Derry Duff Farm

Head and Heart: Esk Mountain and Derreen Garden

I have had two experiences in the last couple of weeks that have both been outstanding, instructive, beautiful and unsettling.

Let’s start with Esk Mountain. Long term readers will remember Finbarr, our Bug Hotel and lockdown mascot (not Finbarr the pheasant, that’s another story). This Finbarr was designed and built for us by Kloe and Adam, the Two Green Shoots. We visited them in 2020 and were hugely impressed by what they were accomplishing in their gardens and their passion for conservation.

Kloe is now immersed in an enormous and significant undertaking, having expanded her holdings and diversified into animals. What I saw on the walk-and-lunch I did recently is her transformative vision in progress. Her project is called Esk Mountain and you can find it and read all about it here: https://eskmountain.com/.

But you can do better than read about it – you can stay here in an utterly charming studio apartment with the best accessory to a B and B I have ever seen – a nest swing! This is typical Kloe – full of imagination and using materials that would otherwise go in the landfill. 

Kloe has 270 acres and it was set up over 100 years ago with tree species to attract deer and provide good habitat for hunting. Then the rhododendrons arrived, smothering everything in their path. Her work now is restoration and it is very hard work indeed. She and her workers and volunteers have been clearing rhodos and felling trees and letting the light in so that the native species have a chance to grow – and they do! We saw all kinds of oak and holly seedling as we wended our way through the trees.

There are bridges and planks and stone steps and trails – the sense is of winding your way along magical little paths through the forest. Kloe is a great guide, stopping to tell us what we were looking at, pointing out plants, old walls, new shoots, old water courses. And then we reached the place where the mountain comes into view, green and dramatic – and being grazed by Dexter Cattle! It’s all part of the plan – the Dexters came from Derry Duff Farm, about which I wrote in my post Miracle in the Mountains. 

We could see them far away – but Kloe showed us how you do this now with Technology. Each animal wears a collar, so it’s always findable on your phone and you can move them around from grazing spot to spot, using this technology. Amazing! 

The walk ended with home made pizza in the outdoor pavilion, using a pizza oven and wood fire. We all made our own, using some of the materials we had foraged along the way, and very good local meats and cheeses. The most delicious pizza I have ever eaten!

Kloe’s aim is to restore Esk Mountain to a natural and healthy habitat. It’s a daunting task but if anyone is up to it, it is Kloe. Her passion for the forest and the land is obvious, as is her commitment to getting the job done. 

(Photo below courtesy of Esk Mountain)

If you would like to help, book an experience or if you can’t do that, sponsor a stake to help build their deer fence – after all the early years of trying to attract deer for hunting, it is now imperative to keep them out. That’s a lot of fencing! 

After that inspiring visit, it was an interesting contrast to drop into Derreen Garden on the Beara, with my friends Peter and Amanda (the Holy Wells champion). This is the other side of gardening. The home page describes it thus: A network of winding paths passes through a mature woodland garden laid out 150 years ago with subtropical plants from around the world and incomparable views of the sea and mountains. 

This is where the ‘unsettling’ part comes in – I am not sure I should have enjoyed Derreen as much as I did. After all, it is the antithesis of a place that seeks to regenerate and restore – Derreen is a celebration of the ambition of wealthy Victorians to create an exotic garden from imported and unusual plants. These kinds of garden were status markers, providing gentlefolk with a designed landscape full of meandering strolls and lovely vistas. 

Rhododendron, the same plant that Kloe’s team is exhausting themselves felling is, at Derreen, doing the ornamental job it was planted for, and in the brochure we are encouraged to spot the Sika Deer. So – one century’s status symbol becomes the next century’s problem and my head tells me I should be reserved about this.

And yet, and yet . . . To walk among these towering trees, every now and then coming upon the sea lapping at the shore, with views across to the Kerry mountains offers a sort of transcendence. It reminds you of your place in the world, and that we are as humans driven to ‘improve’ our own part of it. It’s the kind of setting where you want to settle down with your back to one of those giant cedars, gaze across the water, and write poetry. And in among the foreign plants native ferns and wildflowers are also flourishing, like the Sea Asters and Sea Lavender below. Whatever about my head, my walk through Derreen did my heart good.

It strikes me that both places are someone’s answer to what do we do with land we love, as it is now? Esk’s answer is restoration and participation; Derreen’s is curation and contemplation. I am definitely still unsettled, with my head and my heart jostling for my attention.

PS  I am hoping for a response from my friend Paddy Tobin, An Irish Gardener. I KNOW he will have opinions about this piece. 

Derry Duff Farm: Miracle in the Mountains

Last week I finally managed to make it to one of Derry Duff Farm’s open days – something I have been trying to do for a couple of years, ever since I started reading about what Steve and Claire Collins are accomplishing up in the mountains above Coomhola.

The first thing to know is that Derry Duff is one of the highest farms in West Cork, occupying very marginal land – the kind we mostly see being used as sheep range or simply covered in heather and fionnán grass. Certainly not the kind of location where you can imagine a thriving and productive berry farm.

The second is that Steve Collins is a man on a mission. A highly-educated dynamo, he has spent his working life in the trenches of famine-stricken regions, teaching local people the value of diversifying their crops so that when one fails, they do not starve. There a lovely irony in this, as it is very likely that those who lived on this land in the mid-nineteenth century surely were victims of the Great Hunger, when the potato crop failed for several years in a row. The Derry Duff farm still has its old farm buildings to show how long people have been making a living on this mountain.

Steve is convinced that Ireland has fallen into a false sense of security, with our reliance on mono-cropped grass. In years when the price of silage and hay soar, as they do, or when feed is scarce (remember the fodder crisis of two years ago?), cattle and dairy farming become precarious. He set out to see what he could grow that could make money, was not vulnerable to rainfall and climate change, was ecologically sound, and which helped to drive diversity. 

Along the way there has been experimenting, and not everything has been successful (anyone for Irish walnuts?), but he has landed now on two main cash crops – blueberries and aronia berries – and a huge variety of fruit trees and vegetables that are grown mainly for themselves. 

The farm is very impressive indeed. Steve has harnessed streams from the mountain, and dug ponds, and using solar-powered pumps, has a steady supply of water. He ‘grows’ his own soil using compost, wood chips and sheeps’ wool, which produces earth at the right Ph level for the crops he plants.

The paths that wend through the growing areas (you can’t really call them fields) are fragrant with chamomile, and at this time of year loaded with blackberries, heather, meadowsweet and cat’s-ear. The impression is of a living hillside, bursting with life. Apple trees grow all over the place, hens cluck here and there, and many different tree species have space to see if they can flourish at this altitude and in this climate.

To eat a fresh Derry Duff blueberry (you can buy them at select stores locally) is to rediscover what a blueberry is supposed to taste like – large, juicy, sweet and substantial. It’s a labour intensive crop but there are picking machines which may be part of the process at some point. They were just ripening for our visit.

Aronia berries are new to us here in Ireland. A north American native, they have the highest level of polyphenols of any plant or vegetable.

Here’s the information from the Derry Duff website:

These benefits come from four distinct but inter related mechanisms; their ability to improve glucose metabolism; their positive effects on the microbiome; their anti-inflammatory properties; and their antioxidant power.  Research shows they can prevent metabolic syndrome; the combination of central obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes or pre-diabetes and deranged blood fats; the greatest source of chronic ill health in Ireland and the developed world.

I came home with a large box of aronia juice, and I’ve been working my way through it. I like it – it’s not too sweet and tastes great mixed with some sparkling water. As regular readers know, I had Covid last week and I do wonder if the aronia juice got me back on my feet sooner than I might have without it. I remember feeling tired and listless for ages after my last bout of Covid and I seemed to bounce back more quickly this time. But of course that’s an anecdote (or a scientific survey with a population of one) and for the real science behind aronia, you can take a look at all the evidence here.

I came away from Derry Duff with a sense of awe that Steve and Claire and their family have taken on a challenge like this – to take a piece of marginal Irish hillside and turn it into a small miracle of abundance and fertility. Oh and by the way, up there ranging over the hills is also a small herd of Dexter cattle. The emphasis is on sustainability and biodiversity.  Nothing is wasted and everything they do addresses their aim, to live in harmony with the hills.

If you want to experience this yourself, you can stay at Derry Duff! They have a wonderful, luxurious, cabin called the Hidden Haven and it gets rave reviews in all the usual sites and magazines. The photo above is taken from their website. If you want to visit on an open day, contact them through the website to add your name to the list.