Gardening pioneer is embracing organic life
REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF FOUND THE JOURNEY TO ASHFORD WELL WORTHWHILE AS HE DISCUSSED PRACTICAL GROWING TIPS AND SUSTAINABILITY WITH ORGANIC GARDENING PIONEER WENDY NAIRN - AND HE WAS INTRODUCED TO KOHLRABI TOO.
WENDY Nairn is growing organic vegetables for decades, her career as a gardener stretching back to the days when she had to explain over and over again what the very word ‘organic’ means. Now her daughter is one of a duo of growers who are pushing the boundaries of chemical free horticulture in a field near Ashford to produce an astonishing range of crops.
It seems that the Nairn family is forever to the fore in challenging everyone to consider how the food they eat reaches the plate and how it should be grown. The message is that we may not always be able to throw diesel and pesticides and artificial manure at our problems as decision time for our planet approaches fast.
‘I’m from Dun Laoghaire,’ Wendy admits as she welcomes the reporter to her home, ‘but forty years in Ashford and the four children were brought up here in Ashford.’ She would never deny her Dublin origins, yet it is hard to imagine anyone more at home than she is in the cottage amidst the low hills above the village she has come to regard as home.
The house is cluttered with gardening paraphernalia, with sweet pea ready to plant in the expectation of early flowers in 2020. She slips easily from English language into botanic Latin as she explains that the same over-wintering approach may be applied to broad beans. Aqua dulce is apparently to variety of bean to do the job: ‘They don’t mind the cold.’ She has an acre of land here as her playground to experiment with such things.
Hang around with Wendy and the tips are sure to follow as members of her gardening class at An Tairseach in Wicklow Town doubtless testify after their lessons in sowing and composting. This fount of knowledge comes from hands-on experience as her original training was in other disciplines. She graduated in zoology at Trinity Collee and also qualified as a Montessori teacher.
‘I liked working with small kids,’ explains Wendy who is now doting grandmother. She married Richard Nairn and the young couple found themselves living in Dundrum – not the one in Dublin or the one in Tipperary but the Dundrum in County Down. They crossed the Border as Richard landed a job with the National Trust and it was there that the habit of keeping poultry and growing plants became ingrained.
A city girl, she was soon in tune with rural life: ‘Dundrum was a lovely place to be, even in the middle of the Troubles,’ she recalls. She also had time there to read and the books from which she drew inspiration were about self-sufficiency and the early stirrings of an organic philosophy of food production. To most people, the brief petrol shortages of the seventies were a temporary inconvenience and ‘The Good Life’ was a comedy.
To the Nairns, on the other hand, they helped to spark exploration of a vein of thought which Wendy has been mining ever since. When their stint in the North came to an end, the couple loaded up their hens, ducks and geese, bound for the cottage in Ashford. Her mother was already happily resident there after escaping from the big city, and there was room to accommodate the expanding family.
While her husband commuted to Dublin, Wendy masterminded the planting of fruit trees and the erection of glass-houses or poly-tunnels.
A network of organic growers was beginning to form in the eighties. Ideas of how to best produce vegetables in the Irish climate were exchanged and experimented with. As the family expanded, she kept on gardening, for the joy of it, for the taste of it and for the science of it
Along the way the Ashford enthusiast discovered that there was a demand for well turned out veg. A weekly market was established in Roundwood community centre hall as a showcase for small producers. Wendy brought whatever was surplus to family requirements from her own garden and found ready takers. The organic tag meant little to most of her customers in the early 1990s: ‘most of the people didn’t care – they just wanted fresh vegetables.’
She confides that there were those who questioned her sanity and that it could be lonely waving the organic flag in the face of general indifference. One kindred spirit for a while was Linda Saunders, chef at the Old Rectory in Wicklow who appreciated the fine produce coming from Wendy’s garden. The hotel and restaurant accepted deliveries of vegetables and also of edible flowers which became something of a signature in the presentation of dishes. Linda made a habit of serving salads, specially grown by her green-fingered collaborator, with leaves of fresh lettuce, rocket, mustard and the likes.
At the start, these unsolicited gifts were pushed to the side of many a plate but gradually diners realised that they were being offered a tasty bonus with their meal.
The chef also ordered yellow skinned courgettes - the gardener smiles at the memory - considered a novelty at the time. It was all great while it lasted but the hotel and restaurant business is a movable feast and Wendy too was not one to stand still.
She developed an alternative side-line as a teacher, bringing her horticultural skills to the classroom – and to the grounds of schools where there was scope to develop gardens. The first school to benefit from her expertise was Nun’s Cross where her own brood were on the roll. She remains a regular star turn at the primary school in Brittas Bay where the summer term is spent cultivating peas, beans, lettuce and lovely herbs under her direction.
She returned recently for one day after the holiday break to preside over bringing in the potato harvest with the staff and pupils. It is always a joyous experience seeing youngsters react with wonder and delight in uncovering great big spuds.
‘Most children are not really aware of where their food comes from, especially in cities,’ she observes ruefully.
As secondary students are pre-occupied with the points race, she reckons that changing this state of affairs must begin at the primary level. One bright spot on the curriculum for the older age group is transition year where some teachers are happy to take on a ‘sustainability’ module. Bray Educate Together have seized on sustainability, developing an extensive garden on their campus, much to Wendy’s admiration.
Her personal vision of sustainability does not embrace vegetarianism though she urges that humanity should consider eating more vegetables.
And she insists that growing enough to feed everyone is possible without resorting to methods which depend heavily on fossil fuels and chemicals. The trick is proving that organic is only a nice ‘Good Life’ idea but also a practical option.
Three years ago, the Nairn family acquired a 19 acre parcel of hilly land less than a kilometre up the road from home in the countryside near Ashford. Wendy had always hankered after growing trees, so now there is space to achieve that aim, with husband Richard and son Tim planting deciduous woodland on a section of the site. The 7,000 saplings are coming on well but the forest is a long term project.
More immediate returns are being made from ‘Hazel and Davi’s Farm’ where vegetable production is already into its second year. Hazel is a daughter of Wendy and Richard, while Davi is her Brazilian partner who hails from the city of Sao Paolo. Together they are transforming a section of the land into an impressively productive vegetable holding.
On westerly facing ground, the pair have set up a couple of poly-tunnels and more than 80 open air growing beds, each bed 10 metres long and just under a metre wide. The result makes a jaw dropping impression on any casual small-scale gardener who takes the trouble to call.
The H&D combination is growing a dizzy array of outdoor crops, the list including (deep breath) leeks, celery, kales, courgettes, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, french beans, bulb fennel, mange tout peas, sprouts, celeriac, scallions and something called kohlrabi. Sturdy tomato plants are the under cover staple, still turning out impressive fruit in the tunnels as winter approaches.
Twenty lucky subscribers roll up the lane each Saturday morning to collect their weekly box of veg. Corralled behind an electric fence, a flock of egg laying hens offer a clue as to where some of the manure to power this riot of fertility comes from. The regime is not only strictly organic but also embraces a philosophy of minimum digging, which makes the spade all but redundant.
Weed control is achieved not so much by physical effort as by using a mixture of hay and wood chip as a mulch. Davi illustrate the results of one no-dig experiment where seed potatoes – variety sarpo mira – are planted in layers of manure and compost, yielding a bounty of healthy tubers.
This may just be the future of Irish food production, as seen in a west facing field in the townland of Ballardbeg.
MOST OF THE PEOPLE I SOLD MY PRODUCE TO IN THE NINETIES DIDN’T CARE ABOUT ORGANIC- THEY JUST WANTED FRESH VEGETABLES