grady says, "that's the first step." She points out that foraging is part of a new interest in things that are local and seasonal, especially if people have more time on their hands these days. "Growing up in the country you're more aware of these things but they are accessible to everybody."

Whether you are out in the depths of the countryside or in the more urban setting of a city park, nature is freely and easily available. Sometimes it is just a matter of grabbing a basket, gathering the family, getting out there and seeing what's available. This gives us the opportunity to re-connect to our own childhood memories of these foods, to remember golden autumnal afternoons spent hunting with our own parents and grandparents for something edible amidst the trees and brambles.

"It's the passing of that experience and interest on to a younger generation," agrees botanist Olivia Goodwillie who has been running a foraging course at Lavistown House in Co Kilkenny for the last five years. Eating wild food can be very evocative, she finds, as people experience "the memories of picking blackberries from childhood rather than the actual taste of blackberries." Goodwillie emphasises how much children enjoy the chance to get outside, to climb fences, get wet and slop around: "It is a real kids' day - the big kids showing the small kids how to do it, how it was done in their day."

As well as foraging, Goodwillie is also passionately interested in good food so making something edible out of what's been picked is an integral part of the course at Lavistown: "The morning is spent foraging and the afternoon we light a fire, boil up our berries to make jelly and we boil water to make funny tea with things like dandelion roots and pine needles." Sometimes," she points out, "things may be edible but you might not know what to do with them after picking." One of the most popular things that she makes is a jelly, using a collection of different berries, including sloes, rose hips and elderberries. "The hedgerow jelly is absolutely delicious and especially if you make it over a fire, as we do, it has a smoky flavour which no jam that you buy will ever have."

Months later, on a cold January morning, as you eat the jelly on your toast, you're able to sit there and taste all the flavours of the time you spent outdoors. "You're eating memories," Goodwillie laughs, "you're eating your day."

Long gone is the era when knowing what to pick and when to pick it was the difference between eating and going hungry but discovering a hidden crab apple tree or beating squirels to the hazelnut crop still offers a primordial thrill. It's real hunter-gatherer stuff - even if you just eat all the blackberries as you go - but cooking with or making preserves from your gleanings is a tangible and delicious way of capturing the moment.

Foraging for wild food can be as simple (those blackberries again!) or as complex - mind the mushrooms - as you like but it's rarely less than satisfying. You may not quite manage to pick your dinner but you'll definitely have fun trying.

2009 Foraging Courses
Saturday 26 September - Foraging with Roger & Olivia Goodwillie
Lavistown House, Co Kilkenny. Ph: 056 7765145 Email: lavistown@eircom.net Web: www.lavistownhouse.ie

Saturday 26 September - Foraging with Darina Allen
Ballymaloe Cookery School, Shanagarry, Co Cork. Ph: 021 4646785 Email: info@cookingisfun.ie Web: www.cookingisfun.ie

Saturday 3, Saturday 10 October - Mushroom Hunting with Bill O'Dea
Avondale, Rathdrum, Co Wicklow. Ph: Mob 086 827 4899 Email: billodea@eircom.net Web: www.mushroomstuff.com

Sunday 4, Sunday 18 October - Mushroom Hunt at Longueville House
Longueville House, Mallow, County Cork. Tel: 022 47156 Email: info@longuevillehouse.ie Web: www.longuevillehouse.ie
Slow Food Ireland often run foraging events around the country. Check www.slowfoodireland.com for details.

Books
Wild Food by Roger Phillips: a well-illustrated reference book which includes good recipes.

The Easy Edible Mushroom Guide by David Pegler: pocket-sized, with accurate photos and drawings.

As a child, autumn was one of my favourite times of year. Going back to school was much eased by the fact that there were blackberries available for eating on nearby hedges, crab apples down the fields to be gathered and plenty of field mushrooms to be picked. This year, Little Missy in her sling for our daily walks, trying to grab any bramble that comes near her, we've been keeping an eye out for plump sloes and watching as the elderberries ripen, while eating lots of blackberries.

Last weekend we visited the Galway-based Schoolfriend. A chunk of Saturday afternoon was spent picking blackberries near her house, her three-year-old holding the bowl for us as the Husband, Schoolfriend and I picked the sweet, inky berries. Her 14-month-old kept an eagle eye on proceedings from the pushchair and Little Missy enjoyed the activity as their two dogs 'helped', grabbing mouthfuls of blackberries for themselves.

Back at the house, the Husband peeled and chopped a few apples and a couple of pears from their tree outside. The fruit was popped into the oven to soften while the three-year-old and I made a simple crumble topping: a big bowl for me, small one for him so we could both get our hands messy, rubbing the butter into the flour, then mixing it with the sugar and oats. We tossed the apple/pear mixture with a little sugar, a shake of cinnamon and the blackberries, spread the crumble over and landed it into the oven, just vacated by the Schoolfriend's Shepherd's Pie. It's easy to make dinner when there are a few people involved!

My Clonmel Cousin has been getting into the gardening gifts lately - and I've been the lucky recipient, getting a cheerful pink petunia and fuschia pot for my birthday and a Christmas present of a hazel tree with a pair of blueberry bushes. We had tried blueberries in the garden previously but they're big fans of acidic soil and I don't think we added enough peat moss into the spot where we planted them. This time round, when I was planting the bushes, I landed plenty of peat moss into the hole - with good results.

Our soft fruit area is near the clothesline so most of the fruit - that's also where our gooseberries, blackcurrants, raspberries and rhubarb are planted - bypasses the kitchen, going straight into my mouth as I hang out the (mostly pink) clothes. Having been down in Ladysbridge for a week, enough blueberries survived on the bush to cook with last weekend.

While the Husband took his cousin and her husband for a walk up the Canon Sheehan Trail in the Ballyhouras, Little Missy and I minded the house (and tent: short of space, the Husband, LM and I were camping in the garden for the weekend). We also took the opportunity to pick the ripe blueberries and stir them into the batter for Oatmeal Muffins. Warm out of the oven when the walkers returned, they didn't last for long and the mixture of oats and berries made us feel very virtuous, even when we were having thirds! Must try some blackberries next time I'm making those muffins.

Update 28 August: Forgot to give the link to the original muffin recipe! Here you go - Val's Oatmeal Muffins. Just add a large handful of freshly picked (approximately 100g) blueberries - or more! - to the batter before dividing it between the muffin cases.

When I was small, picking blackcurrants was a big job. My Nana had several large, old bushes in the orchard under her apple trees. Every year, little fingers were pressed into service to strip the bushes of their black bounty so that she could make, or supervise the making, of the pots and pots of blackcurrant jam that were to see the household through the winter.

Although I tried a couple of blackcurrants every year, at the time I didn't much like them as they seemed too bitter to my childish taste. The jam was another matter, however. When we would call to see Nana and Grandad after school, a doorstep of bread, slathered with butter and spread with inky goodness kept us fed till suppertime.

When we bought the cottage, I was delighted to discover a threesome of blackcurrant bushes out in the back garden. We missed the harvest the first year, still living in Dublin and only at the cottage over the weekend. Last year we were in France so the blackbirds beat us to the berries so I was determined to get my share this year. Last weekend I started picking, getting well over half a kilo from the first of the bushes.

Observed with interest by Little Missy, sitting happily outside in her chair, I used Sarah Raven's technique of picking and pruning at the same time. As I cut the fruiting branches, I stripped them of the blackcurrants but rain and grumpiness from LM sent me indoors before I could finish the job. And it seems that the blackbirds noticed. When I went back outside on Wednesday, to my annoyance the remaining berries had been plucked by beak.

Fortunately I had stashed the weekend's pickings in the freezer and, although there's not enough for jam this year, I do have enough for three of these cakes, much to the Husband's delight. This is easiest made in the food processor as you can whizz up the whole almonds in the bowl first before using it to process the rest of the mixture. You could use blanched almonds but I love the brown speckled effect from the unblanched nuts and the cake is extra moist as a result.

Seventeen gooseberries does not a summer make. I have a pair of bushes that were planted out next to the blackcurrant bushes last summer - one that should produce green berries, the other red. But this year, between the two of them, I could only hunt down a total of seventeen gooseberries. I think that they may be too sheltered where they are. There is a ditch behind them and the sycamores growing there tend, despite much cutting back, to hang over the fruit bushes. Come this winter, it may be time to move them to our developing mini-orchard at the back of the garden. The apple and pear trees wouldn't give too much shelter at this stage.

So what did I do with my scanty harvest? To make the most of it, I took a tip from Jane Grigson and stewed them for a little time with a bit of butter and a drop of water. We were out of elderflower cordial or I would have used that instead of the water. When the berries had broken down a little, I added some sugar, crushed them with the back of a fork, then swirled the cooled mixture through some natural yoghurt for a simple (cream-less) fruit fool. Don't sweeten the character out of the gooseberries. You want something tart and well flavoured. In fact, if you have the red gooseberries, I find they are so sweet that you may not need any sugar. They didn't actually make it into the photo, getting eaten by the Little Sister and I as we peered around the bushes, looking for more.

While nice in small amounts - and good for making the most of the few berries that you may be able to gather - this recipe would also be well worth trying if you had more than the seventeen gooseberries in your garden.

Last summer, when we had the Mallow Farmers' Market running outside Urru, we saw a lot of Patrick Frankel, a local organic vegetable grower. When he started coming to the market he had just started producing vegetables on his family farm near Doneraile and customers were delighted with the early fruit of his labours: spring onions, yellow and green courgettes, an assortment of tomatoes, new potatoes, peas and, my favourite, mangetout. I bumped into him a few times at the Killavullen Farmers' Market, always making sure to stock up on the mangetout - great shredded and tossed raw into salads or briefly steamed and served as a side - but hadn't seen him around for a while so I was delighted to see that the North Cork Organic Group had organised a farm visit.

The NCOG take their meetings out and about during the summer months. In June there was a visit to the Secret Garden Centre near Kanturk which we unfortunately missed. August's outing - the Sunnyside Fruit Farm in Rathcormac - is already up on the calender. After getting a total of 17 gooseberries off two bushes this year I need to pick owner John Howard's brains for some soft fruit- growing tips.

Although we had plenty of sunshine and showers last Sunday, luckily the rain stayed away for our walk. The four acres Patrick cultivates are situated on his family farm so alongside two busy polytunnels and many neat rows of outdoor vegetables are his father's working Percheron horses, a collection of pigs - one of which, much to the delight of the children on the walk, was nursing a couple of tiny piglets - a fabulous old walled garden, and, in the stables, a magnificant black Percheron stallion. He grows garlic in the walled garden alongside the old apple trees and a variety of other fruit and, in a one-for-everyone-in-the-audience-stylee, we were all allowed to pull a bulb to take home. Wet garlic - yum!

While admiring the neat rows of vegetables, the appreciative audience picked up tips on avoiding carrot fly infestation (Patrick uses a ground cover material to keep down weeds which doesn't give the flies anywhere to lay their eggs) and found out where he sourced the movable electric fence that keeps his hens away from the growing area. We've found our hens (now, sadly, down to two) happily digging up seedlings and making a nuisance of themselves around the raised beds, especially after an afternoon's weeding. The fence that Patrick uses might also give us a chance of keeping the rabbits away from targeting the few cabbage, kale and bean plants that are left.

Patrick, who is making tentative noises about a future vegetable box scheme for the area, is currently selling at the Coal Quay Market in Cork every Saturday. Watch out for the mangetout...

We were slow off the mark this year with our planting but now - finally - we have some produce from our garden. The salad seedlings that the Husband set in large pots (they are easy targets for the slugs and whitefly if planted out in the garden) are taking off so we now get to have more than just the one leaf per meal.

Herbs that I thought were dead - tarragon, marjoram, lovage, garlic chives - have resurrected themselves to be repotted and join the little container garden that lives outside my kitchen. I already have bay, rosemary, thyme, lemon thyme, both curly and flat leaf parsley, chives, sage and a large fennel there for the picking. The mint is taking over a damp patch near the ditch, we have high hopes for the corriander this year and the two basil plants that we got at the Killavullen Farmers' Market are recovering from a somewhat bumpy trip home.

Being able to use handfuls of herbs in cooking is one of the great joys of growing your own. I never could be bothered with those measly supermarket packets, especially after living close to Middle Eastern shops in Dublin that sold parsley, mint and corriander by the large bunch rather than the stalk.

The four raised beds out in the garden are playing host to a variety of vegetables, including beetroot, cucumber (a Siberian variety, hope it can cope with Ireland!), tomatoes, carrots and some very healthy looking shallots. So far, at least, they've survived the demise of Little - we don't seem to have much luck with cats - and the resurgence of our rabbit population. The Husband went to town with the potatoes, which are divided between one of the raised beds and several adjacent ridges. It's looking like we won't have to buy spuds for a while to come.

The most prolific edible crop, so far, has been the radishes. A variety from Brown Envelope Seeds called Scarlet Globe, their skin is a vivid red colour, a gorgeous contrast with the snow white flesh. We've been eating them tossed in with all leaf salads, they make a crunchy addition to my Warm Potato and Chorizo Salad on cooler nights and I'm loving Clothilde's combination of radishes, mashed avocado and smoked salt. I still have a little garlic and chilli manuka smoked salt from our last NZ trip which goes particularly well with this line-up of ingredients.

Clothilde also has a Radish Leaf Pesto recipe, although our leaves are a little too hairy to be really palatable, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves. If you also have a radish glut - some day we really will learn about successive sowing! - you can find some more recipes here.

My latest baking project - one that even takes longer than the three-day Sourdough Bread-making event! - is almost completed. All going well, the Husband and I hope to welcome a small new inhabitant to the cottage early next month, to join our family of two humans, three hens and one cat (yes, we're back to one again - sadly the road by the cottage claimed Large, our big tom cat earlier this week).

Things may get slightly sporadic around here over the next while as I try to fill the freezer with easily managable meals, stock up the store cupboard and fill the tins with baking that will keep us going for a while. There's not going to be much time for baking with a new baby in the house! Flapjacks, both Honey and Chocolate versions, and Ballyvoddy Tea Bracks are top of the list, baking-wise, while I have a large ham hock (just €2.49 from James Whelan's Butchers in Clonmel and it will feed us for days) just waiting to be turned into freezable pots of soup and several casseroles in mind for the savoury side of things. Anybody got any other suggestions?

Meanwhile, the Husband - inspired by our weekend course at Glebe Gardens - is concentrating on assembling four handsome raised beds so that we can plant up plenty of vegetables to keep ourselves well stocked for the summer. In preparation for planting, the spare room is playing host to several egg-cartons-worth of potatoes being chitted, or sprouted. This year we're going with Maris Peer (I was seduced by its salad-friendly properties) and, unlike other years, we decided not to plant them on St Patrick's Day after last year's crop rotted in the ground when inclement weather hit during the last half of March.

We were able to get the potato seed from Fruit Hill Farm through the North Cork Organic Group, along with a bag of shallots which I'm looking forward to growing. I rarely buy shallots as they are a little expensive but love to cook with them so it makes perfect sense to grow our own, especially if our one remaining cat can can keep the rabbits away. Otherwise, there just might have to be a few more Rabbit Stews!

It's looking like summer has already arrived in North Cork and the hens, although their numbers were reduced to three of the original four after a run in with a fox during the winter, are thoroughly enjoying the sunshine. No matter what weather we've had, they've still managed to produce a steady source (especially after I found their secret stash!) of dark yellow-yoked eggs for baking and cooking, as well as being entertaining company in the garden.

In honour of St Patrick's Day tomorrow, I'll be putting some of those eggs into an Irish Tea Brack or even, if the Husband hasn't finished off all my Sloe Gin, a Ballyvoddy Tea Brack. If you're looking for something Irish to make for St Patrick's Day, I've a recipe for a Beef and Red Wine Pie which, with a little substitution of alcohol, turns very easily into a Beef and Guinness Pie. Or you could always turn your hand to some Brown Soda Bread.

With this kind of weather, it looks like I won't be long in the kitchen as there is plenty of digging to be done to get the garden ready for the new season's planting. Time to join the hens, methinks.

Enjoy your St Patrick's Day!

After a relaxing, sunny weekend in Baltimore we've returned home with headfuls of ideas, lots of notes, a handful of mail order catalogues and lots of inspiration for our garden in 2009. Jean Perry, who owns the five acres and house at Glebe Gardens with her artist husband Peter, was our teacher for the two day course. They run a popular café on site, producing most of the organic vegetables, fruit and herbs that they use there from the raised beds and polytunnels in the gardens.

With just a dozen friendly participants from a range of backgrounds and locations, there was plenty to discuss and learn - our rabbit problem was a bit of a teaser but two of our classmates brought in a list of plants that aren't particularly tasty to rabbits and now we're looking at planting box hedges around this year's veggie garden. We're also hoping that the pair of tom cats that we got to replace our late lamented Puddy will soon go into action against the rabbits - although, judging by the look of them at the moment (asleep indoors), they don't seem to be getting themselves in shape for any serious rabbit action.

Jean uses the no dig method, with raised beds and plenty of mulching. I've read - with skeptcism - about this system before but it's much easier to get your head around it when you're standing in front of the beds and eating the produce (a delicious lunch of soup and cheese was provided, along with copious amount of biscuits that were partaken of at regular intervals to keep the brain active). I now know how to replant my seedlings properly (hold the leaves, not the stalk when moving them), the kinds of insects to attract so that the aphids don't eat most of my salad crops (ladybirds all the way) and that I can use a shredder and my left-over newspapers to make some extra bedding for the hens.

It was a great excuse to visit Baltimore and, particularly, the lovely Glebe Gardens once again, as well as getting energised about the coming year's gardening. Jean is running more courses in March - take a look on the site to see the dates - and the two days, plus your lunch (and lots of biscuits!), just costs €100. Time to dig out those seeds and get chitting seed potatoes!

We didn't have very many new potatoes this year so those that made it into the pot were treated like gold. We planted them, as normal, on 17 March - the traditional time in Ireland for planting the spuds, as far as I know, especially when they're earlies - but the weather was nasty after that so I think more than a few simply rotted in the ground. Between that, the terrible summer, the death of our cat and subsequent rise in the bunny population (we must not have been eating enough Rabbit Stew) it hasn't been an entirely successful summer in the garden. At least we've the hens to keep us fed and entertained, although when the weather was absolutely appalling there, last month, they seemed to go through a bit of a depression, egg laying dropping to just one per day. Fortunately they're now back up to a three-a-day average - making a lovely accompaniment to the few potatoes that we managed to salvage.

Supper ideas last night started with the potatoes and eggs, then I discovered a chunk of Gubbeen chorizo lurking in the fridge door so I went off on a warm salad direction. Unfortunately, my timing of the poached eggs did not coincide with the Husband's readiness for dinner so they're a little overdone, unlike Sarah's fantastic-looking ones. The measurements I give for the olive oil and sherry vinegar are very approximate - toss the salad, taste and see if you need any extra. A lot depends on the amount of flavoursome fat that your chorizo gives off as it fries.

Despite all the recent rain and bad weather, the range of vegetables available at the Mallow Farmers' Market continues to expand. As well as his fantastic salad leaves, which I eat for lunch every day, Morris from Gairdín Eden has been selling huge bunches of rhubarb and carrots. I also picked up some parsnips this week, along with a jar of West Cork Eden Honey – perfect for Honey Flapjacks, if I can save some back from the Husband and his toast!

My favourite thing to do with the smallest, sweetest carrots after I get them home on Saturday evening is to take them all off the bunch, scrub them well and eat them for dinner with a big bowl of homemade hummus. With a good chunk of one of Gudrun Shinnick's cheeses - herbed St Bridget, aged St Gall, spicy Cais Dubh - or some of the other cheeses that she sells on her stall (the soft Knockalara sheep's cheese has been very popular around here) it's a perfectly easy supper to eat outside in the sunshine (if and when that happens).

We've been waiting for the organic vegetables from Patrick Frankel, a new producer in Donneraile, and they started arriving in the last few weeks. On Saturday, his stall was manned by a helpful French girl, selling herbs, spring onions, yellow and green courgettes, an assortment of tomatoes, new potatoes, peas and, much to my delight, mangetout. When I shop for vegetables and fruit, I try to buy as locally as possible – first Ireland, then Europe, then I don't bother. Despite me inadvertently leaving the mangetout in work over the weekend, they've already made it into a large tub of Nigella's Sesame Peanut Noodles as well as a Potato Salad with Chorizo and Mangetout. The only thing I missed this week was one of my market staples, the smoked trout from Geraldine Bass of Old Millbank Smokehouse. I use it in warm and cold salads with pasta, potatoes or couscous, in risottos and oven bakes, panfried with spiced garlic butter and mashed into fish pâté. I just might have to take a trip to Friday evening's Killavullen Farmers' Market at the Nano Nagle Centre and see if she's there.

The next Mallow Farmers' Market will take place in the courtyard outside URRU from 10.30am to 1pm on Saturday 23 August.

...eggs a day. That's a dozen every three days, 28 in a week and 124 in a calendar month - and that's a hell of a lot of eggs to be used up! Redistribution has already started. If you're nearby and needing some free range eggs, just let me know.

During the summer, the Killavullen Farmers' Market moves to Friday nights for a time, which is useful for me going home from work, and I was delighted to pick up a couple of just-picked globe artichokes there last week from the Nano Nagle stall. The first time I ever encountered them in real life - having pored over how-to-eat pictures in my mother's cordon bleu cookbook as a child - was when I was (briefly) an au pair in Chamonix and they are a rare treat.

We ate them during the week, the stalks sliced off to the base and the artichokes then simmered in salted water, under a side pate to keep them immersed, until the point of a knife penetrated the base easily. I melted some butter, added a squeeze of lemon and landed the drained artichokes on the table, leaves to be picked off one by one and dipped in the buttery lemon dressing before we used our teeth to scrape off the tender nub at the bottom. As the pile of discarded leaves grew bigger, we eventually got to the heart of the matter. Once the hairy choke was removed we could savour our long-deffered reward, the sweet artichoke heart. After mopping up the last of the dressing with a crust of bread, then mopping our fingers and faces, we contemplated the debris left behind and determined to buy even more at the next farmers' market. Or maybe we just need to start growing our own?

After the excitement of our first - albeit cracked - egg, three out of four of the chickens have been earning their keep. We're still not sure who's holding out, but most mornings, when we go out to the run to feed and water them, there are three eggs waiting in the nesting box. They're small - I'm using two instead of one at the moment - but perfectly formed and, I didn't expect this, have an incredible flavour. It must be all the Ballyvoddy slugs that the girls pick up on their wanders around the garden.

Mornings working from home are enlivened by frequent checks on the foursome as they free-range around our half-acre. We live alongside a busy road so would like to keep them towards the back of the property. That's not what they think as they make their way towards the front of the house where the best of slugs seem to live, judging by their determination to make it there. I've taken to moving the computer to an outside table so that I can keep an eye on them (and on the cat, watching carefully as they scratch about), until they get too naughty and I have to herd them down the length of the garden towards their home. They like to take the scenic route, through some of the less-mowed parts of the garden, and our travels are enlivened by my swearing as they lead me through yet another patch of hidden nettle stalks and my bare ankles suffer.

With a half-dozen eggs arriving in the kitchen every two days, I'm turning to my recipe books for more ideas and Michel Roux's Eggs has already proven itself invaluable. My small cast-iron pan is getting used for regular omelettes and a couple of eggs poached on a bed of spicy lentils was very successful. I'm looking forward to making mayonnaise this week and we've also baked a couple with blue cheese in the heart-shaped ramekins we got from the Sculptor last June. I remember my Nana making Lemon Curd when there were lots of eggs to spare so I'll have to dig out her recipe. Then, with whites left over, there'll have to be a Pavlova some day for tea. Who would have thought that having hens would be so much fun?!

Our half-acre plot is surrounded by mature trees, including several elders that are currently blossoming in a profusion of heady-smelling, cream-coloured flowerheads. Rather than just admiring them this year and thinking - afterwards, of course - that I should have made elderflower cordial, last weekend I dug out my recipe, buckets and ingredients, made a special trip to the chemist for citric acid, picked a selection of the flowers and had it made in minutes. The recipe I used comes via my mother, who noticed one of her students drinking a bottle of elderflower cordial last summer and got her mum's recipe for me. Ever since then it's been sitting on the kitchen mantelpiece, just waiting for some elderflowers - and a little motivation!

There were tastings along the way, random teaspoonfuls here and there, as I tried to gauge the strength of the brew. I eventually strained and bottled the results after three days-worth of steeping. According to the recipe, this keeps well in the fridge for a couple of weeks or, if you don't think that you will use it up in that time, just freeze it in ice cubes, ready to be landed into a jug of water on a hot day. It's the scent of summer in a glass even if - as today - the rain is driving down.

On Saturday – two weeks after our (supposedly) point-of-lay pullets arrived – there was great excitement when the Husband discovered a little egg, still warm, on the bottom of the hen house. Unfortunately, by the time he found it, it was already cracked, proving that our chickens still haven't got the hang of things. The chicken that laid the egg managed to do it from her perch, rather than the nice cosy nesting box. Still, the cat was delighted to get an egg for her tea and hopefully it won't take too much longer for the rest of the girls to follow her example.

When you take the cost of the hen house and run into consideration, this is, as the Financially-Orientated Brother pointed out, the most expensive egg ever in the history of egg-laying. When the chickens get the hang of the egg-producing life, we are hoping that the average cost of each egg will come down quite a bit.

My Nana always kept hens. As a child, I spent a lot of time at her house - just the other side of the hill from where we now live - and hens were an ever-present, taken-for-granted part of growing up. Previously my Nana, a trained and skilled poultrywoman, had kept flocks of hens for breeding; by the time I came along she just supplied Dwanes, one of the local shops, with fresh eggs for sale at the counter. But there were still jobs for the grandchildren to do. One of the dreaded chores was that of collecting the eggs. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the straw-lined wicker egg basket banging against my Wellington-clad bare legs, I would go through the gate in the far corner of the yard, wander past the haggart with all its fascinating bits of rusty farm machinery, turn right on to the lane the cows ambled along twice a day for milking and, keeping close to the less muddy inside side, come to the old wooden hen house. After taking a deep breath of clean air, I would twist the old bolt across, opening the door into the musty fug of the hens' world and prepare myself for the egg search.

These were very much free-range eggs; the hens spent their days roaming through the nearby grove and surrounding farmyards. Very few of the outdoor escapades of my cousins and I didn't involve encountering some squawking hen in an unlikely place. But there were always a few indoors and they looked very imposing indeed, especially to a little girl who wasn't too much bigger than the basket that she carried. Most of the nesting boxes that lined the hen house were empty that time of the day but there were always a few hens in place to put the heart crossways in you as you pulled back the disintegrating curtains that gave the layers some privacy. Unlike my Mother and aunts, I could never bring myself to root under a hen for eggs, always too afraid that that shar-looking beak would seek to defend its owner from the unwarranted intrusion. I wonder how many eggs I left behind in those days?

On Saturday the Husband picked up four Rhode Island Red, point-of-lay pullets from a hen lady near Kanturk to populate our sturdy and stylish new hen house and run from Fingerprint Wood Products. The crooning and clucking from the girls as they figure out their new surroundings has unlocked a stream of long-forgotten memories. Every time we go into the garden there has to be time spent observing the new arrivals and marvelling at their antics. Even though we are keeping them confined at the moment, they have already managed - even at a remove - to terrorise the local tom cat who was paying visits to our own cat. The cat herself normally follows us around the garden as we work outside; her movements are now more confined as she tries to avoid being seen and commented on by the hens. Last night the Husband and I spent half-an-hour in and out of the run, trying to find a bowl or bucket that our ever-so-slightly dense foursome would recognise as a water receptacle. They walked around - almost into - the various water containers for quite a while but not once while we were there did they actually see what was in them. Figuring that they wouldn't expire from thirst overnight, we eventually left them to it. I think that my Nana would have been very entertained.

Although there has been lots of salad planted in the garden on recent weekends, including mustard greens, rocket and mizuna (at least I'll be able to distinguish between the plants after cramming in Ballymaloe for the salad leaves and herbs exams!), it's going to be a while before any of the leaves are big enough to eat. Then, of course, because our planting in succession routine is not entirely developed - despite best intentions - we'll have another glut to work through. But that's all ahead of us and, until then, I've been growing my own salad on the windowsill.

I bought a small, three-level seed sprouter last summer but it was much too warm in our Dublin flat so my first attempts weren't very successful. Now, on a bright windowsill in my unheated cottage, it's really coming into its own. It's on the window behind the sink which makes it easier to remember to rinse the sprouts twice a day - it's not so good when you forget although the smell will help you remember.

I started off using the seeds that I bought at the same time as the sprouter - broccoli (a bit weedy), fenugreek (spicy addition to salads), mustard (peppery, really good in sandwiches) and red clover, which is all a bit anonymous. Getting more adventurous, I recently moved on to the contents of the store cupboard. Mung beans - the bean sprouts we all know - have been a success, especially in their crunchy and juicy early stages but the quinoa never really grew properly and the wheatberries were much too much like grass to be palatable. I suppose that's why wheatgrass is normally used for producing juice. My absolute favourite - so far - are the sprouted lentils. I've been switching between the simple brown and crunchier Puy lentils, both which are great mixed with the stronger-flavoured mustard and fenugreek sprouts in salads and stuffed into sandwiches, pitta breads and wraps. With this tiny garden, I'm much better with successive planting - hopefully we can make it work better outdoors this year!

If you're interested in reading more, there's some very useful information about sprouting in the recent Guardian Grow-Your-Own Guide and the ever-useful Nigel Slater gives a few ideas about how to use them here.

Spring may not be properly sprung, judging by this week's storms, but there's still a lightness in the air, a brightness in the mornings and evenings which translates itself onto the dinner table. Not being entirely well organised gardeners, it took us a while to figure out which of the selection of plants still standing (or half battered down) in the garden is kale - the other that we still have growing is purple sprouting broccoli or PSB, although not yet P or S, although we still have our fingers crossed. We're growing a variety called Ragged Jack, with large frilly leaves, and I had only ever encountered curly kale before this so initially refused to believe that it was edible. After confirming that it is indeed edible - more than that, it's actually delicious, with tender and juicy leaves - we have been eating it with abandon.

During the dog days of winter, it made frequent appearances as a last minute addition to stews and soups - that was if someone felt like braving the nasty weather and Very Dark Garden outside. Happily, the Husband's head torch (normally used for camping) proved very useful in a winter countryside setting. Washed, de-stemmed and shredded, it just takes a few minutes to cook in a pan of bubbling winter-time food, softening into a delicious bright greenness in minutes. But there's more to kale than using it just as a last-minute addition other meals. Here's a recipe for those times when you feel like you need a spring tonic - just kale, garlic, chilli, olive oil and lemon juice. After a plateful of this, perhaps on a slice of your own homemade bread rubbed with more garlic and drizzled with some of the olive oil you used to cook the kale, you'll feel ready to face whatever the weather may throw at you.

It's not exactly salad time yet but, when a gloriously sunny Sunday coincided with the local point-to-point races and the family coming round for a pre-race lunch, I couldn't resist poking out an old bag of puy lentils (still working my way through two kitchen's-worth of ingredients!) to combine with the last of our Ushiki Kuri squash.

This squash variety is due to become a garden staple - we had a fantastic yield last autumn, they stored well and the skin is thin enough to be eaten, all good things from a small garden patch. I decided to give the squash a Moroccan accent, roasting it with a sprinkling of Ras el Hanout. The current blend that I am using is a sweetly aromatic sachet that I got while in Morocco, and contains, amongst other spices, black and white peppers, cloves, maniguette or grains of paradise, ginger and rose petals. You can find numerous recipes for Ras el Hanout online (including this one from Greg Malouf) or, for this recipe, you can use a mixture of spices that you find appealing - cumin, coriander, cinnamon and cayenne pepper would do it for me.

I served the roasted squash on a bed of warm lentils, which I tossed in a chilli-spiked, citrus dressing, alongside a large empty-out-the-fridge-and-garden Tortilla, or Spanish Omelette, filled with potatoes, leeks, broccoli and bacon. Then it was off to the races - although some people were luckier with their betting than others!

The veggie garden is looking a little sad at this stage in the year. Just a few scraggly kale plants, as-yet-unformed purple sprouting broccoli - but we still have some leeks, when we remember to cook them! We've recently been having a cold snap so I've been making lots of soups and, one day when I happened to remember that we still had to use up the leeks in the garden and actually had some potatoes in the house, I made a version of Clothilde's minimalist Leek and Potato Soup, which she in turn had adapted from Sophie Brissaud's recipe. As I was just after a stock-making session, I used chicken stock as well as water in the soup for more depth of flavour, and finished it off with dollops of ever-present yoghurt. This is very much an approximation of the recipe - I just didn't want to get out the weighing scales!

Rabbit is in season at the moment, at least according to one of the emails I got from Eat The Seasons a few weeks ago. I should tell the Husband although, with lush, fresh grass everywhere at the moment, I'm not sure our rabbits would venture into one of the cages for a carrot (even if it was a recently pulled one!) At least they've stopped trying to dig their way inside the fenced-off veggie garden recently and our purple sprouting broccoli, kale, sweetcorn, beans and silverbeet are all thriving.

Check out the article on rabbit here - like all Eat the Seasons entries there's information on the history of the rabbit and tips on buying, storing and preparing your bunny. No tips on cage-enticing though. There are also a few recipes (One-Pot Rabbit, Pot-Roasted Rabbit with Baby Leeks, Stuffed Rabbit with Harissa) that I might have to try the next time we get our hands on one and, for the vegetarians, they even include a recipe for a Welsh Rabbit!