New gardening book launched to critical acclaim.

Klaus Laitenberger has released his organic gardening book ‘Vegetables for the Irish Garden’ to much critical acclaim.

Klaus who had been head gardener in The Organic Centre for seven years, has been growing vegetables for more than 20 years many of which in Ireland. He knows the Irish soil and the unique Irish climate and so he gives you - beginner or more advanced gardener - hands on information on growing vegetables in an Irish garden.

From Artichoke to Turnip you get all information needed for every single vegetable:
varieties, soil and site, sowing and planting, spacing, rotation, plant care, harvesting and storing, pests and diseases.

A sowing table, a month-to-month guide and chapters about companion planting, composting, weeds, tools and green manures make this book a great guide throughout the seasons and a "Must-Have".

Klaus's book is written specifically for sowing and planting, harvesting and storing vegetables in Ireland.

Below are just a few of the growing number of positive reviews:

Scéal Eile Books

“Vegetables for the Irish Garden” by Klaus Laitenberger published by Milkwood Farm Publishing. Pices from €14.95

We are delighted to have in stock copies of Klaus Laitenberger’s book “Vegetables for the Irish Garden”. The author is well known to gardening enthusiasts from his work as Head Gardener at the Organic Centre in Co. Leitrim, and his restoration of the garden at Lissadell House, Co. Sligo.
He has distilled his knowledge of the craft of vegetable growing into this volume. “Vegetables for the Irish Garden” is a handsomely illustrated book and is full of advice and tips tailored specifically to gardeners working in our Irish climate.
Expert vegetable gardener Joy Larkcom has descibed the book as “…an invaluable source of information for vegetable growers here – novices and experienced alike…”

Spend more time on the maths and you won’t have to palm off extra courgettes on friends, writes FIONNUALA FLANAGAN Published in the Irish Times 5th August 2010.

NOBODY ever warns you when you start your own fruit and vegetable garden that it helps an awful lot if you’re good at maths. Of course, green(ish) fingers are also very useful, as is a strong back and the understanding that Nature and not you, is the head gardener, but “computational skills” are surprisingly handy too. That’s because, very quickly, the urban farmer finds himself or herself in the garden, measuring-tape in hand, furiously adding, subtracting and multiplying in order to calculate exactly what quantity of seed potatoes, onion sets, carrot seeds or courgette plants will be needed to fill the plot. Length, width, perimeter and area (square metres or feet, depending on whether you’re metric or imperial) determined, it’s back to graph-paper, scale-rulers and Google we go, to painstakingly work out the “how much?” and “how many?”.
Which is why it’s so strange that when it comes to estimating how many vegetables we’d actually like to eat (rather than grow), it’s another story entirely.

Any effort at calculating quantities suddenly goes out the window. “Eight courgette plants, one square metre per plant- that sounds about right . . .”, we mutter vaguely to ourselves, without really stopping to consider quite how many courgettes will be produced (somewhere between 100 and 160 if picked when they’re about 10cm long).
Then harvest time comes round. “Not another glut of courgettes,” we groan, before quickly calculating how many friends/neighbours they can be palmed off onto. It’s the same with lettuce – they’re sown, they’re grown and then, all at once, there are twenty plump, purple heads of “Lolla Rossa” sitting there reproachfully, just begging to be eaten.

Even in the OPW’s walled kitchen garden, gardeners Meeda Downey and Brian Quinn are now dealing with a glut of cauliflower, cabbage and calabrese, which comes hot on the heels of a glut of summer berries. The difference here is that much of the fruit and vegetables produced in the walled garden goes straight to the next-door Phoenix Café, where it’s quickly used up. Not so for the home-grower.

In defence of those who over-sow and overgrow (which is probably most gardeners), part of the problem is that there isn’t exactly a glut of available information when it comes to calculating how much to grow of any particular fruit or vegetable.

That’s one of the reasons professional gardener Klaus Laitenberger’s new book, Vegetables For The Irish Garden, is very useful (we hope he’ll bring out an equivalent on fruit).

Take potatoes, for example, a staple crop for most gardeners yet one that many have difficulties with when it comes to calculating yield. While he points out that it all depends on how much you like them, Laitenberger suggests that an area of 40 square metres should provide “more than enough potatoes for a family of four from July until April. One square metre may yield 5 to 7kg of potatoes”.

Annual spinach? If you love it, successionally sow one square metre every three weeks, he suggests. Onions? Working on an average of five a week, Laitenberger points out that you’ll need to have stored away 140 onions to see you through from September to the following March (28 weeks). Lettuce? Sow 15 seeds every fortnight, he suggests, enough to give you five heads a week while allowing for losses from slug damage etc.
He’s good, too, when it comes to the lesser-known vegetables, such as the tuberous oca (“just a few to see if you like them”), asparagus (“ten plants are sufficient for a generous weekly helping for the six-week harvesting period”), and Jerusalem artichokes (“5 plants are more than sufficient as each tuber will yield around 2kg of artichokes”).

All of which is very useful advice for next year, but what to do with this summer’s gluts? Serious GYOers know that part of the answer lies in having a chest freezer, which goes a long way towards turning a summer glut into tasty winter dinners. Here also, Laitenberger’s book gives plenty of advice as to technique (always blanch first in boiling water) and as to which vegetables are best suited to freezing (asparagus, broad beans, runner beans, peas, calabrese, sweetcorn and Florence fennel amongst others).

There’s also advice on other storage methods, such as “clamping” and storing in boxes of sand, both of which techniques are best suited to root vegetables. But what about courgettes, which traditionally form the “gluttiest” of all the vegetable gluts? Laitenberger advises that these are best eaten fresh.

I know, however, that another GYOer of long experience, the Irish Times columnist and original “Good Lifer”, Michael Viney, has an alternative solution to the courgette glut. He, or rather his wife, Ethna, uses them to make ratatouille, the traditional French Provençal dish that is a stew of courgettes, aubergines, onions, tomatoes, peppers, herbs and garlic, which she bags into handy portions and then freezes. All of which tells you that, along with being good at maths, being an excellent cook is also very helpful (even, perhaps, necessary) when it comes to the art of growing your own. Of course, having an excellent cook to live with can be very useful too.
The OPW’s Victorian walled kitchen garden is in the grounds of the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre, beside the Phoenix Park Café and Ashtown Castle. The gardens are open daily from 10am to 4.00pm.

Toiling in the Irish soil Printed in the Irish Times July 17th 2010

By JANE POWERS
A new book by German-born gardener Klaus Laitenberger is tailored to the Irish vegetable grower.

GARDENING BOOKS ARE like the proverbial buses. You’re waiting ages for the right one, and then, just like that, two of them come around the corner. For years we’ve been craving a book on growing vegetables in Ireland. Our conditions are not the same as those in the UK, from where most kitchen garden books emanate: our climate is wetter and milder, both in winter and in summer. So, advice tailored for gardeners across the water may not fit us properly.

I mentioned the first of these homegrown books, The Irish Gardener’s Handbook , by Michael Brenock (O’Brien, €9.99) when it appeared earlier this year. And the second, Vegetables for the Irish Garden by Klaus Laitenberger (Milkwood Farm Publishing, €14.95), has just been launched. Keen vegetable growers will already know the author – who has served as head gardener at both the Organic Centre in Leitrim and Lissadell in Sligo – through his lectures and classes in organic gardening.

Since the German-born Laitenberger came to Ireland in 1999, he has been adapting his methods of gardening to our more soggy and clement climate. His book is particularly relevant to gardeners in the northwest, as he is intimately acquainted with the soil in Sligo and Leitrim. He now lives on an 11-acre holding at the foot of Benwiskin in north Leitrim.

I visited some years ago, and was impressed at how he managed to coax exquisite vegetables out of the waterlogged and infertile peaty soil. His methods for gardening in a damp climate with saturated soil are several. Drainage, of course, is paramount, and it can be created by digging channels to carry excess water away from the vegetable-growing area.

Raised beds are another solution. Adding properly decomposed compost and loosening the subsoil also help. Winter digging – which allows the cycles of freezing and thawing to break up the soil – is not something that he recommends, despite its popularity with many traditional gardeners.
As he points out in the book, we get more rain than frost in most parts of Ireland (although last winter was an exception), and the rain washes out the nutrients and turns the soil into “mash”. In such conditions, the soil pores become filled with water, and valuable underground dwellers such as earthworms are driven out or drowned.
Laitenberger has plenty of advice for new gardeners. I like that he suggests starting on a smallish scale, so that the garden doesn’t get out of hand and become a thing to daunt rather than delight. He also cautions against sowing seed too early – a mistake we’ve all made, in the rush to end winter’s doldrums. In most parts of Ireland vegetables should not be sown outdoors before May; broad beans, garlic, onions, peas, potatoes and shallots are the exceptions. Planting too closely, and choosing the wrong variety are also common errors.

The book, however, is more about getting it right than avoiding the wrong. The first half includes comprehensive instructions on raising more than vegetables, from artichokes to turnips. Besides all the expected advice on cultivation, and – importantly – varieties that he knows work well in Irish conditions, the author offers snippets of history and the odd pithy quote, such as the inimitable Charles Dudley Warner’s “Lettuce is like conversation. It must be fresh and crisp, and so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitterness in it.”

The second half considers practical matters such as planning, soil, ground preparation, composting, rotation, pests and so on. A month-by-month guide will keep new gardeners on track from one end of the year to the other. Laitenberger has chosen not to include tomatoes, peppers, aubergines or cucumbers (tender crops that do best in greenhouses or tunnels), which may disappoint some readers, especially those who have warm corners in their gardens. Notwithstanding this omission, it’s a book that Irish vegetable growers (myself included) will be very happy to dig into.

Vegetables for the Irish Garden is available from selected shops, and by mail order, €14.95. See milkwoodfarm.com

See here for a list of stockists for Klaus Laitenberger’s Vegetable for the Irish Garden.