Our Polytunnel
Growing your own fruit and vegetables is one of the easiest things that anyone can do to lower their impact on the environment - and it can save you money too. Our polytunnel is by far one of our biggest success stories, and the great thing about it is that anyone with a garden space can emulate what we have done on a smaller scale.
Self sufficiency
We built our polytunnel with the aim of it helping us to become self sufficient when it comes to fruit and vegetables. It could not have been more successful. Today it provides fresh fruit and vegetables for four families, all year round, and is home to the kind of mouthwatering treats that would otherwise have to be transported long distances before we could enjoy them here in Cork.
Help from the wormery
We grow gorgeous honeydew watermelons, and fantastic kiwi fruits - as well as grapes, beetroot, radishes, salads and a wide variety of herbs. The soil in our polytunnel is kept rich in nutrients by compost from our wormery (re-using our own waste food in the process) and by using companion planting we manage to attract the right kind of creatures that keep the wrong kind of creatures away from our crops - so we don't have to use sprays or pesticides, we just let nature do its thing.
Building a polytunnel
A polytunnel isn't even a particularly complicated thing to build - there is nothing stopping most people having one in their garden if they have the room (ours is a big one, but you can have smaller ones, of course). Metal struts form the skeleton, and this is then covered with a hard-wearing polythene with UV inhibitors. The polythene allows 90% of light through into the polytunnel, and the light is diffused - meaning that it is spread evenly to allow all of our crops enough light to grow, not just the tallest ones.