Postcard Gardens at Bloom 2020

Bord Bia calls for entries to Bloom Postcard garden category

Bord Bia is calling on gardeners to submit entries for the popular Postcard garden category for Bloom 2020, which is set to return this June bank-holiday weekend from May 28 to June 1, in the Phoenix Park, Dublin 8.

Postcard gardens offer passionate amateur gardeners, garden clubs, community, and grow-it-yourself groups a chance to showcase their talents to over 115,000 visitors attending the event.

The Postcard gardens are small but perfectly formed 3-metre by 2-metre plots which can be used to represent a club, locality, special person, or character from a community. They have been popular in other garden shows recently too.

In 2019, schools, communities, day-care centres, and resource centres from around Ireland brought themes such as autism, mental-wellbeing, climate change, and children’s literature to life through flowers, planting, art, and woodwork.

Longford Town Guild, Irish Countrywomen’s Association received Best in Show for their Postcard garden, Fork to Fork, which demonstrated how we can turn the tide on unsustainable consumption by using the earth around us to feed ourselves.

If you have a group that could rise to the challenge you can get the application form from BloominthePark.com and the closing date to apply is Monday, March 2, 2020.

Adding Meat or Dairy to the Compost Pile

 Bio Diversity in the Tidy Towns

Meat or dairy

Are you ever tempted to throw your meat and dairy waste into the compost? Have you had people shouting at you not to do it? I’m sure you have so I though a more scientific explanation would help make up your own mind. 

It can seem a bit frustrating that you can’t just compost meat and dairy, but you can, it’s just a question of balance and being careful.

It’s not that meat and dairy are hard to break down in compost bins, the issue is that it’s too easy for them to decompose. 

The main reservation is pests, mice and rats love a warm cost compost pile. There’s also the worry that disease causing bacteria growing in home compost. The solution is to get the pile up to a high enough temperature to kill the pathogens. Temperatures are all important for killing weed seeds too and we do struggle here sometimes for those temperatures to be reached. Situating the pile in full sun helps with this.

The main reason for the meat and dairy being a problem is how delicious the animal protein is to soil microbes. Composting is all about getting friendly soil bacteria to break things down for us, but we don’t need it to get too excited.

Good composting relies on the balance of two elements – Carbon and Nitrogen.

Carbon makes up the chemical foundation for almost all of life’s favourite molecules including proteins.

Proteins also contain a lot of nitrogen, which means that animal products, which are more densely packed than proteins than vegetables contain more nitrogen.

Experts have determined that the best ratio of carbon to nitrogen in compost is somewhere between 20:1 and 30:1 with vegetables being somewhere in the middle at 25:1. Something like a chicken carcass is 5:1 and when bacteria see all of that nutritious nitrogen in the compost they start to grow really fast, that uses up oxygen. When the bacteria use up all of the oxygen in the pile, that favours the growth of other bacteria that don’t need oxygen to live.

The pile switches to anaerobic, or oxygen free decomposition. The chemical products of that process are very smelly like hydrogen sulphide which smells like rotten eggs.

So, if you casually throw all of the leftover meat and dairy products into the compost, you’ll more than likely be left with a slimy putrefied mess instead of lovely sweet-smelling usable compost. Putrefied compost can actually contain chemicals that are toxic to plants although it can usually be salvaged by drying out and adding more green matter such as wood chips or paper products which contain a lot of lignin – a tough component of plant cell walls which doesn’t contain any nitrogen. Bacteria can still eat lignin packed materials but they just slow down the over enthusiastic microbes.

Scishow, an online science programme says that producing compost by the Bokashi method can help. This relies on an anaerobic process on purpose. You add cultures of friendly anaerobic bacteria instead of the poor, smelly ones. Once things like meat scraps have been treating the Bokashi way they can be added to the compost pile with less risk of the whole thing going stinky.

Tidy Towns Initiative

It’s never too early in the year to be thinking about and getting involved in the Tidy Towns Initiative. It can be a great motivator for getting every aspect of the garden ship shape and ready for the judges in late summer. As a past judge you can always tell a garden that’s been frantically tidied up just for the inspection, in some cases it can improve things of course as the unkempt look is quite popular now.

The Tidy towns Initiative we know, and love started its days differently to the UK. The UK Tidy Towns was set up after WW2 on the premise that it’d be great to get the towns and villages looking great again. It was, in reality used as a method of getting tax inspectors onto your property to be assessed to see if any tax avoidance was going off.

Here in the Republic it was started 37 years ago with no hidden agenda (That I know of) to get communities together, brighten the place up, take pride in your living space and of course to attract tourists.  Tidy Towns was originally linked to a single competition, first by Bord Fáilte, then the Irish Tourist Board, and now by the Department of Rural and Community Development.

Over the last few years there have been a lot of changes to the competition. More and more initiatives are concentrating on biodiversity and sustainable issues. The pollinator award is a good example and Buncrana hold the National Pollinator award for 2019 showing that we here in Inishowen take eco initiatives seriously.

Chamomile Lawn - Relaxing, Restful Weeding - Sooth You to Sleep

Kind of Blue

                                                     Photo: Kind of Blue Strawberries

I’m so tempted to start sowing. 

I’ve walked out of the house a few times with a packet of seeds and turned around to come in again as a waft of icy air hits my face. It’s going to be a while yet though as I think we have a few more cold spells to come before the optimum sowing time is upon us. It doesn’t stop me stocking up on seeds though and there are plenty of companies to choose from, in Ireland and further afield.  

I’d ignore any over inflated seed prices that claim they are GMO free. All seeds sold to the public are GMO free, it’s just buzzwords used for marketing purposes and gives suppliers the freedom to charge you that little bit more for the apparent peace of mind and feeling you are doing something positive for the environment. It’s a bit like putting the word Vegan on heavily processed food, it might not come as too much of a shock to realise that just because something says ‘vegan’ on the packet doesn’t mean it’s not still junk food full of chemicals, salt and sugar and bad for the environment. 

Paint the whole world with a Rainbow

There are other seeds for sale online that are also a bit misleading. You’ll see adverts for Rainbow Tomatoes, which claim to have black, purple, red and yellow fruits on just one stem. The images on the adverts look very impressive, both in their myriad of colours and also for the quality of work done be someone on Photoshop. I’m sure they must have a giggle every time someone buys a packet and puts a couple of euro into their bank account. 

Some people purchasing the packet of seeds might never actually get around to opening them as they are sometimes seen as a novelty item. Others who might be expecting a rainbow of colour might be disappointed to just find the regular red variety or plants that don’t resemble tomatoes at all. The worst-case scenario is to have no seeds germinating and you miss the optimum growing time. There are very few people who complain about these seeds as they either feel a bit daft or just disregard them as it’s only cost them a few euro. 

Blue is the Colour

You can also get ‘Blue strawberry’ seeds. The images we see online have also been attached to a rumour that they were genetically modified by scientists in order to create a freeze-resistant strawberry.

Websites claim they did it by an artificial transfer of isolated genes from a species of fish called the Arctic Flounder Fish. The Arctic Flounder Fish produces an anti-freeze that allows for protection in freezing waters.

There is a very small element of truth to this claim. Researchers did attempt to introduce an antifreeze gene from an Arctic flounder into strawberries in the late 1990s in order to create a more freeze-resistant fruit. So far, it’s come to nothing, but you can still get yellow strawberries, both in large and alpine sizes. It’s claimed you get a better crop of the delicious sweet fruit because the birds aren’t attracted to them meaning there’s more for you. There’s no mention of slugs though.

If you encounter a photograph of a blue strawberry on the internet like the tomatoes, it most likely grew out of an enthusiastic Photoshop users head, not a seed.

All Wrapped Up

I was thinking about seed and plant protection in the cold spells and reminded myself of the fabulous work local knitters do around the peninsula around for the Feelgood Fortnight. Trees and outdoor furniture all get the Yarn Bombing treatment consisting of either crocheted or knitted covers being put on trees, posts, outdoor furniture and anything else that stands still for long enough.  It was initially seen as a feminine movement to partake in the traditionally masculine and male-dominated graffiti scene. I’m sure there are men in the groups now though.

It’s used as street art and temporary graffiti which goes down well with most people. There have been a few issues where people use nylon or acrylic materials to cover things but on the whole is natural wool that is used which rots down quickly if not removed. 

Originally from America the idea was to peacefully and brightly reclaim and personalising cold, sterile public areas. In Inishowen it’s used as a celebration and I think some of the pieces could be used as a colourful way to protect your more delicate shrubs and trees over the winter period.