Our garden is a food paradise! It’s the starting point for our dinners and a source of great inspiration and fine taste. The flavour of just picked fruit and vegetables is addictive.

What we have at Lettercollum is a one acre walled fruit and vegetable garden that was originally built around 1860. It initially provided for the ‘big house’, then fed the nuns and forty noviciates who moved in next. It was then abandoned for many years and when we inherited the garden, it would be generous to say it was a tree lined weed patch!

However, we have lived here for forty-two years and have gone to great lengths to cultivate the garden organically.

The soil is healthy and nutritious after all the digging and constant applications of manure and compost. The old mantra of one year’s seeding, seven years weeding is so true, but eventually the garden transformed into an orderly and productive place.

All our edible food waste goes to the chickens and everything else goes to the compost. We spent years transporting buckets of waste back and forth from the kitchen in our shop.

I always hoped that the egg shells would discourage the slugs but they continue to thrive. We used to dig up hero quest figures that belonged to our children, but these days it’s more likely to be a vegetable peeler.

We repaired the glasshouses which are now in year round use housing tomatoes, aubergines, chillies in the summer, and a winter garden for the colder months.

The tunnels are very valuable in our climate, as tomatoes would rarely ripen outside, and in the colder months we have a slow but steady supply of vegetables to cook.

We have a beautiful peach tree, an apricot jam tree and bougainvillea espaliered along the wall of one tunnel — a resounding blast of the Mediterranean in West Cork!

Outside there are artichokes, potatoes, beans, beetroots, leeks, courgettes, pumpkins, salads, brassicas, lots of soft fruit, apples galore.

It’s been hard work, but we feel very fortunate with the abundance we have cultivated.

A garden of plenty.