A garden that gives so much

It’s hard to believe the Johnstons have only been in their Coronea home at the foot of Bruise Mountain for two and a half years.

It’s testament to what can be achieved in a limited timeframe, and with an even more limited budget. Passion and hard work more than make up for any such shortcomings. When the Celt visits on a wintry wet Wednesday afternoon, Therese has just taken a hearty pastry dish from the oven resplendent with tomatoes grown in her polytunnel. Her boys, James, Emmet and Jude dig in, and nowt goes to waste. Despite their youth they understand how food is grown, the effort and time required, and its value. The trio feature prominently in Therese’s Instagram account which charts their gardening exploits and free range eggs mini-business.

From a gardening perspective, front of house is all about the flowers. It was this that inspired Therese to start a virtual gardening club a year or so ago. A relative novice at flowers, she wanted to learn from others who understand the challenges of Cavan’s soil, as she says, “some flowers are moody enough”.

“I started to go to Ballinagh Gardening club - alone, because it’s very hard to get people my age to go to a gardening club. I was like - I want one of these in my locality and I don’t think everyone my age can get out of the house, so I thought a virtual gardening club would be good.”

Since launching the club, a hundred gardeners, mostly from Cavan, now share their growing successes and failures.

Therese has had very few of the latter judging by the lengthy flowerbeds exploding with colour. An evangelist for ‘no-dig’, Therese covered the grass with cardboard and heaped compost sourced from a mushroom producer on top - that was the lion’s share of her modest outlay.

Calendula, verbena bonasaries pony tail grass and creeping thyme were grown - a hundred at a time - from seed.

“Perennials are going to come back every year so they are the best value for money. I have no budget and big notions.”

She fills out the bed with annuals such as sunflowers, hollyhock, cosmos, forget me not, and giant poppies again grown from seed.

“I believe flowers grow much better with loads of flowers around them - I think they all go: ‘Oh, competition - let’s grow big.’ Because any time you leave something out on its own, it just doesn’t seem to thrive.

“Anything I can find that will grow, and grow prolifically, and give colour for a long time, I try to invest in or get cuttings.”

Therese points out horsetail that’s invaded the bed, that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.

“I try to plant loads of cosmos to hide the horsetail,” she says, and they do blend in with the frothy foliage of the cosmos. “Horsetail doesn’t really compete with any other flowers that I know of - you can’t get rid of it and I’m not going to spray so I’ve to work with it and embrace it.”

For Therese, such shortcomings aren’t to be hidden, they are to be explored, discussed and learned from. For example, when preparing for the no dig here she cut holes in the cardboard to slot plants into.

“The weeds that came up through those little gaps are really strong,” she says. “I won’t be doing it again.”

She brought this learning to the nascent Community Garden at Cornafean GAA grounds, which she set up. The cardboard was left in tact and they mounded up around the plants’ roots.

Back at the Johnston home, roses of every colour are dotted around the beds courtesy of her family.

“When I moved in here I said, ‘Please, please don’t be spending money on flowers for me for Valentine’s - please buy roses with roots’. The first Valentine’s I got four roses - a colour each from each of my three boys and Phil. And the second Valentine’s I got four more - and on my birthday I got two more.

“I keep saying: look at the value - you’ve more than 12 roses in that. We’re two years in - we might have a full rose garden by the time we’re 20 years married.”

Vegetables dominate at the rear garden, and this is where Therese is in her element. Trained as a chef in Ballymaloe, it was from volunteering with their horticulturalists that she picked up the skills which serve her kitchen garden so well.

“The closer to the back door the more you’ll use it,” she says of her garden’s location.

Outside beds are home to cauliflower “that needs to come in”, some “amazing” turnips which arrived early, Brussels sprouts, courgettes of surprising shapes, parsnips, coloured carrots, a full patch of pumpkins, perennial cabbage and kale, and also Kolhrabi “which you can plant anywhere”.

“It’s a really lovely size for a two or three person coleslaw for the week,” she marvels of Kolhrabi. “It’s delicious, it grows really easily - very little slug damage - the purple one especially.”

As we chat, Therese harvests a purple cabbage of epic proportions for a cookery demo the following day, it’s just the latest in a series of events which confirm her growing reputation as a go-to source of expert advice. She periodically opens her garden for tours, to see her no-dig approach up close.

In the polytunnel she has chilli peppers, chard, a fragrant supply of tomatoes, a patch of potatoes for Christmas dinner, and cocomelon - no it’s not simply a kids’ TV show.

“That’s been a great success in our house this year - it’s a cucumber melon,” she explains.

A common refrain of aspiring gardeners is they simply don’t have time. Few however will have more responsibilities than Therese - a mother of three boisterous boys, who works as a health care assistant in Cavan General’s theatres. How does she find the time?

“When you come home there’s nothing better than turning off the internet and getting everybody outside for half an hour or an hour.”

It’s a team effort: Therese draws up the plans and minds the seedlings. While Phil does any heavy-lifting.

“The kids come with me and put the stuff in and then just watch it grow!”

And how it has grown!

“This is a very young garden and it has a long way to go, but it’s colourful It makes us extremely happy.”