Ireland: Cork woman turns her garden into allotment to teach children Get Ireland Growing
It’s well observed at this stage that the Covid-19 lockdown brought about a boom in interest in gardening and growing your own food.
By Ellie O’Byrne
Echo Live
Oct 8, 2020
Excerpt:
Louise isn’t on some solo mission for suburban self-sufficiency: two years ago, she started converting her own garden into Patch na bPaisti, a community allotment where she runs food-growing workshops for children of four and up.
And she’s just been announced as the national winner of non-profit GIY’s annual Get Ireland Growing competition: the grand prize is €5,000 worth of garden renovations, including a polytunnel.
Louise’s garden is already home to six large raised beds for growing veg, and a treehouse with a storage area for children to keep their gardening equipment in, but for the many crops that do better indoors in the Irish climate, last year she and her little helpers were relying on a flimsy “mini-greenhouse” to grow in. So the polytunnel is going to be an exciting leap forward for Patch na bPaisti.
Louise’s journey to her current work hasn’t always been a smooth one, and she’s weathered several storms, sometimes quite literally: having come through the Covid lockdown and worked to distribute grow kits to families and elderly people stuck at home, August’s Storm Ellen caused devastating damage to Patch na bPaisti. For Louise, who had worked so hard to establish the allotment, it was a big blow.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Louise says.
“I had so little left after the storm: only things that were very low on the ground survived. Our equipment was very basic and a lot of stuff just fell apart.
“There were sunflower heads and tomato plants that I don’t even know whose garden they ended up in because they were just gone.
