Muintir na Tire School Garden Competition

  Corn Salad Often considered a weed, corn salad (also known as lamb’s lettuce) is a super-hardy and low-growing winter salad with a mild, nutty flavour. It is one of the winter-hardy salad leaves we sow at GROW HQ in the late summer and early autumn to last through the winter. We generally do a couple of sowings every two to three weeks from September to keep us going, with occasional pickings of winter leaves until the new season salads arrive in spring. SOWING Corn salad is usually grown as an autumn/winter salad, but can be grown year-round. For an autumn/winter crop sow in August and September. It can be sown in modules and transplanted, but is easier to sow direct. If sowing direct, sow thinly 1-2cm deep in rows 15cm apart. If sowing in modules, sow one seed per module and transplant when they have outgrown the tray, spacing them 10cm in rows 15cm apart. GROWING The crop can be thinned to 3-5cm between plants, which tends to give larger leaves, but will happily grow unthinned...

  Onions We love onions at GIY because they are one of those vegetables that it’s possible to become fully self-sufficient in, even if you don’t have a huge amount of space. A decent sized raised bed could produce a couple of hundred onions, which would be enough for most families for up to a year. Onions are relatively easy to grow and they store well. Above all, there’s nothing better than having onions hanging in your shed and knowing you don’t have to buy those dry, tasteless, imported supermarket onions this year. SOWING Onions grow best in a good fertile soil, so add compost and a general fertiliser for best results. There are two types of onions: autumn-sown onions and the far more common spring varieties. Onions can be grown from seed or small, dried immature onions called ‘sets’. Beginners often find growing from sets easier. To grow from sets, buy good quality sets in either the autumn or spring. Plant autumn varieties in September or October and spring varieties in late ...

  Garlic Most of the garlic available in supermarkets is imported from China (over 5,000 miles away). Garlic is relatively easy to grow and stores extremely well. It’s also incredibly good for you. The garlic requirements of an average family can be easily satisfied by even the smallest of vegetable patches. If you were to take a bulb of garlic, break out the cloves and stick them in to the ground spaced about 10cm apart, each clove would eventually turn in to a bulb of garlic. That’s the magic of it. SOWING When planting garlic it is important to make sure you have a variety that is suited to the Irish climate and to the time of year you are planting it. If you buy garlic from a supermarket it could well be imported from abroad, e.g. China or Spain – the variety would probably grow poorly in the Irish climate, which is why we recommend you buy your garlic locally. Garlic will grow in most reasonable soil. For autumn planted garlic the fertility left in the soil from a previous cro...