Grow real Irish coffee
QUESTION Is it possible to cultivate coffee beans in a greenhouse in Ireland?
IT’S perfectly possibly to grow coffee beans in a greenhouse or in a warm spot indoors, despite the Irish weather, but it takes much time and patience and the results are not always guaranteed.
People have tried growing coffee beans that haven’t been roasted, from sources like Bewley’s, but they haven’t worked out. However, it’s perfectly feasible to get coffee seeds and start growing your own coffee plants. Coffee seeds can be bought online, which means that you can cast your search far and wide; here in Ireland, one online source worth trying is seedaholic.com which is based near Westport, Co. Mayo. It offers over 2,000 varieties of seed.
One perfect example of coffee being grown in a greenhouse in this part of the world came from the Eden Project in Cornwall. In 2008, it grew coffee beans like this and then used them to make the first professional cups of coffee in the UK made from locally grown beans. Incidentally, Cornwall is also known these days for growing tea, near Truro.
But staff at the Eden Project said that so much work went into growing their coffee beans that if they had costed the endless hours of work, each cup of coffee would have been priced at €25!
To grow your own coffee beans, the organic sort, you need somewhere that has about 12 hours a day of diffused sunlight, constant humidity and warm temperatures by day and night, to mimic tropical conditions. So a greenhouse, window sill, sunroom or close to an indoor hot tub can work perfectly well. Garden centres will provide the organic soil you’ll need for growing the beans.
You also need to choose your coffee variety carefully. Most commercial coffee i s either arabica or robusta; the former is self-fertile, so just one plant will pollinate itself, whereas robusta needs several plants together for pollination. After about nine months, the flowers will start turning into coffee fruits, which look a little like cherries. If you leave a coffee plant long enough — several years — it can grow up to seven metres in height, or even more.
Coffee has long been popular. It was a widely enjoyed drink in the Muslim world long before it came to Europe; the first coffee house in Contstantinople, now Istanbul, in Turkey, was opened in 1475, but coffee houses didn’t start to become popular in Europe, in places such as Vienna, until the 17th century.
These days coffee is more popular than ever, whether as granules or roasted beans.
But as uncertain weather conditions hit many of the world’s coffee growing regions, coffee is becoming scarcer and so more expensive. Coffee prices have gone up considerably over the past year and more price rises are on the way. So growing your own at home from seeds might be the perfect solution to continue enjoying this refreshing drink.
David Dunne, Co. Wicklow. the intention of declaring himself High King.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t take Tara without a fight and lost the battle. He sent word for Strongbow to come to help in person, and in 1170 the Norman Earl arrived at Wexford at the head of an army of Norman cavalry and Welsh bowmen. This event marked the true start of the Norman invasion.
This small but well-trained force quickly established a presence, capturing Dublin before moving on to pacify the rest of Leinster. To cement the alliance with Diarmait, Strongbow married his daughter and became King of Leinster upon his father-in-law’s death in 1171.
Worried that the Norman army in Ireland was becoming ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’, Henry invaded in order to claim his feudal rights over his vassal Strongbow.
Henry gained the backing of the English Pope Adrian, who declared him feudal overlord of Ireland, the act that justified the English claim to the island for the next 400 years.
The Normans established colonies everywhere but Ulster, where the Irish chieftains called on the Scots for help. The Norman heritage in Ireland can clearly be seen in the castles and cathedrals they built. They were unable to exercise full control over the country, so over the next 30 years it was broken into three distinct areas of power. The first was the Pale, an area stretching about 30 miles around Dublin which the Normans ruled and where they introduced Norman feudal law.
The second was Ulster and the south-west coast, which retained the traditional Irish rule, while the third, the remaining area (about 70 per cent of the country) fell under Norman-Irish control.
As the Normans intermarried with prominent local families the rule of the English kings declined and became more of a token than a reality. After 200 years, the only remaining land under the full English rule of law was within the Pale. The reality elsewhere was the leadership of the clans that the Normans married i nto, and which formed loose alliances to fight each other or the few English monarchs who tried to re-establish control.
This was to change when Henry VIII came to the throne and required that ‘all Irish gentlemen’ hand over their lands to the English crown.
Bob Dillon, Edinburgh. opportunity to compete with the slow and inefficient cross-Channel sea ferries of that time, using air cargo planes that had seen service in the Second World War.
His Silver City airline commenced air car ferry services in 1948, flying from a grass airstrip at Lympne, Kent, to Le Touquet.
A former RAF airfield, Lympne was just 47 miles from Le Touquet. Later, in 1954, Freddie Laker’s ‘Channel Air Bridge’ established a competing service, flying from Southend to Calais. By the time of the Morecambe and Wise film, in 1966, Silver City and Channel Air Bridge had merged to become British United Air Ferries (BUAF), and were operating services from Lydd (‘Ferryfield’) airport in Kent to Le Touquet.
The mainstay of these airlines’ fleets was the Bristol 170 Freighter, which could carry two automobiles and their passengers, and later, the slightly larger ‘Superfreighter’.
The noses of these planes opened like doors, and the cars rolled down a ramp. As the Bristol Freighter took only three cars and 16 passengers, boarding was a swift process, while the flight itself took just 25-30 minutes. In the early Sixties, approximately 100,000 cars were carried each year, at a typical cost of Stg£25 each way, and Lydd airport was busier than Gatwick.
However, aircraft manufacturers were not keen to design replacements for these ageing cargo aircraft, while the sea ferries had become larger, faster and cheaper — and in the 1970s, cross-Channel hovercrafts provided a f urther choice. These, and other financial problems, meant BUAF’s air car ferry service ceased in 1977.
Jacqueline L. Faulkner, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.
QUESTION An earlier answer suggested that ‘the colonisation of Ireland by the English started with the Normans’. What is the story of this invasion?
THE Norman governance of Ireland was comparatively short-lived, lasting only 200 years. However, it established an English claim to the island that would see a continued conflict, which colours Anglo-Irish politics to this day.
The process started when, in 1167, the King of Leinster was deprived of his kingdom by the High King of Irel and, Turlough Mór O’Connor. Diarmait Mac Murchada (anglicised as Dermot MacMurrough) sought the aid of the Norman-English King Henry II to recover his throne and Henry obliged by allowing him to recruit soldiers.
Robert Fitz-Stephen helped Mac Murchada to recruit a mercenary army of Norse and Norman soldiers including the Earl of Pembroke, Richard de Clare, also known as Strongbow. In 1169 Diarmait took his army to Ireland and quickly recaptured Dublin. The rest of Leinster soon fell.
He then marched on Tara, seat of the High Kings of Ireland, with
QUESTION In the 1966 Morecambe and Wise film That Riviera Touch, they are shown flying into Le Touquet airport in a plane that also carries their car. Was this a real service and how expensive was it?
IN THE late 1940s, British Air Commodore Griffith James Powell saw an