There is an abundance of Irish apples currently in season and turning them into a delicious dessert the whole family can enjoy is a lovely way to enjoy them. These little puff pastries are the perfect treat to make over the Halloween holidays. There is no doubt eating an apple raw is the best way to enjoy it nutritionally, however even when cooked they are still a good source of dietary fibre. Most shop bought puff pastry is dairy free, making it a great staple to have to hand for a speedy sweet or savoury dish. These pastries can be enjoyed hot from the oven with a scoop of your favourite dairy-free ice-cream or, when cooled, packed into a lunchbox to tuck into as a snack on an autumn walk.
Take the pastry from the fridge and leave to rest at room temperature for 20 minutes before using.
Preheat the oven to 200°C/fan 180°C /Gas Mark 6. Line a large baking tray with parchment paper.
Unroll the pastry and cut into thin strips.
Slice the apples and remove the inner core of each slice using the end of a piping nozzle to cut out a circle.
Add the caramel sauce to a small bowl. In another bowl, mix the sugar and cinnamon.
Dip each apple slice in the caramel before coating well in the sugar/cinnamon mixture.
Carefully, wrap the pastry strips around each apple slice. Place the wrapped apple slices on the baking tray. Brush with a little milk and sprinkle over some more of the cinnamon sugar.
Bake in the preheated oven for about 20 minutes. Once baked place on a wire rack to cool.
To serve, dust with icing sugar, and to make these little pastries resemble mini pumpkins, pop a cinnamon stick plus a couple of sage leaves into the centre of each one. Enjoy!
Mushrooms make for a nutritious addition to the diet as they’re a source of fibre, protein, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. This mushroom pâté can be made a couple of days in advance, and it’s best served with slices of lightly toasted crusty bread and crunchy vegetables. However, it can also be used as a delicious stir-in pasta sauce; simply stir through some hot cooked pasta with a little of the pasta cooking water, add a few gratings of black pepper, and you’ll have a speedy and tasty supper in minutes.
1. Add the olive oil to a small saucepan over a low heat. Add the diced onion and cook, stirring regularly, for about ten minutes, until the onion is soft but not coloured. Take from the heat and leave to one side.
2. Add the butter to a large pan, over a medium heat. Add the sliced mushrooms, season with a few grinds of black pepper. Turn up the heat and fry, stirring regularly, for about 5 minutes. Once the mushrooms are cooked, stir in the garlic and thyme, and continue to cook for about 1 minute, stirring continuously. Take from the heat and leave to cool.
3. Once the onions and mushrooms are completely cooled, add them to a high-powered processor along with the cream cheese and blitz until smooth. Refrigerate for at least an hour before serving, and up to 3 days. Serve with a sprinkle of finely chopped chives, some crusty bread, and thin slices of vegetables.
This blog has two parts this week, the first bit was an unexpected happy moment that occurred only yesterday:
We won a national organic award! We won the best “direct to the consumer” award and we are delighted. Thank you so much to Bord Bia and to all the judges for looking at our business and for giving us the thumbs up. It is absolutely a credit to everybody who works at Green Earth Organics that we won, the hard work and dedication, innovation and integrity of the whole team on our farm made achieving the award possible.
Against the backdrop of two very challenging growing seasons, and many growers opting to get out of the business altogether, the award couldn’t have come at a better time.
So, thank you to everybody who works here, thanks to all you our customers who keep us in business, and thank you to the judges for recognising it all. We are very grateful.
In Ireland in 2021 there were 3 million kgs of pesticides applied, and in that same year the dept of agriculture tested 1,039 fruit, vegetable and fungi samples mostly imported and found than 60% had detectable limits of pesticides, and 5.3% had higher levels that what was deemed safe.
It has always been clear to me from a young age that spraying chemicals indiscriminately in nature was wrong. Now I can’t say I understood why I felt this way or why I felt that our planet needed to be protected from ourselves but that is the way I was programmed.
As a scientist I understand the role science plays in our lives and in facilitating the production of food for so many people. But we have been to an extent conditioned to think that we need all these chemicals to grow food, it is not unlike the pharmaceutical industries desire to have us taking preventative maintenance doses of some of their drugs for life.
So here is the thing we have a perfectly amazing way to reduce our chances of getting sick. Being healthy indeed can be our default setting, but it seems that not unlike our natural world we too have developed a deep sense of physical and mental malaise. We are in a word not well.
The common scientific perception is that chemicals in small doses are not harmful to life. There certainly is some validity in this statement and this piece is not about engendering fear, far from it. It is about increasing awareness about how our food choices can have a remarkable positive effect on our lives and our environment.
So, taking low level doses on a daily basis of chemicals in our diet is not how at least I want to live my life. I get it that the scientists use terms like MRLS (maximum residue limit) to reassure us that our food is are, after all that is their job. But is it really? And how do they decide and who is they anyway? Well, they use all sorts of things like acute toxicity and extrapolations and lifetime consumption assumptions.
Talk of the gut Microbiome is everywhere these days and rightly so, its importance is only beginning to be understood. There is little doubt that the myriad of beneficial bacteria that inhabit our intestines play a major role in our health, from depression to inflammation.
So, it’s with interest that I discovered a couple of articles that link the constant imbibing of pesticides into our bodies not only damage our cells but also all the myriad of microbes that live in our gut and you guessed it it is not a positive feedback loop we are talking about here. You can if you are inclined read the article here.
It is no coincidence then that these pesticides that kill plants or organisms and damage the microbial life in the living soil also damage and kill the good bacteria in our gut.
I remember distinctly our first year of growing, which was 20 years ago, it was before we officially started our business, it was my first year back in Ireland after spending 11 years in the UK, it was on a small vegetable patch in my grandads back garden, it was amazingly rewarding and to get food at the end of it was a bonus.
We have been growing organic vegetables here on our farm in Galway for nearly 20 years.
We have seen many changes over that time, but something that has never changed has been our commitment to sustainable local food. We are Irish and grow Irish and support Irish and always have since we started delivering our first boxes in 2004.
Something that has changed since then is the price that the supermarket pays for and charges for fresh produce in the supermarket, which has decreased. Since 2007 the average price paid for 1kg of fresh vegetables has decreased from €1.87/kg in December 2007 to €1.46 in August 2020. This represents a 21% decrease in price paid for fresh produce over 13 years when everything else has been going up.
Back in 2007 the minimum wage was €8.65, that has since risen to €13.50 in 2025, representing a 56% increase in the cost of labour alone. This is one cost of many that has increased, fertiliser, energy, packaging, general farm inputs have all increased dramatically over that time, and yet the retailers have consistently and unrelentingly driven down the price paid for produce.
It is also a fallacy to state that the retailer takes the hit on the price promotions in stores, there and it is the added impact of driving down the price a farmer can get for his or her produce elsewhere.
There is a glimmer of change driven by consumer demand for Irish produce, where Irish producers can now demand a little more for what they are producing. The reality when you walk into any of these large supermarket stores is that they are promoting supporting Irish when mostly the produce is imported, have a look at our video or check it out for yourself when you are next in a supermarket.
The pressure and race to the bottom have driven a lot of good growers out of business, and now as the supermarkets feel the pressure from the consumer and sense the marketing opportunities to show themselves as the saviour of the industry, they are promoting with all their vigour the support for the Irish vegetable farmer.
It’s the sad reality that after 20 years of hollowing out the industry they now want to turn the other cheek, but only ever so slightly, not too much, and not enough in many cases. Any increase in price paid must still be fought for tooth and nail, and after years of devaluing the produce it looks like a very poor effort indeed.
But any change in mindset is being driven by one thing and that is completely down to you,
you the consumer demanding more local Irish produce.
We have growers all over the country of Ireland, from Joe Kelly in Mayo, To Padraigh Fahy and Una Ni Bhroin in Beechlawn in Galway, to Enda Hoban and Orla Burke in Galway, Audrey and Mick in Millhouse organic farm, Cameron in Battlemountain organic farm, Philip in Coolnagrower organic farm in Offally, Richard Galvin with his Irish organic apples in Waterford. Banner berries with their amazing blueberries in Clare, Donnelly with his organic cherries in Dublin, then there is Garynahinch mushrooms, McArdles mushrooms, and leeks from Roy Lyttle in Antrim, plus Joachim and Jeanette in Galway also. And of course, our own amazing organic farm where Emmanuel and his team grow a whole range of fresh Irish organic produce. All of these growers are Irish, all are organic, and all are committed to growing sustainable produce. With your support we get to bypass the juggernaut of the supermarket buying machine, and all the damage it leaves in its wake, and we get to support ourselves and all these amazing other growers, but only and very much because of your support.
In 1998 there were over 400 primary field scale growers in Ireland, now there are less than 60. I imagine if you went back a further 30 years, this number would double again.
There was a time when a potato or vegetable grower could deal directly with local supermarkets, this allowed local produce to be sold at local supermarkets. But since the advent of central distribution, the flow of produce has been restricted to only three or four large distributors that supply the supermarkets, putting a swift end to local supply chains.
Growers had little choice, either consolidate, increase production and compete or go out of business. But as the supermarket model of procurement was centralised their power increased and there was little power left in the hands of the farmer.
Farmers that scaled up to meet the demand, usually with very significant investment (you need tractors, sheds, washing facilities to grow vegetables in scale), were left at the mercy of unscrupulous supermarket buyers. When farmers were then faced with propositions from supermarkets to drop their prices or to fund promotions to reduce the price of their produce on supermarket shelves they had little choice but to do so.
On a smaller scale but not dissimilar to the bigger growers above, I remember distinctly our experience of dealing with supermarkets. We had spent several years building up business with certain supermarkets and we were selling well in several stores. Customers had gotten used to our shelf in the supermarket, but then bit by bit, own branded supermarket imported produce started to appear next to our produce.
One Monday morning as we called to get our usual order, an order we depended on, we were to discover that the rules of the game had changed. A new fresh food buyer was put in place, and he demanded that we reduce our prices, stock the shelves ourselves, and be responsible for any waste they incurred due to lack of sales of produce they had bought from us.
We never supplied that shop again or for that matter any of the other 12 supermarket stores we used to supply.
The supermarkets continue to put pressure on growers to fund their loss leaders’ campaigns, they expect farmers to shoulder part or all the burden of this cost.
But these cheap prices lead to the perception in the eyes of the consumer that freshly grow produce is of little value. Ironically this can inadvertently lead to food waste, nearly one third of all food produced is thrown in the bin, which in the end will cost us more. If we were to pay a little more for our food, maybe we wouldn’t waste so much and ironically actually be better off.
So, as it stands the supermarkets, the kings and gatekeeps of this seemingly inexhaustible and abundant supply of produce are more to blame for the decline of the Irish vegetable industry than anything else. The bottom line is always the bottom line, and if the farmers had a model that was financially viable, they would still be here, I guess we can safely say they did not.
We all get sick sometimes, but when something serious comes along how we define what is important to us can change significantly. There is little doubt that without our health we have very little. All it takes is to be laid up in bed with a serious dose of the flu to know that being sick can be serious. The prevalence of chronic disease in our current age is frightening, it is unfortunately a reflection on how we as a society have evolved. Our eating habits, working habits, exercising habits, have steadily changed and not for the better over the last 50 years.
But what has happened to our food is very concerning. Obviously, the ultra-processed rubbish that is designed to be irresistible is very unhealthy, and we would in all seriousness be better off eating cardboard. But it is often said that it is not what we do occasionally that is the problem it is what we do every day that causes the benefit or the damage. Those things we eat everyday are one of the keys to our health. Our bodies are amazing machines and when we are young, we can cope at least for a while with just about anything, but as we grow older things start to take a greater tole on our health. So it is with our food, at least in my opinion the chemicals on conventional food must over time do damage, they hurt us on the inside and they do it gradually over years. I remember years ago my biology teacher telling me if you irritate something for long enough you will cause cancer. I know I am fortunate and can afford to consume organic food as I have it all around me, I don’t take that for granted. Ironically, for health reasons I have a restricted diet and one of the things I can eat are blueberries. Over the last couple of weeks, we haven’t been able to source organic blueberries as we do not buy airfreighted produce. So, I bought some conventional blueberries in a shop. I think they tasted a little odd, I ate them anyway. But I decided to investigate this a little and here is what I found: In 2024 Pesticides were found on 90 percent of conventional blueberry samples, compared to 81 percent in 2014. 80 percent of samples had two or more pesticides, versus 70 percent in 2014. A single sample of blueberries could have up to 17 different pesticide residues, compared to 13 in 2014. Reference here.
This information is relevant to the US, but many of the blueberries on Irish supermarket shelves come from all over the world and could have the same residues. The most troubling pesticides found on blueberries were phosmet and malathion, chemicals known as organophosphate insecticides. They kill many types of insects and are toxic to the human nervous system.
Not only are conventional blueberries on the list of items to source organically if you can, but green beans, peppers, and kale were also singled out. We have sourced organic blueberries again, the first new European harvest from Spain. I write this piece to once again highlight the difference between conventional food production and organic. Don’t we deserve to known about these unseen extras? So anyway, I am looking forward to getting the first new season organic non airfreighted blueberries next week. They won’t be as good as the Irish ones we had a few weeks ago, but they will be pretty good.
Don’t take this the wrong way but I love chemicals.
So much so that I dedicated nearly 15 years of my life to studying and working with them, I worked for years on trying to figure how to make a new antibiotic, imagine life without antibiotics?
Without chemicals our life would be so much different and not for the better. But here is one other thing I learned whilst trying to develop a selective drug, a drug that would not have any side effects, and it was this: A 100% selective drug was impossible. Impossible as all chemicals taken into the body interact with different receptors in different ways and have side effects. This silver bullet is the holy grail of pharmaceutical research and is still some way off.
Have you heard of polyphenols? If you are interested in your health, you will certainly have heard this term. They are powerful antioxidants found in plants and may have a very positive effect on our health. More on these later.
So, in the super controlled environment of pharmaceutical development a drug that does not have side effects is impossible to produce. So, who in their right mind decided that we should take toxic chemicals and start spraying them indiscriminately on our food?
In the conventional food world now, we have farmers spraying nonselective chemicals on our food to kill insects and other plants. These chemicals kill both the target (ie the aphid) but also other insects flying around, devasting biodiversity.
Then there is the issue of these chemical being that toxic that they harm life, what do they do to us when we consume them on our food? Nothing good for sure, and there is plenty of literature out there on the damage they do.
So, let’s keep going down the rabbit hole now. Take this a step further, as some of these chemicals are “systemic” that means they are absorbed into the plant, brought inside and there they reside until harvest and eventual consumption on our dinner plates. Washing will do little to remove these as they are inside the produce.
So, we have these non-selective, systemic toxic chemicals being sprayed on our food and they are hurting us and destroying biodiversity. But there is an often-overlooked further issue here, and that brings us back to polyphenols.
These amazing compounds are produced by plants to defend themselves against disease and pests, these powerful antioxidants protect the plants, and guess what? They protect us too, when we consume them. But here’s the issue, when plants are sprayed to remove pests then the plants have little need to produce polyphenols so not only are we getting chemically contaminated food, but the actual composition of the food is also being changed by the application of these chemicals, isn’t that just crazy?
It is so easy to ignore all of the above, as when we see produce on the supermarket shelf it looks amazing (and it is without doubt better to eat fresh produce than not), but if there is an option at all, and I understand for some this is not possible (But you can always try our rescue box, which is always sold at a greatly reduced price) then choosing organic is just always, always going to be better for you, if you can choose local organic then there are all the other benefits also of supporting a local food economy.
So please for your own sake and the sake of our fragile planet, if you can at all choose organic.
Tomatoes are naturally high in lycopene, which is a powerful antioxidant. Cooking tomatoes not only increases the level of lycopene in the tomato but also makes it easier for the body to absorb. This is also a great dish to make if you’ve young chefs in the kitchen who’d like to help-out as it is so easy to prepare. It’s packed full of nutrients and serves well by the bowlful with chunks of bread on the side, or it transports well in a thermos flask for a lunch on-the-go. Enjoy!
Method 1. Preheat the oven to 200°C/fan 180°C/Gas 5.
2. Place the chopped tomatoes, garlic cloves and onion in an ovenproof dish. Drizzle over the olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Sprinkle over the smoked paprika and sugar, and season with a pinch of salt and some freshly ground pepper.
3. Using a wooden spoon, combine all the ingredients together.
4. Roast in the preheated oven for 25 minutes.
5. While everything is roasting, make the pasta according to the pack’s instructions.
6. In a large saucepan heat the stock, stir in the cooked roasted tomato mixture and simmer over a low heat for 15 minutes.
7. Add the basil, saving a few leaves for serving. Using a liquidiser or hand blender, blend the soup until smooth.
8. Divide the pasta between four bowls, pour over the soup and top with a few basil leaves.
This week we got the news that our business and farm has been shortlisted for a national organic award, and we are grateful and humbled by the acknowledgment.
I’m afraid Jenny my wife will stop talking to me if I don’t stop going on about the weather. But I just can’t help it, maybe I have a condition, but it has been so bad. And to be fair to me, I need to talk about the weather, I really do. I feel traumatised by the relentless darkness and rain, I am sure I must not be alone, and somehow getting the knowing nods that you are right and, in a group, (and for farmers there is nothing more conversation worthy than the weather) that feel the same way is comforting, it changes nothing though. True enough, I suppose there is little we can do about it, as the weather will be the weather, the same cannot be said for what we mankind are doing to our climate…
The last time we had a summer this bad was last year! Two in a row. And before that I remember 2012 being a summer where we saw virtually no sun, temperatures were low, and it rained nearly every single day. We should be lucky I guess there are many that have no water and here we are in the West of Ireland with enough for half of Europe. But luck will not help our already late harvest of tomatoes ripen.
It has been 13 months now, in my slightly twisted view, it started raining last June and hasn’t really stopped, has it? We have struggled recently and certain crops that love the sun are not loving Galway weather at moment.
There is muck stuck to everything, the land is wet, saturated, we could give the “Tough Mudder” race a good run for its money. Now, it is not all bad news, the leeks, celeriac, parsnips, swede and brassicas are doing quite well, and we are certainly grateful for that. In fact, Emmanuel is harvesting the very first of our parsnip crop this week, which is quite frankly amazing! But the increasing unpredictability of our weather is another challenge in an already challenging industry.
So it is with this backdrop that it is lovely to be acknowledged that we are doing some things right. To have external validation, that it is worth persevering, despite being a very small cog in a massive and unforgiving food machine.
To that end Simone and Lilly will both be in Dublin this weekend at Merrion square for the national organic food festival, and I will be there for a few hours from about 12 on Saturday if you would like to come along.
Not only that but we are having our first and only farm walk next Saturday the 7 th of September starting at 11am, and all are welcome, you can book a free ticket here. Hopefully see you over the next couple of weeks! Thanks as always for your support. Kenneth
I distinctly remember being encouraged to use Roundup as we embarked on our fledgling enterprise 18 years ago, “a touch of roundup” to use the exact phrase. Well, I nodded my head and went about my business, there was little point in trying to explain that in my view this was madness. Certainly, never in my lifetime will it be used on our little 20-acre patch of land in the west of Ireland. We are never going to apply a toxic weedkiller, no matter how easy that might make our lives.
This year and last year the weeds have got the upper hand, and the reason is straight forward: the rain. We have been challenged at ever turn, we have not been able to get the machines out into the fields to do our usual work as it has not stopped raining. There will be some casualties as a result, but I have to say if you look at the broccoli we are harvesting from our farm now, the weeds are certainly making no difference to the yield and quality, it is some of the best we have ever grown. You will be able to come and see for yourself on the 7th of September….. but you can meet us earlier too in Dublin, we’ll be at the National Organic Food Fair in Merrion Square on August 31st/Sept 1st!
Roundup provides a “Clean field” or an “Empty field” but in my view using it creates a landscape devoid of life, a landscape that could not be dirtier in terms of actual chemical contaminants. I believe the organic approach to producing food is certainly more difficult, more challenging, but it gives you imperfect perfection, which may seem a little ironic, but it is true. Perfect vegetables, but maybe to the naked eye the scene in the field does not look perfect. Maybe the vegetables do not always meet the exacting criteria of supermarkets, but maybe the produce is perfect just as it is and what is missing is the chemical contaminates, this is what makes our produce and the produce of all the other amazing Irish organic farmers that supply us perfect.
You have to ask the question with the overwhelming wave of chronic and serious illnesses that are sweeping society today, could the increased use of chemicals in growing our food and in producing our food have a role to play (and there certainly is no one reason for sure). As a medicinal chemist I would have to say these chemicals are not improving the situation, and the cocktail effect of consuming hidden chemicals in our food is for sure having a negative impact on our health. Just think if you saw a bottle with the description: irritant, toxic, harmful to aquatic life, carcinogenic, would you even consume a tiny bit of that. I certainly would not, would you? Chemicals that kill bugs and plants are toxic, they destroy life.
I digress, roundup and all modern herbicides are used to destroy life. They destroy any vestige of plant life that all other biodiversity relies on for their homes. What then? Where will the insects live? Where will the birds find their food when there are no insects? And how indeed will whole ecosystems survive when we remove all the critical natural environmental pieces of life they rely on? The answer is simple, they won’t.
We need to urgently look at how we are growing our food, I am not saying that organic is perfect, it certainly is not, but it does at least put environmental considerations at the centre of the food production journey. That was and is and has not changed in 18 years our central mission, to protect our beautiful biodiversity, and protect the environment whilst producing clean healthy imperfectly perfect food.
Thanks you for your support,
Kenneth
PS We are harvesting amazing broccoli amongst many other things, click to see them all here: IRISH SECTION HERE.
PPS: VERY EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENTS!
Announcement 1: We are going to be in Dublin for the national organic fair on the 31st of August and the 1st of September, please come by and visit our stall in Merrion square, more info here.
Announcement 2: We are having our first and only farm walk to mark the essence of the Irish harvest season on Saturday the 7th of September, put the date in your diary, details to be announced closer to the day!
