Off to Cork

We are working today (Friday) and will be off to Cork for tonight and Saturday and then will spend a day in the city of Midleton on Sunday.

Pictures coming soon hopefully!

Day 3

We all made the quick walk to the garden that’s about 100 yards from our cabin to meet Aidan and Jean-Christophe. I had watering duty this morning—watering plants and filling newly dug holes—that included lettuce, green beans, artichokes, sweet peas and potatoes. I’m getting really good at this watering thing. They call me the Sultan of the Soaker, Wizard of Water, Intimidator of Irrigation.

10am is Tea Time. And at Ballymaloe, tea time MEANS tea time. Mid-watering, Aiden told me to drop everything and go for tea and scones. Today there were delicious scones and raisin bread with an unbelievable homemade rhubarb jam. Seriously I think I’m already addicted. Aidan, master garden keeper, says rhubarb is one of the easiest plants to grow in the garden…just let it grow and fertilize with a bit of seaweed. But don’t eat the leaves—they’re poisonous—so you just keep the stems and boil in water to tenderize the tough stems and mix with sugar. We talked with Jean-Christophe (JC for short—yes he’s Jesus Christ) over tea—he is from a town near Lyon, France and is staying at Ballymaloe for 2 months, working in the gardens in the morning and in the restaurant in the afternoon as an intern.

Lunch was grand today. Looks like I’m not gonna be losing any weight even with all the hard work. Today’s included delicious fried fish, shepherd’s pie, spaghetti with meat sauce, cabbage, homemade pizza and more. Lunch is always at 12:55- 5 of 1- and if you’re late you won’t get the best food—so don’t be late.

After lunch, I covered the beans with plastic mesh to keep birds/rabbits out. Then scooped chicken manure and spread it all over a patch of land where salad greens will soon be grown. Yummy…sorry Dad I think there might be chicken crap stuck to your boots for a while. Lastly we cleared rocks and then sewed seeds in the glasshouse. To say the least my feet are dead tired.

Peace from Ireland for now…

So maybe no one's reading this...

If you're reading my blog...comment on some of the posts.

I know this blog might be corny…okay, really corny.

Let me know if my last post was too long, too short, or just too boring. Any ideas of what I should include? Or just jealous you aren’t here?

I'll have some pictures uploaded in the coming days!

Day 2...Work begins!

Day two was the start of work. Real quick: we’re living in a cabin. Mel, Emily and I each have our own room and there’s a nice kitchen that is stocked with some homemade bread, cookies, fresh milk, and fresh jams and relish from Ballymaloe.

Ireland had a long, dry, cold winter this year so for the most part, we are currently harvesting only select greens and herbs, onions, leeks and cabbages. Most of the farmland actually consists of wheat that grows year-round. But, it is beginning to get warm, so its time to plant a lot of produce now (or veg, as they call it).

Robyn introduced us to Susan, who oversees the garden, Aidan, who maintains the garden everyday, and Jean-Christophe, another helper who just came from France a couple weeks ago. We planted cauliflower, several types of cabbage, broccoli and Brussel sprouts today. I know that seems like nothing, but trust me, it takes forever. All this was in the huge bricked-in garden.

The steps:

Dig holes at measured 50cm increments. Place manure pellets in holes. Place small potted plant in hole. Fill up with water. Cover hole with dirt. Spray water over plant. Label plants. Cover with nets to protect from birds/rabbits.

10am=tea time. Always gotta have you tea in Ireland.

12:55pm= lunch time. This is when a lot of the staff eats and you get all sorts of choices, most of which is leftover from the restaurant service. Today’s included beef, shepherd’s pie, chicken in cream sauce, chickpeas, curried eggplant, rice, buttered carrots and a ton of desserts from rhubarb pie to lemon custard to chocolate cake to and Irish seaweed pudding-like thing that actually tasted really good.

By the end of the day, my hands felt like they’d never be rid of all the dirt. We took some stuff from the kitchen for dinner (pork belly, quiche and crab pate) and picked fresh greens from the garden for salad.

First day impressions: this place is serene, calming and friendly. And the weather is pretty perfect. About 65-70 degrees Fahrenheit…great sunshine but you’re rarely sweating.

Sorry for the long post—I promise the rest will be shorter!

P.S.—also in the walled garden includes onions, rhubarb, pumpkin, kale, leeks, kohlrabi, and ton of other stuff I’m forgetting. And there’s almost too much cabbage…its like the worst vegetable next to raw onions. (Yes, I hate raw onions as much as Scott Conant)

First day in Ireland

Sorry, it's been a few days, but I haven't had Internet. Here's a report on my first full day on the Emerald Isle.

Day 1 consisted of mostly travel. 940pm flight from JFK, land at Shannon airport around 10am their time. Anyone with a Euro passport is simply sent through customs with a smile as long as they hold up their passport photo. Then again, all I got was a stamp and sent through. I wish U.S. customs were just as quick…well, maybe not.

Upon landing at Shannon, Mel and I took a 2-hour bus ride to Cork (Ireland’s second biggest city), had a 2 hour wait, and then another hour-long bus ride to Ballycotton. The second bus happened to have mostly uniform-dressed middle schoolers going home from school on it. Looking out the window on the bus ride, I noticed a couple things.

First—Ireland really IS the Emerald Isle. Rolling, perfectly green-grass hills covered every bit of land in between the patches that were city.

Second—I saw a lot more black people than red-heads…yes, you read that right. Those Irish stereotypes are a bit off (although the pub beer-drinking one is dead-on).

Robyn, our host, picked us up at Ballycotton and brought us to our chalet (really a cabin) at The Ballymaloe House to unpack and shower after a long day of traveling. Robyn is a New Zealand transplant who happened to come to Ireland 7 years ago and did a few months of work at the Ballymaloe Cookery School and in the Ballymaloe hotel before settling down in Ireland and marrying Darren, a son of one of the hotel’s owners. Robyn is a graphic designer (she did Ballymaloe’s website) and she also helps out in the gardens and provides salad greens/herbs to the restaurant. Darren raises pigs and hens for food and eggs and is a big kite surfer.

SO just to make sure you understand Ballymaloe is a cooking school, restaurant, hotel and farm, as well as selling food its own products/cookbooks. It’s pretty sweet.

Robyn and Darren then made us some chicken, fresh salad from the garden with arugula, mustard greens, and rocket lettuce, and lastly a potato and just-picked asparagus salad with homemade mayonnaise. Instead of eating at her house, the four of us, joined by their terrier-beagle, took a 2-minute drive to the ocean shore and ate right on the cliffs that lead into the water.

After dinner, we went to the local pub, Blackbird, for a pint of Murphy’s beer, which is brewed in Cork. Yes, the Irish like their pubs. After meeting some friends of Robyn's, we went to sleep early because of some bad jet lag.

All About Ireland

Still haven't left yet...but I figure I'll share a brief bit about Ireland that I know (which isn't much so correct me Mella if anything is incorrect). Most information is from my Dublin-born geography professor.

Contrary to popular belief Ireland is not ruled by drunk red-headed leprechauns.

Ruled by England until the 1920s after WWI. New government tries an autarky (basically no international trade)...obviously this attempt sucked and in the 1970s Ireland became a place of cheap labor for globalizing companies (similar to Mexico today minus the drug lords?). From the 1980s on, Ireland improved education and increased financial services/technology greatly, forming the "Celtic Tiger" of the 1990s, the period of unbelievable economic growth in Ireland (like China today but more honest and subtract 1 billion people).

Hence, Dublin became a technological/tourist center of Europe and has a very young population (40% under 25 years old). But the Irish still get a large amount of their food from their home country compared to other countries its size. It's now a large producer of potatoes, beef, and cheese, among other things, and it has embraced the local "Farm to table" approach quite well.

Oh and they have that thing called Guinness (apparently Ireland's #1 tourist attraction is the Guinness Storehouse).

Real famous Irish people include Daniel Day-Lewis, Colin Farrell, Liam Neeson, and some guy named Bono and his band U2 (most people reading this will not have heard of half the famous hurling, rugby, soccer players, poets, writers, artists from Ireland so I won't mention them).

No Ryan Merriman from the "Luck of the Irish" disney channel movie is not Irish, surprisingly. However, a good amount of the Harry Potter films actors are Irish.

So why am I doing this?

Still haven't left yet, but for those who wanted to know why or how I came to do this...well....

When I failed to get any full-time summer job I knew I wanted to travel and somehow found out about WWOOF. The process is just about as informal as they come, so really anyone can do it. Pay a small fee 10-20$ maybe for the list of farms, contact the farms you want to work at, and if they want you, show up. Some farms ask that you stay 2 weeks, some 1 month, some say come by to help out for whatever amount of time you want..even a few days is fine.

Some hosts are huge farms, some are small farming projects, some just a family's large garden, some are agricultural communities. There are hosts in cities, mountains, and coastal areas. I could have picked hosts with no electricity, some that were totally vegetarian, or ones that only raised cattle, but I'm glad I started off with something less remote with a wide array of opportunities.

WWOOFing a seriously cheap way to travel. Pay for a plane ticket and you get free shelter/food in exchange for some work (many ask that you help out for 5 hours a day with weekends/nights free).

So am I trying to save the world with WWOOFing? Of course not. That's for Capt Planet. But there's something about eating food you helped grow and eating food you KNOW. Besides the fact that it tastes better, there's more satisfaction in knowing where your food came from and knowing you helped it grow from seed to food.

Maybe I'm a food elitist, but canned food usually sucks. Fresh food doesn't. And when you get something local, you're supporting the local economy. Sure you're cutting back on CO2 emissions too, but honestly, when a busted oil rig is spewing out about 40,000 gallons of oil into the ocean per day (yes I looked that up), I'm not sure eating local really halts CO2 emissions by decreasing shipping of foods across the country.

I enjoy eating local, organic food for the main reason that it supports people financially and it tastes better (and it helps the environment a little). Watch the documentary Food Inc. and you'll realize why you want to buy food you know. The film only brushes the surface, but let me tell you it's a lot tastier and more comforting to buy food from smaller, local practices.

Anyways, still haven't left for Ireland. Leaving tonight.

Intro

So here's the deal. I'm going to be in Ireland the next three weeks with two friends, Mel and Emily (although we'll all be going different dates). I'll be writing about my adventures on this blog. Hopefully I'll be able to update it every day but I doubt that will happen. Enjoy.

We're doing a program called WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). (Check it out here http://www.wwoof.org) WWOOF is in countries from Sweden to South Africa to China to Uruguay and even throughout the US. Unfortunately I won't be building a dry cleaning center for homeless leprechauns on this trip. Instead I'll hopefully be doing some farming, traveling and eating fresh produce. Simply, WWOOF gave me a list of farms looking for workers and I emailed a bunch asking to work for them in exchange for food and shelter (that's how WWOOF works), and (yes I use a lot of parentheses). Anyways, some farms already had workers, others wanted us to work.

Long story short: I email one family. They say we already have wwoofers coming, but my relative needs some wwoofers on her farm. Her relative emails us asking us to come work at her farm....and sends us this link of the farm. http://www.ballymaloe.ie/

I immediately said yes. Check out that link and scroll over "accomodations" and click "gallery". You'll understand why I chose this place.

I knew nothing about The Ballymaloe House (pronounced Ballymaloo...I think) except for the website/what the woman had told me. I soon found out that my parents stayed there in the 80s or so. The hotel is also home to one of the top cooking schools/restaurants in all of Ireland and is owned by Darina Allen, famous TV chef and pioneer of the European slow food, farm to table movement. It has its own 200 acre farm and all food for the restaurant is grown on the farm or other nearby farms.

Ballymaloe is in the southeast corner of Ireland just miles off the coast and about 45 minutes from Cork...if any of you have memorized a map of Ireland. (I know most people have)

I've yet to leave for Ireland, but it should be a great time as I'll be able to travel, cook, farm, eat delicious organic/local food. I'm almost as excited as Snookie was to leave for the Jersey Shore! I'm eager to see and experience all the Emerald Isle has to offer.

Everyone please comment and enjoy the blog!

P.S.--great Irish song to get you in the mood: Ireland by Garth Brooks.

P.S.S.--famous Irishmen include Samuel L. Jackson, Freddy Prince and Mariano Rivera. (jk..)