A day off from the gardens

So again I’m writing posts on my computer and will put them up once I get to the Internet, hopefully later tonight. Thursday we took the morning and early afternoon off and biked over to the famous Ballymaloe Cookery School, which is run by Darina Allen. She’s Ireland’s most famous chef and she and her daughter now appear on TV all the time here (mostly her daughter Rachel though). There’s no one really like her in America…but maybe she’s a little bit like Dan Barber, chef/owner of Blue Hill restaurant. Darina has lots of cookbooks and is an enormous supporter and trailblazer for “slow food”, local produce and gardening in Ireland. The Ballymaloe Cookery School has demonstrations, short week long courses, and 3 month courses upon which students receive their certificates from the school. Their gardens are larger and even more impressive than the ones at the Ballymaloe House (they’re a 2 minute drive/15 minute bike ride from each other). At the Cookery School, they have more money, more people, more animals, more veggies, more fruit and more food in general, but both are equally as impressive.

The same morning we also walked around the Ballymaloe House and went to visit the pigs and hens that are raised behind the hotel. The hens live in couple luxurious double-wide trailers (yes, you read that right), and we took some freshly laid eggs from their pen after feeding the hens our food scraps.

That night we worked in the Ballymaloe Grainstore (located between the gardens and the restaurant), which is hosting a month-long art exhibition featuring 7 artists and lots of paintings. I helped get the place ready, serve food and wine and collect plates. The Grainstore is still in the building process, but is almost completed, and it’s a big building (formerly held all the wheat grain) that hosts everything from music (Al Copley of the Blues Brothers is playing there next week) to art to lectures to weddings. I heard they even have tons of Bar and Bat Mitzvahs at the Ballymaloe Grainstore (not).

The work was fairly easy and the night went well overall. I met some new young workers including Jean-Baptiste, another France native, who is doing an internship at Ballymaloe this summer.