Corduff garden delivers the produce

PUPILS at St Patrick’s Senior National School, Corduff, are enjoying a new orchard garden created by students of Horticulture at ITB (Institute of Technology Blanchardstown).

The new garden was officially launched last week by Dublin GAA football star, Denis Bastick, at a ceremony attended by local community representatives, teachers, school staff, parents, children, ITB students and their lecturers.

ITB Horticulture is involved in a number of local community projects and this year a group of second year degree students wanted to run a series of practical workshops in growing food from seed for local children.

The five students – Breege Brennan, Cialan Burke, Graham Morrissey, Pricilla O’Reilly and Patrick Nolan – under the guidance of Horticulture lecturer Ciarnad Ryan, researched current community horticulture practice and working with school staff at St Patrick’s, planned and reviewed each workshop for the children.

The apple trees in the orchard garden were donated by ITB. Each tree is a successful graft carried out by propagation students at ITB with their lecturer Eamon Kealy.

Last week’s launch was a celebration of the work the students completed on the garden during the year and the collaborative effort of the school, ITB and the Dublin 15 Good Food Network (Blanchardstown Area Partnership).

The aim of the Good Food Network is to address the issue of food poverty by making healthy food available, affordable and accessible in the community. To help achieve this, ITB developed the school garden and community garden in Corduff to teach people how to grow their own food, even in a small space.

The ITB students worked as a group to deliver a series of workshops for the children throughout the spring that covered the basics of growing their own food including germinating seeds, handling transplants, training beans and planting strawberries.

The students explained how to care for the plot over the summer so that the produce can be harvested later in the year. Each class in the school had an opportunity to plant a tree and there are now 42 trees in the St. Patrick’s collection.

Ciarnad Ryan, lecturer in Horticulture, ITB, said the students benefit enormously from off-campus projects like the orchard garden.

“It gives them an opportunity to plan and implement a cost-effective project in a realistic time frame that will benefit our local community for years to come,

? he said.

“We also really enjoyed working with the children. Their enthusiasm for growing plants and being outdoors is infectious and reminds us of the reasons we became horticulturists in the first place.

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