Homage to the pickers and their heirs who put the king in picking...

- Aisling Blackburn -

The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living – Vandana Shiva

Do we realise that we’re on the pig’s back in Ireland, living quite comfortably like kings in this little part of Europe? The warm summer ensured tomatoes were sweeter, apples tastier and now with the rain, blackberries are bigger and juicier.

The ones who grows their own food, are setting themselves on a rewarding path, as growing and learning about living things never gets old. Consider a shop bought apple: picked before it was ripe and treated with ethylene to prepare it for supermarket shelves. Was it hand picked by a worker paid a minimum wage or piecemeal by weight, did this worker have rights? How many chemicals were used and would the same sprays be legal to use in Ireland? How far did this apple travel in its short life and so on.

I bought blackberries from Brazil once or twice. They were very large, sweet and irresistible. Then, my neighbour showed me a thornless variety growing in his garden that sported the same delicious fruit. While picking berries along the lane, another neighbour stopped for a chat. He could remember the '70s, and the man in the food van, selling bread and vegetables door to door, who would, he told me, along with hawking their wares, buy punnets of blackberries from local pickers. I have yet to meet any pickers out on my walks, just daft me and my dog, making jam and crumbles for free.

There are wild strawberries and raspberries to be found in the hedgerow as well, but not really enough to make a pot of jam. The thing about growing fruit is that not only does it satisfy that need to have trees, shrubs and nature around, it also feeds our tummies. They are also ridiculously easy to care for as well.

Rhubarb

Think rhubarb, but don’t eat it! What I mean is, don’t harvest any more this year. Not because someone said it is toxic now (look it up) as that is not true. No, the reason is only to allow the fruit or vegetable or whatever you decide the plant is, to build up it’s reserves for the following spring. Then add lots of nitrogen, usually in the form of manure and for sweeter earlier stems, cover the plant with a barrel or a fancy rhubarb forcer in order to pick almost leaf-free rhubarb for yummy pies, then stop picking again as this plant will need time to recover.

Grow as many as you can. I got seed from seedaholics last year, there must be 30 or so now in the walled garden and nobody is allowed to touch them for 2 years (gardeners are patient). When you divide a rhubarb plant, leave the new division to build itself up.

If you have an old plant that is not producing many stems, I suggest that you dig it up entirely and leave it above ground for the winter, replanting it again in spring with a good dollop of well rotted manure, even the one you can buy in bags, encourages the formation of new stems.

Apple

Let's take another fruit; an apple, entirely home-grown. Could it be an early, mid-season or late variety? or a local variety, the Cavan wine, collected in Milltown where Charlie Robinson lived? Is it a cooker, an eater, a dual purpose or a juicer for cider, and will it keep? A triploid or diploid, a self rooter, a family tree, a tip bearer; red gold or green?

Grown at home, you can rest assured the apple will not have been sprayed with chemicals. In some countries, commercial apple trees were once sprayed with daminozide, a known carcinogen now no longer in use - we hope – as it was banned by the US EPA in 1989.

I picked apples in Massachusetts myself for a brief spell, it was then that I became aware of Alar (the product name); one of the actions of this chemical was the thickening of stems to ensure that the fruit remained longer on the tree and was therefore sweeter. I was somewhat food aware before my travels in the USA, and even more conscious on my return as a result of what I had seen.

Thankfully there is more awareness now, and it may have started with that ban, I remember buying bottles of apple juice concentrate (very hard to get nowadays), labelled ‘Alar free’. Companies are not actually out to poison us, only to make a fast buck, sadly, though unless the rules change or we eat only organic, some of us may end up as collateral damage.