It’s been another crazy week. We have so much good stuff happening on the farm. We received the first Irish organic cherries from Darragh Donnelly and they are fantastic. We have been busy harvesting our own fresh garlic, and we have plenty more for next week, along with gorgeous lettuce, and tonnes other amazing freshly harvested farm and Irish produce, such as salad, spinach, chard and more.
Then there has been the climate fuelled heatwave that we couldn’t quite believe, one minute there was a biting North wind, it was pouring rain, 6-7C and the next it was 30C! and not a single cloud in the sky. The intensity certainly gives us a taste of what a fossil fuel warmed planet is going to look like. This type of intense heat is going to stress already stretched food systems and mean our reliance on imported foods must shift.
Nevertheless, the dry soil meant conditions for sowing parsnips and carrots beetroot and spinach were ideal, but as with all thing’s that seem to be going well, disaster is always lurking its ugly head just around the corner and sure enough our fancy seeding machine took a turn for the worse. luckily Enda’s ingenuity meant the day was saved and in a MacGyver-esk type intervention we got the machine going again.
We have also sowed an amazing 3 acres or sow of a mix of loads of different clovers and wildflowers which will be a mecca for biodiversity.
Now I don’t know if it is the amazing compost we used in our tunnels this year, but the crops look amazingly healthy. We will be harvesting our first new season farm kale next week and it looks terrific. Not only that but because it was spent organic mushroom compost, we are getting free mushrooms popping up here and there!
But here’s a question for you. Would you prefer caterpillars or chemicals on your kale?
Kale in the US came in as the second most sprayed crop in the EWG dirty dozen list in 2026. How can this super resilient crop need such an array of toxic chemicals to apparently keep it growing? I find this hard to fathom? I write this sitting in our Polytunnel full of the most amazing kale and all it has seen is fertile soil and water, there isn’t an aphid or caterpillar in sight, and that’s no different for the thousands of kale plants we have in the ground in the field, the biggest issue we have there is the pesky pigeons.
Ironically if you did ever find a little critter of some denomination or another in your produce this is a great sign, because it certainly means the absence of chemicals. Now no chemicals on our food are pleasant but I am sorry to say for your US followers that you get a much worse deal when it comes to chemicals on your food compared to here in Ireland. Having said all that the Irish dept of agriculture survey here in Ireland shows that in 2021 nearly 70% of the kale grown was treated with a variety of herbicides and pesticides.
So, the question remains caterpillars or chemicals, which would you choose?
As always thanks for your support each order is changing the food system one box at a time.
Kenneth