Chapter 1: What is the significance of walled gardens in Ireland?
We begin this bank holiday edition of Mooney Goes Wild with a stroll through a very special walled garden in County Meath. Walled gardens have a long history in Ireland and Britain. Originally built on grand estates centuries ago to shelter fruit and vegetables from wind,
frost and prying eyes and to create highly productive self-contained growing spaces this one is in Stamullen in County Meath and reporter Terry Flanagan has been visiting the garden with Ciarán de Butler Ciarán grows his food in close partnership with Wildlife and Nature and has written a book Nature's Acre to encourage others to do the same
So the walled garden, Simone, has been here a long time, but it's not my garden. And the people who own the garden have generously allowed me to grow vegetables and food here. And also we grow in conjunction with nature and wildlife rather than against them. We're all together in this.
Chapter 2: How does Ciarán de Buitléar grow food in partnership with nature?
all together who's we we being myself and marie and dominica who helped me here in the garden and truth be known they do all the work yeah and they're local they live in simoleon yeah we being nature and wildlife and the insects and the birds and we all look after the land together so where we are here now we're just inside the wall we're right up here at the top of the garden which you've dedicated to growing food
So this is where we grow our food organically and we have raised beds here because they work very well around here and also a large part of the garden we've left largely to nature because we find that helps nature and it helps us to grow our food because the balance of nature means we don't get pests and bugs or we don't get very many of them and the food still grows.
looking at some of the food here you've got cabbages typical vegetables that people will grow but these are all organic as you say they're all organic it's not certified but we follow organic principles we don't use sprays we don't use chemicals we don't use artificial fertilizers we're not zealous about it but we do things in probably a natural way and that's the food we want to eat yeah yeah so that's why we grow it that way
Let's move over here a bit because if we move away from where you're growing food for eating, you have it left to wildlife here. I'm looking over here. You have what appears to be a little pond. Is that right?
So we put in a wildlife pond. We got it on a free cycle. One of these websites, a man was just getting rid of it. And we put it in there and we left it. And we said, well, the frogs might find it. And they have. I can see the tadpoles in there.
I can see the tadpoles. There are literally, well, there must be a hundred tadpoles in there. is and hopefully some of them make it to be mature frogs and they come along and they'll eat some of those pesky slugs and you have another one here I think you're about to get it up and get it running it's an old bathtub
Sure, yeah. One of the neighbours got their bathroom done up and they said, Ciarán, do you want an old bath? So I said, yes. And well, Dominique dug it out. Right. She dug that out and we put the bath in. We have a grill over it to stop any dogs or kids from falling in. And that will be filled with water naturally. The rain will fill it up and hopefully more wildlife will come in and use that.
The frogs, the insects, all those.
Now, the wall is covered in ivy. You've allowed that?
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Chapter 3: What organic gardening practices are used in the walled garden?
No cars at all. You can just hear the birds, right?
Yeah. It's an incredible spot and I presume it's an acre, is it? I mean, the walled gardens traditionally were an acre in area. I think it is an acre now. It looks like an acre to me. I see too you have a lot of nettles growing here in the garden.
You allow that, yeah? Sure we do. Now the kids maybe don't like them, but we tell them to avoid them. But they're really good for butterflies, which...
are good for caterpillars which are food for birds which all feeds into the cycle here so we let them grow maybe not in the bed where we're growing our onions yeah but we let them grow on on the margins of the garden and in fact in large sections of the garden they're full of nettles and then there's bluebells and as you said there's cow slips yeah the butterflies tell me some of the species you get
But we do get what you might call the cabbage white, which we do keep off our cabbages with netting, so we don't try to kill them. We get the red admiral butterfly, and we get peacock butterflies. Those are probably the only ones I know, but I've seen blue ones and orange ones, and I'm not an expert on insects, so I couldn't tell you what they are, but there are lots of different kinds here.
Now, the sun has just come out, and it brings everything to life here in the garden.
It's unbelievable. It's like being in the Mediterranean sometimes sitting here in Stamullan on the coast of Ireland. The heat from the sun here, it's different from outside. I don't know. It could be something in my head. Perhaps you're feeling it too. Well, I can feel it now.
Just since that sun came out there now, it's really brought up the temperature.
Absolutely. And if you go up beside that wall, you get the heat there. It's phenomenal. What do the locals think of this garden? It's funny. I walked past the wall for years not knowing what was in here. And when I came in, I saw the garden. People are hearing about it because we do some stuff on social media and we talk to people, obviously.
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Chapter 4: How does wildlife contribute to the health of the garden?
So nature helps us to grow our vegetables here in this garden by maintaining a balance so we don't spray with anything. We don't have huge influxes of green fly anything like that we don't have the white fly and the black fly and I won't name all the pests but we have the pests and we have the predators we have a few of each and the whole thing works we've never sprayed anything here.
And Ciarán you'd like to encourage others to take on a project like this?
I absolutely would and this project has actually moved outside the walls of the garden I did write a book about it called Nature's Acre And I've brought that into the local primary school and read parts of it and talked about it to the kids. Now, one girl, about eight, came up to me after that and said, you've inspired me to do gardening.
Now, a neighbour also, down the road, about a mile away, gave me a call and said, could you come around and look at my garden? I've got an acre of grass and I'm sick of cutting it. I'd like to put in wild plants instead. So I went around and we got our heads together and... I gave her a planting list. So she's replaced half of her lawn with wild shrubs and trees and wild plants. Right.
And she wants the birds to be able to come into that space and make more space for wildlife. So this project hasn't just stopped here. The project has gone way outside the garden. Another lady in Dundalk got in touch. She had a flooded back garden, no light. Very shady, flooded back garden. The whole garden flooded regularly.
And we just got our heads together and I gave her a few ideas and she got a few friends together with a planting list and she made a wildlife garden in a tiny, tiny back garden. Solved the flooding problem. Got somebody to dig out a sump and put in raised beds and now she's filled that with native Irish plants and it's full of wildlife.
Thanks indeed to Ciarán and Terry, and more details can be found on www.rte.ie.
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