A successful gardening venture in Birr is good for body and soul

THE beginning of this year was a depressing moment for many in Birr when the long-running and much-loved vegetable garden known as The Growery closed its door to the public for the last time and underwent a process of dismantling and removal.
The Growery committee continued to meet and discuss things but we were without a home. My wife Rosalind put her mind to the problem and came up with a possible solution, a Dublin gardening programme called “Community Roots.” Rosalind got in touch with the couple who run Community Roots, Scott Bryan and Caitriona Kenny. Scott and Caitriona agreed to attend a meeting in Rosalind's art studio, Tin Jug, which brought together several local people. This was a very promising start.
The concept of Community Roots is that it connects Garden Owners with garden-less Budding Growers living nearby and looking for a patch to grow their own food. We ran a publicity campaign in Birr asking for people to join our new venture. The response was excellent. Within a few weeks we had achieved our target of ten Garden Owners and ten Budding Growers. More meetings were held, raised beds were constructed and soil was delivered. A WhatsApp group was set up connecting all the participants.
So far this new movement in Birr has been a real boon and has been something of an antidote for the disappointment of the closure of the Growery's old premises. The Growery committee continues to seek a new premises but in the meantime Community Roots has been a very consoling force for good.
Growing your own veg is the essence of wellbeing. For many of us gardening provides us with good exercise, immersion in the outdoor world and a sense of achievement. For those of us who are suffering from life's difficulties, who might be feeling that the rug has been callously pulled from under our feet, gardening provides therapy and a means of escaping reality with its lack of feeling and understanding.
Gardening of course sometimes brings success and sometimes failure. Over the years I have had plenty of failures - I have planted various herb and flower seeds and nothing happened. I made a few stabs at carrots and nothing emerged from the ground. My spuds were badly damaged by frost one year and during a drought I didn't water them enough which led to a poor crop.
For me gardening is an activity which should be kept untainted by any signs of ego or competition. We shouldn't be derogatory about other people's efforts. It should be done for the pleasure of the thing in itself.
It's always a lovely moment when you see the first shoots of the vegetable you've sown rising above the soil. Harvesting is another lovely, satisfying moment; as is the eating of your produce which usually tastes better and fresher than what you would purchase in the supermarket.
As well as growing the foodstuffs which I find especially delicious I am also swayed by those crops which are particularly hardy and do well in Irish soil. In this category comes rocket, kale, spinach, parsley, mint, oregano, chard, chives, broad beans and peas.
Rosalind and I enjoy watching BBC's Gardeners' World presented by the affable and incredibly famous Monty Don. Monty Don has also written many books and in one of them, "Down to Earth", he points out that to grow your own food, harvest it and share it at the dining table with family friends is one of life's great pleasures; you are eating food fit for kings. "You become nourished by the earth," he says, "by your labour, by the intimate and unbroken connection with the ingredients themselves, and by the profound satisfaction of knowing that no one in an office constructed that meal as part of a profit-forecast spreadsheet - let alone used and abused labourers, and abased them for a pitiful wage." He's clear-eyed about growing your own produce, pointing out that we often can't be as self-sufficient as we would like to be. He points out that more important than aspirations of achieving certain levels of self-sufficiency is the simple sense of self-esteem which vegetable growing brings us. Vegetable gardening can also become somewhat technical with a number of subjects coming into view looking for our consideration, such as crop rotation, soil requirements, an enormous variety of vegetable seeds, and the challenges presented by the seasons. While this can be very interesting, as in many things in life it's best to not over-complicate things and we should try to keep matters reasonably simple. Monty Don says the ultimate point of growing your own food is mental and physical wellbeing: "Grow good vegetables with honest hands, make a meal that is shared around a table, and you have the bedrock, the essence of wellbeing."