Grow it Yourself (GIY), has signed a lease with Curraghmore Estate in Portlaw, Co. Waterford to create a GIY market garden, expanding its food education and production activities.
The GIY market garden at Curraghmore Estate will be a mixed-use organic smallholding with traditional breed poultry and pigs, as well as field-scale vegetables and fruit which follow regenerative agriculture principles.
It will be based within the 19th century 12ac walled garden at the Curraghmore Estate, one of the largest walled gardens in Ireland and the UK.
Founder of GIY, Michael Kelly, said that the new partnership with the Curraghmore Estate – the ancestral home of the Marquis of Waterford, will build on the success of GROW HQ – an award-winning food education centre, urban farm and café based in Waterford city.
The aim is to create a regenerative food education campus in Waterford.
Michael said: “It will be a model of a sustainable food system with a mixture of food production, education, enterprise and tourism.
“We are delighted to announce that we will be turning the sod on the new GIY Market Garden this spring. We will be using the new land for food production, adopting farming and grazing practices that restore organic matter, soil and ecosystem health.
“It will be a setting for food education, offering immersive education experiences through courses, visits and events for children and adults.
“Food enterprise activities will see the creation of a community of GIY enterprises from an organic vegetable box scheme, to the supply of local restaurants with vegetables, eggs and meat.”
Next steps
The GIY founder continued: “The next steps for the project, will see preparation for spring planting across 7ac, with the first food production and harvest underway. We would also like to see the walled garden restored to some of its former glory.
“At one stage, the walled garden would have employed 40 gardeners, and supplied the estate and Portlaw itself with produce. It was pioneering and innovative for its time, and was the first workplace of rewilding pioneer, William Robinson.”
People in Waterford and beyond will be able to sign up to receive a weekly box of organically-grown produce from the GIY walled garden from July.
GIY has launched a registration process for people to find out more and to sign up for the waiting list on its website.
The project was approved by government with support from the dormant accounts fund.
GIY has worked collaboratively with partners across sectors, from foundations to corporate partners, to national bodies such as Healthy Irelan, Bord Bia and Failte Ireland, and at a global level, with the UN Sustainable Development Goals Advocacy Hub.
Curraghmore Estate has 800 years of history and is a 25-minute drive from GROW HQ. It is the last of four castles built by the de la Poer family after their arrival in Ireland in 1167. Their descendants still live there today.
It is home of Curraghamore Whiskey and the All Together Now music festival. The gardens include a formal parterre, tiered lawns, a lake, an arboretum and kitchen gardens.
The estate contains some of Ireland’s most remarkable surviving trees – sweet chestnut and oaks, beech, Chinese Fir, Japanese Umbrella Pine, a Maritime Pine, Lebanese Cedar and the estate’s and Ireland’s tallest tree, an enormous Sitka Spruce.
At 12ac, the walled kitchen garden was known to be the largest walled garden in the UK and Ireland. At one stage it employed 40 gardeners.
The farm at Curraghmore was considered Europe’s first commercialised farm.
Champion of the naturalistic style of gardening, William Robinson started his horticulture career at Curraghmore and later became a famous garden writer and author of ‘The Wild Garden’ (1870).