TREES FOR A WET SITE

Photo: Hawthorn flowering in May.

Hello. I have a very large garden backing onto a river and would like to plant some trees along the bank. Have you any idea what would survive these conditions? I would prefer it if the trees benefited wildlife in some way and if possible the thinned wood be good for burning as well. Regards BT Buncrana.

REPLY. Getting the correct trees for your site is important if they are to flourish. Alder is a favourite native tree for this type of ground. They can tolerate damp acid, neutral and chalky soils. Their favourite sites are stream sides, damp woods and waterlogged sites. The trees are fast growing and increase soil fertility by fixing nitrogen. The only wet they don’t like is stagnant sites. The trees can be coppiced well. The foliage is rich in insects and the birds like the seeds the trees produce. If you burn the coppiced wood then the firewood value for Alder is fair.

Willow is another native favourite. These produce rapid growth and some of the larger weeping types would look wonderful by the river. They can be coppiced to make your willow screens and prove to be good shelterbelts much the same way that coppiced Hazel is used for cattle. These trees can’t survive permanent water logging so plant them up the bank a bit. The early blossoms are valuable for insects and bees and give excellent nesting cover for the birds. The coppiced wood is very pliable and is widely used. For firewood though it is pretty poor but it is used for biomass fuel, so it can’t be all that bad.



Plant some Ash, Birch, Blackthorn, Hawthorn, Hazel and Whitebeam as well as these will survive wet conditions but not quite as successfully as Alder and Willow But they will give you a bit of variation. If you want to go for a non-native tree try Poplar as these can tolerate the wet and they are great for shelterbelts and rich in insects. The wood is of good quality but doesn’t burn well. There are some conifers that would be ideal for the spot too, although they won’t be full of wildlife like the other trees. Plant a few Lodgepole Pine as these will create a fine windbreaks. Sitka Spruce is good for shelter too but prefers grassy to heathery sites. The cones can attract Crossbills but very little else. Both trees produce soft wood that is fair for burning but if it’s anything like the base of our Christmas tree will burn very fast indeed!

Horticultural.

WALL INTEREST

When the garden is dormant you can always find plants of interest to look at on walls. There are some lovely south facing walls around where I live and they are awash with life. You will find that there is still a lot of growth on the warmer walls. Mosses are especially prevalent in January. These hardy plants can tolerate the wettest winters and the driest summers and need no attention from us whatsoever to give an attractive show. Mosses don’t set seed like normal plants; they produce tint spores in summer. You can see the beginnings of the spore pod capsules on stalks. These will later produce the dust like spores that get up peoples noses and cause hay fever in summer. Other walls have tiny ferns. They might look like the larger types but some are naturally tiny and have adapted brilliantly to their environment. Look for Wall Rue. With fronds divided like parsley, and Bladder Fern, these have tiny blebs on the backs of the leaves. Two kinds have slender fronds with a row of simple lobes on each side. One, Maidenhair Spleenwort, has fine black stalks. The other, Rusty -Back is so called because of the mass of brown scales on the underside of the fronds. This type curl up and look quite dead in dry weather.

Besides these you may find tiny flowering plants, which are seldom found anywhere else. The Ivy-leaved Toadflax makes bushy clusters of hanging stems with pretty mauve flowers like snapdragons. This plant sow it’s own seed on the wall. The stalks bend backwards and push the seed capsule into a crack. Wall Pepper or Yellow Stonecrop is a fleshy plant with a “Hot” taste, which stores water in its leaves.

Horticultural.

FOOD BOXES

I headed off to Belfast last week to visit some friends. For a few years now they have been on a council waiting list to acquire an allotment within walking distance from their house. This will allow them to grow their own organic vegetables. Like many areas that doesn’t have an abundance of spare land, these allotments are very much sought after. It could be years until one comes up (it would be a good idea to put children’s names on the list when they are born, that way they will probably get a plot before they retire)!

One thing that appeals to a lot of people about allotments is the sociable aspect. You could spend many a happy hour talking vegetables with your neighbour, swapping tips and cultivating new ideas.

Being self-sufficient with organically grown produce in the garden can’t be beaten. But if you have no interest in the fine art of growing your own, where can you get organically grown fruit and vegetables that haven’t been genetically tampered with? Most local shops, supermarkets and market stalls only sell a very small proportion of organic fruit and vegetables. This may be because people don’t ask for organic as it does tend to be more expensive. Another reason is that the produce may have imperfections on them such as scabs on apples and the odd slug tucked away on the underside of the leaves. Every year growers are improving their growing techniques to such an extent that you would be hard pressed to tell organic produce from chemical grown, apart from the taste of course. Prices too are coming down as the demand increases. Organic produce tends to be grown on a smaller scale than chemically grown plants and there are strict measures to make sure that the soil isn’t eroded from over cropping. I remember once driving through Lincolnshire in England and the effects of open field and intensive farming were devastating, the roads are up to six feet higher than the fields. When the roads were built they were on the same level, the soil has simply been blown away leaving an appearance of nothing more than a desert. The only way to grow vegetables in some of the worst effected areas is to add more chemicals as all the goodness has gone from the remaining inch or so of the soil.


In Ireland we’re limited by the amount of fruit and vegetables we can grow, as the season for growing is quite short (thankfully we still have soil though). In an environmentally perfect world we would all eat just the things that are growing around us. It would be pretty boring eating curly Kale all winter though! After saying that, here, up until recent history all people ate all year were spuds, there was no choice. Thankfully though, now we do have a choice it’s very popular to buy out of season crops from the shops, a punnet of strawberries to eat after your avocado salad in January for example. There are of course things that would be totally impractical to grow in our climate; the heating costs to grow things such as bananas and oranges would make the fruit far too expensive, the heating would be a pollutant too.

There was a report recently where a team calculated that the contents from just one pot of yoghurt combined had travelled more than 3000 miles to get to the table, which is a total waste of energy. The same goes for fruit and vegetables, some travel thousands of miles to get to us and of course the more it is handled the greater the cost to us, some products going through two or three distributors before the shop gets them.

FOOD BOXES

There has to be a happy balance to satisfy our varied taste for fruit and vegetables. One person that has done a lot of research on this subject is Thomas Becht. Thomas runs Donegal Organic Farm Produce based in Glenties. His company specialises in organic home delivery boxes. There are a number of vegetables that they grow themselves that are available at this time of year such as parsnips, leeks, turnips and even fennel, but to cater for customer demand Thomas sources products locally and from our European neighbours whilst trying to keep transport down to a minimum.
The boxes are made up to the customer’s specifications depending on what fruit and vegetables they like. They can include extras such as organic orange juice and if you’re really lucky the odd free-range egg from their hens. One advantage of these delivery boxes is that if you ask for a surprise box you will find yourself eating things that you wouldn’t normally buy. On Friday’s the company delivers around Donegal from Killybegs up to Dunfanaghy through Letterkenny and down to Donegal town. Unfortunately they don’t come up to Inishowen, it’s only a question of time though before we all realise that we are what we eat and that Inishowen needs a constant supply of organic fruit and vegetables.

Horticultural.