Cabbage patch kits

LAST MARCH, MICHELLE OBAMA and a bunch of volunteers, spades at the ready, dug up more than 1,000sq ft of presidential lawn to create an organic community “Victory Garden”. Where Barney and Spot Bush (Dubya’s glossy Spaniels) once played hide and seek with WMDs (sorry, I mean ham bones), the Obamas dug down, planting a herb and vegetable garden with crops that will be shared by the White House with a Washington organisation catering for the homeless.

Edible celebrity is where we are at: never before has a muddied carrot been so coveted, a runner bean so feted, a frowningly pitted celeriac so celebrated. In these recessionary times, one is barely finished saluting the sun before some enthusiast on morning radio is twittering on about allotments and organic pesticides. And where once the ubiquitous dinner-table conversation was of property prices, now the chat is all chard and the whispered intimacies are of the slug-repellent variety.

Not one to buck a trend (well, that’s not quite true – the closest I’ve ever got to an SUV, for example, is the narrow avoidance of its bull bars on my backside), I too have taken the plunge and bitten the beet, so to speak. I am now the inordinately proud proprietor of my very own vegetable patch. There is a six-foot by three-foot box sitting in my patio garden (a euphemistic term for a small concrete space), suffused with bashful little lettuces and elegant chives, and cabbage and beetroot plants, and a couple of bunches of proud celery (to name but a few) – and baby, I have arrived!

Now there are two types of people in the world, in my opinion: those who go to hardware stores for fun (my brother-in-law is a prime example, finding his way blind around aisles of wall plugs and six-inch nails like a confident mole in a tunnel of clay); and those, like me, for whom all DIY is torture, and for whom the act of building a raised timber vegetable bed (are you joking?), let alone filling it with a tonne of organic soil (you’d need a wheelbarrow for a start), would be a destructive and humiliating experience, akin in fact to parading down Grafton Street with your skirt tucked into your tights (and no, I haven’t actually done that either).

Quickcrop is an innovative business, supplying and fitting modular raised bed-planters, with a choice of growing vegetable plants, in gardens, patios or even, for apartment-dwellers, on slivers of balcony. It is a service that takes the work out of growing vegetables, allowing you to do the fun bits, such as watering the seedlings, gasping at the leeks, and picking and eating your own produce.

The brainchild of Niall McAllister and Andrew Davidson, both Leinster natives now living and growing in Co Sligo, the venture was launched late last year when the retreating Celtic Tiger left them both facing unemployment. McAllister, who worked in office furnishing, and Davidson, an artist, were already growing their own produce, having moved with their families to the countryside several years earlier, and both had a keen interest in sustainability and self-sufficiency.

They found that friends enjoyed eating their produce, while children who were usually fussy eaters would behave like locusts around a vegetable patch. Time and again, people would say how much they would like to grow their own were it not for constraints of space, time and expertise. According to Davidson, something of the “Yes We Can” spirit of the Obama campaign started filtering through, and the two men set about designing a product and service that would allow the greenhorn vegetable-grower soar.

Their plan is deliciously simple, and on an unusually sunny spring day I watch it take shape. McAllister and Davidson arrive with the raw materials to build a raised bed: timber, which has been treated against rot and pest attack and is guaranteed for a minimum of six years; and a tonne of soil – loose, organic, premium-grade, peat-free and composted with farmyard manure.

“You’d want to get into it,” says Davidson with genuine relish when the frame has been slotted together, the galvanised steel screws tightened, the semi-permeable membrane laid down and the bed filled with soil. Casting Davidson’s offer aside, we (note the word “we” – within half an hour of their arrival I was Ms Grow-Your-Own 2009) filled the bed with a selection of vigorous young vegetable plants that had been started off in polytunnels and hardened off outside, maximising the possibility of successful growing.

Two hours later, my raised bed was smiling at me, and next to it was a smaller seedling bed, planted and covered with a plastic cloche, which acts as a mini-greenhouse, generating the plants that I will use to replace my consumed produce.

So why do it? Why a raised bed? Why not just dig up the garden and plant a couple of spuds? It’s not rocket science, for heaven’s sake. Well, firstly, I don’t have a garden to dig up; secondly, if I did have a garden to dig up, I’d talk about it till the cows came home, and never do it; and thirdly, the quality of the soil guarantees me at least six or seven years of growth and I don’t need to compost for three or four years. For someone who is more familiar with a keyboard than a rake, it is also handy that Quickcrop offers an online forum where it continues to support and advise clients, and where a selection of organic seeds and products are available.

“Vegetable gardening with your nails intact?” growled a gardening-enthusiast friend, one of those proper gardeners who suffers for her celery, when I told her about my leap into self-sufficiency.

Way to go! I love it, I just love it. Gain without pain. Scallions without suffering. Thyme without the twinge. Now I’m going to nip out and water my ruby-streaks (that’s a lettuce, by the way).

Easy Planters

Quickcrop has a variety of products available to kick-start your vegetable-growing odyssey. Raised beds come as flat-packs for self-assembly, or there are the fully serviced options, whereby Quickcrop comes to your home to assemble and plant your bed.

Fully serviced small- to medium-sized ready-to-pick family gardens cost about €395, while small to medium herb and salad gardens start at about €120. The top-of-the-range is an 18ft by 3ft ready-to-pick unit with three tonnes of soil, which costs €995.

I got a medium vegetable garden, 12ft by 3ft by 14in, planted with hardened-off growing vegetables. Harvesting starts within three weeks and continues through to September and October. The beds can also be used for overwintering crops. Details about deals, prices, sizes, seeds, soil and yield are on www.quickcrop.ie .

Powers that be

“Shoehorning vegetable plants into tired beds, between the hydrangea and rosebush, is not necessarily going to be successful,” says our gardening expert Jane Powers. “Paying for the expertise to get a dedicated raised bed, with good soil, into your garden, will get the hard work done and start you off winning.”

Powers, who knows the pitfalls of gardening DIY, is an enthusiastic proponent of a system that will encourage people to get bitten by the grow-your-own bug.

With a bag of chlorine-washed rocket leaves, of dubious nutritional value, retailing in most supermarkets for about €3, Powers is extremely positive about the service and expertise on offer. As she points out, while requiring an initial outlay of cash, this system should ultimately pay for itself.