The Great Outdoors 3oct2024

Patrick Kinney, a Senior Scientist in the Air Quality Team at the Environment Protection Agency, discusses the air quality report for Ireland in 2023. He explains that air pollution is a public health issue, with small towns and villages experiencing pollution during cold, still evenings in winter. The pollutants in the air can cause various health problems, including asthma, heart conditions, and mental health issues. Residential burning is a significant source of pollution, and the report highlights the need for awareness and action to prevent air pollution. Kinney also mentions the air quality monitoring system in place and the impact of traffic pollution in urban areas. This is Radio Phobos Calamara, and you're listening to The Shape Which You Hate FM. Welcome to the great outdoors here on Calamara Community Radio, 87.816.1 FM. Good evening listeners, wherever you are, you're very welcome to the great outdoors. I'm John Staunton, and I'm filling in for Brendan O'Scannell, who has taken a well-deserved break for a little while, and I hope Brendan will have a nice, relaxing time off. So, I'm confident I'll be with you until 8.30. So, let me tell you first, the wonderful people that I hope to talk to tonight. Our eco-slash for that will be talking to Patrick Kinney, and Patrick is a Senior Scientist in the Air Quality Team, and his organisation is the Environment Protection Agency, and it's about air quality. You know, we think Calamara, perfect air, pure air, I hope the story will be good there, but I think the air might not be as good as we think, but I still would reckon it is good. So, if Patrick can hear, Patrick Kinney, Senior Scientist in the Air Quality Team, will tell us all about that. Then, after the ads, we talk to Hans Omer, and his organisation is Global Action Plan, and that's about, that last Sunday, the 29th of September, was the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste. It's just hard to believe the amount of food that's wasted in Ireland, and globally, like it's just mind-boggling and so sad. So, Hans, hopefully, will give us some tips, or something, how to make us conscious, that we all need to get involved in trying to prevent food waste. Then, we have my old friend, and regular here on Calamara Radio, after about 25 to 8, is Eleanor. Eleanor Mannion is a local gardening expert, and she'll be talking all things gardening, and I suppose I'll be asking her, really, what should we be doing in October? It's a lovely time of year, gardening, if the weather is nice, as it has been. Then, attuned to it, we have Seamus Branyard. Seamus is at the Caranagh Walking Club, and there's a weekend, a walking weekend, taking place in Caranagh, I believe, the weekend of the 18th to the 20th of October, not too far away at all, and Seamus will talk to us about that walking weekend, in Caranagh, down the island. It's one of our nearest villages, where our Irish language is alive and well in lovely Caranagh. Then, we finish up, at about a quarter past 8, with our Arts Allot, and I'll be talking to Eamon Murray. He's the project manager, what we call McLeodfest, and he has exciting story for us, news, that new festival will be taking place from the 11th to the 17th of November. In the dark days of winter, we're talking about a tradfest, so I think that will get your attention. So now... The Eco Floss, on Canamara Community Radio, a weekly programme focusing on environmental and climate sustainability. This programme is co-funded by commissioning demands through the Sound and Vision Scheme. Now, as I said there, before the Eco Floss, my technician is Anne Norris, and so hopefully everything will go to plan for us, and we're very confident Anne is so experienced with us here. So, Patrick is online, I believe. Patrick Kenny? Yes, good evening John. Good evening Patrick, and thanks for joining me here on this Thursday evening to talk to us about air quality reports. Thank you very much John, and thank you very much for having me on your show here this evening. It was my pleasure. So, yes, we launched our most recent air quality report within the last week, so Air Quality in Ireland 2023. We publish these every year, and we take a look back on the year that has just gone by. So, essentially what we're saying is that air quality is a public health issue, and if you think of, we're just coming out of a really golden autumn period of time, and I heard you referring there to October being a lovely period of the year, which it certainly can be, but I suppose we are heading towards the winter. It's inevitable, unfortunately, and on those cold, still evenings that we have over winter, we really can see air pollution build up in small towns and villages right across the country, and that pollution and the pollutants in that air are impacting on our health, and the latest figures that we have from the European Environment Agency, who do this for the whole of Europe, but the figure they have estimated for Ireland is 1,600 premature deaths every year from air pollution. We have one of the highest incidence rates of asthma in Europe, and this also impacts on other pre-existing conditions, including heart conditions and impacts on our lungs, and we have recent Irish research which has highlighted the impacts of air pollutants on our health, and one of the things it looked at was that hospital admissions are much higher after periods of exposure to air pollution, and those periods of cold, still air where those pollutants are building up. We even have recent Irish research by the ESRI that is showing the links between air pollution and mental health impacts, including depression. Those air pollutants in our air, those 1,600 premature deaths, the primary source of those is residential burning, because again it's very fine particles in our air that we're talking about here. It's called PM2.5, or fine particulate matter. You could line up about 500 of these on a single human hair. The fact that they're so small means that they can get pulled very deeply into our lungs, so essentially how we heat our homes and particularly what we burn impacts us, our families, our neighbours. We can see the outcomes and I suppose the values from monitoring right across the country on airquality.ie, where local monitoring is available for local monitoring stations right across the country, and we launched within the last year an air quality forecast, which predicts air quality for three days into the future. We also have real-time maps that update every hour and colour in the entirety of the country based on what we call the Air Quality Index for Health, which is an index from 1 to 10, colouring through from green being good to yellow being fair to red being poor and purple being very poor. So every hour we colour in the whole country in those colour bands based on modelling that's based on the monitoring network and met data that comes through from METARIM and other inputs. And will the worst places still be in our cities and towns? Surely there'd be a difference between the intensively populated areas rather than the typical rural areas and especially sparsely populated areas like parts of Connemara? Yes, more sparsely populated areas and more rural areas in general would have better air quality in the wintertime. It's more towns, villages and cities where you have gatherings of people. Essentially for those pollutants to build up you need two things to happen at the same time. You need there to be a source of pollutant in the first place, so be that very fine particulate matter, it's how we heat our homes largely, there are other sources but the dominant source is how we heat our homes. For other pollutants it's vehicles and cars and then very often we need those cold still conditions as well where pollutants don't get dispersed. Obviously we can be a very windy country, it can be a very wet country. On those days the wind and the rain does wash pollutants away which is a positive for Ireland but on days, it isn't raining every day, certainly it's not raining heavily every day and we don't have the wind blowing very strongly every day. So on those days with cold still air conditions in particular we really can see pollutants start to build up particularly in the wintertime. But yes it's in areas where there are gatherings of houses, it's villages, it's towns, it's cities where we see the highest values. Yes, as expected. So you're telling us Patrick that this lovely kind of sunny days with slight frost, real still Connemara is looking amazing, that there is a kind of a hidden danger there, that that's when the tiny toxins of air pollution would be accumulating in our still skies. Yes, it's those kind of wet conditions, it's generally more the evening time and the night than the daytime. It's generally when people get their heating systems going, so it's from about, well depending on how cold it is, but from about 5, 6 o'clock in the evening through sometimes to 11 or 12 o'clock at night and we do graphs and overlays where we take all the stations in our entire network and we have up to 115 stations at this point in time and we overlay all their data and you can see them all rising, particularly again when we get into wintertime and in the evening time, you can really see that when heating systems are starting to kick in you can see the concentrations of those fine particles start to rise and then dip back down again as we get to midnight, 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock in the morning. Equally we also take a look at traffic pollution and we look at a pollutant called nitrogen dioxide, which again is more of an issue in our very larger urban centres where we have greater concentrations of cars and traffic and traffic jams, but we overlay that data as well and you can see that there's kind of two distinct periods of time, there's the morning rush and the evening rush. Now the evening rush generally lasts longer and when we look at Dublin unfortunately the morning rush and evening rush is lasting longer than it ever did before but we can see two defined periods of time for that as well and again with those pollutants, as with all pollutants, when we get periods of time with cold, still air conditions, they tend to not get dispersed and they tend to build up and up and up. Now this might be a bigger topic, I'm going to ask maybe a minute for about a time almost, but is it a kind of a case sometimes, maybe thinking locally off the Galway ring road, that to get rush hour traffic kind of moving faster rather than take forever like you just barely called and so that might be one advantage of a good flow of traffic might reduce the harmful nitrogen dioxide. Certainly traffic management overall is something that's being looked at right across Europe and keeping traffic flowing and I suppose other things from a traffic perspective are active travel and again even if it is possible and I do appreciate in more rural areas that this may not be possible, I know there's obviously more rural buses than there ever were before, but it may not be possible, but certainly in the more urban areas if it's possible to leave the car at home for even one day a week and either walk, cycle or take public transport, you know that one car less, if everyone could do it, will have a very positive impact on traffic related pollution. When it comes to home heating, again it's moving towards cleaner heating choices and equally, and again this may not be the case for everyone, but if you do have more than one heating system in your home, if you have gas or oil that's capable of keeping you warm and comfortable and it's very important that everyone is warm and comfortable in their home this winter time, but if you have a system that's able to do that and then you have a secondary solid fuel heating system, if it's possible to not use that and still be warm and comfortable, then you're going to have a really positive impact on air quality in your local area for you, your family and all of your neighbours. Because again, getting back to this, it's those tiny particles, if we can reduce down the amount of those that we're generating while still being warm and comfortable in our homes, and I do appreciate that there are people who are listening who don't have a choice in this, they only have a means to heat their home using a solid fuel heating system, I suppose for those folks if it's possible to use the cleanest fuel possible, you're again going to have a positive effect. And equally to make sure, and I think this is an obvious one too, to make sure that you're keeping your chimney swept, that your chimney is clean and that you are utilising the driest fuel possible, you're going to have a positive impact as well. Because again, I think we all know that those chimneys where we can see where there's thick black smoke coming out of it, that really isn't good from a health perspective. Yeah, so Patrick, we're really out of time, it's a huge topic, we'd love to talk longer to you, but thanks a million, some of it is common sense, black smoke, try and reduce it, maybe in the lovely fine still, frosted days maybe if you could take one walk to work or something, but we go to the ads. Thank you very much. Thanks so much Patrick for joining us. Thank you, take care. You've just been listening to the Eco Sloth on Connemara Community Radio, a weekly programme focusing on environmental and climate sustainability. This programme is co-funded by Commissioner Nauman through the Sound Vision Scheme. When I got up this morning, the house, it wasn't freezing, I checked it out with one quick tap, the Sweeney Oil Smart Saver. Control your costs and monitor your oil levels with the Sweeney Oil Smart Saver. Call Sweeney Oil on 1800 555 999 or visit sweeneyoil.ie. Sweeney Oil on Balacliff Kewley. West Coast Insulation, your local cavity wall and attic insulation specialist. Walls pumped with Kingspan Platinum Eco-Bead. We also supply and fit blown rockwool and mineral wool in attics. A grant of up to 3,250 euro available. For more information or for a free quotation, call West Coast Insulation on 087 142 1414 or visit our website on www.myinsulation.ie. If you have any questions, put them in the comments section below. You can use any drug you want. A small thing will go a long the minute you buy it. Put the other drugs in the comments section below. If you have any questions about any drug, you can ask your passionate friends and other people on my website. If you have any questions about any drug, please email me at rsa.ie. Looking for a unique birthday party celebration for your child? Join Killary Adventure Company at our new Aerial Park. Our birthday party packages will have your little monkeys zipping through the treetops for a birthday they'll never forget. Perfect for kids, teens and adults alike. Call Killary Adventure today at 095 434 11 or visit our website to learn more. Adventure begins at Killary. Bounce Back Recycling can collect old mattresses and furniture direct from your address. Recycled materials are recovered and diverted from landfill for a more environmentally friendly option. So go green and get in touch today. Collections across Connemara every Friday. Bookings are subject to availability. To get a quote or make a booking call 091 7608 77. See bouncebackrecycling.ie or message bouncebackrecycling on Facebook. Joyce's Hardware Reset. Located behind Joyce's grocery. Specializing in animal feed, fuel supplies and all your hardware needs. Competitive prices on bulk feed. Joyce's will deliver to all areas of Connemara. Contact Brian on 095 347 50 or 087 268 6946. Clifton Supply Centre, Galway Road, Clifton. Provide building supplies, plumbing and heating supplies, fuel merchants, DIY and general hardware. Contact the Clifton Supply Centre on 095 21476. Now you're welcome back and online I have Hans Zomer, CEO of Global Action Plan. Are you, can you hear me Hans? Yeah, good evening John, thanks for having me on the show. Not at all, we're delighted because you're going to tell us a very frightening story really I think, but we have to hear it about how we're all guilty I think of food waste both nationally and internationally. I'll just give one statistic before you start that I was reading here that in 2022 I believe that Ireland alone threw away 220,000 tonnes of food, 220,000 tonnes of food waste in Ireland alone for a small island country. It's hard to take it in. It's amazing and worldwide a full third of all the food we produce is wasted. So all over the world there's pressure on agricultural land, there's pressure on resources and we're producing food that nobody ever gets to eat. A third of the food just gets wasted and that statistic that you mentioned of 220,000 tonnes of food wasted, that's only by households and that's basically every household in the country, we waste 700 Euros worth of food every year. But there's more food waste than that as well because obviously food waste occurs throughout the supply line. So what food waste is, is all the waste that occurs after the moment of harvesting. So as you know a big part of it is also that supermarkets, they don't want to sell wonky cucumbers and crooked carrots. So they never make it to the shop, so we never get to eat them and they get thrown out as well. So yeah, it's phenomenal and what is worse is that this enormous amount of food is wasted happens at a time that over 700 million people worldwide are going hungry. So we're doing something completely wrong as a species. We really have to look at the way we organize our food. Yeah, like you know, to a child you would say, thinking that would be a very simple job to fix, that all these wonky cucumbers and twisted carrots can all get to the third world countries and that, but it's not that simple. No, it's not, but you know I think there are simple solutions because we mustn't lose heart and one of the things that we're saying and the reason we're saying it now is that last Sunday was the UN day for the awareness of food loss and waste. So it's one of these days that the United Nations have dedicated to drawing attention to a particular issue and we're saying, look it doesn't have to be this way, but what we need to do is I suppose re-establish our links with where our food comes from. Now your listeners will be more familiar than most where food comes from. You know, Global Action Plan, we work all over Ireland, but mainly also in urban areas and particularly people in urban areas, they really do think that food comes from the supermarkets and what we're saying is, well let's re-establish our link with food and food production and one of the ways we can reduce the amount of food that we waste is by growing more ourselves. You know, by growing your own carrots and your own potatoes, you remember where, you know, that food is seasonal and you're able to just harvest as you go along. You don't have to buy more than you need and you actually appreciate the work and the resources that go into growing food so you're more careful about it as well and basically you're doing the planet a favor by growing your own food also because your food doesn't have to be transported halfway across the world. It doesn't require all those chemicals and pesticides. So basically if anybody has a bit of a garden or a balcony, you can grow some of your own food. We're not asking everybody to become a full-time farmer, but all of us, we can grow some of our food like we used to do, you know, two, three generations ago. We would all try to have, you know, grow some vegetables in our backyard. Now granted that would be for different reasons, but I think we could learn a bit from our past again. Yeah, like we're a richer country, times are better and yet we are eating inferior food often the line of fruit and veg like that, you know, a lot of it before was straight from the kitchen garden to the table and sadly that is not common enough. Now on a brighter note here, just in a frack of a second before I come in, and I'm sure it's nationwide, we have a, I think it's called the Food Cloud, where vegetables and that, that wouldn't make the shelves or they might be just best before date, you know, they're on offer. I think it's on maybe today, I think in a frack or whatever, I'm not sure the exact date, but this seems to be very popular and isn't a thing like that a good initiative like that? It's a fantastic, yeah, we work a lot with Food Cloud, so they make sure that food that otherwise gets thrown out gets used properly either by making food directly or by distributing it. There are other options as well, there's an app called Oleo, which allows you to say, look, I actually have these weird little herbal teas that I never drink and I'm, you know, keeping them in my cupboard. I might as well give it away, you know, and so you can barter with people online as well. Yeah, there are many solutions and many initiatives to try and address this issue, but I think the main one is that if we all look at our kitchen habits and see, can we be a bit more conscious about what we buy and why we buy it? You know, so much of our day-to-day decisions, they're really habits and, you know, when people run into the supermarket and they buy stuff and, you know, the supermarket does its best to make you buy as much as you can, you know, two for three or whatever, three for two, whatever, or, you know, if you want to go into the supermarket and you want one pepper, one bell pepper, and you end up buying five because they're in a big plastic bag together, you know, we should stop doing those sort of things. Nobody wants the five peppers. So, granted, a lot of people have to rely on special offers, et cetera, but then if you buy the five peppers, you know, make sure that you can actually use them in a dish and then freeze the dish and eat that at a later time. But we can be a lot more conscious about not buying so much and not wasting so much. You know, a lot of the food waste is about, you know, people buying a bag of lettuce and leaving it in the plastic and, you know, it gets all soggy. Buying too much bread and the bread goes stale and then they throw it out instead of trying to make, say, French toast with it or, you know, there's a lot of online recipe books as well which help you use and reuse food, you know. So, yeah, let's celebrate our creativity, not just go for the easy options. It's also interesting when you're talking to dieticians, et cetera, they say, look, don't eat the processed food. Just buy the raw materials and make your own food. And what we're saying at Global Action Plan is, you know, eat the food that you try to grow yourself as well. You know exactly where it's been, you know what has gone into it and, yeah, you won't waste as much as you do. Yeah, I think people are very interested in what you're saying. I guess it's kind of attention to detail and people should be alert. I thought the peppers was a good example. You might say five peppers and you say, God, that's such great value. But it's like the Christmas sales. Nothing is great value if you don't really want it. You know, if you only wanted two peppers, now you have five. And there's so much of these things all over the place. So, now just to ask you now about the great art of composting, simple, ties in with all that too, isn't it? Peelings and all this should be recycled into making compost for the garden if we can get people to have a little garden. That's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. Again, we used to have this skill or the generations before, if they had the knowledge on how to do that. And we're trying to encourage people to rediscover the beauty of growing your own food. And, you know, as you say, you can do it just on a little balcony or on a small little part of your garden. And if you can make your own compost, it's so much easier than throwing it out in the bins and, you know, you have to pay for the bins to be collected. So, you know, make your own compost and we can teach you how to. And, you know, try and grow some lettuce. Try and grow some carrots, you know. And, you know, it's also incredibly good for your mental health. Just the beauty of looking after plants, getting your fingers in the dirt, you know, seeing the life grow as you look after it. It's a phenomenal feeling. And I have to say, my home-grown tomatoes taste 10 times better than what I buy in the shop, you know. And I'm also told that they are more nutritious as well. Of course. Now, on a slightly different note, but I think it's relevant. I'll just zoom in on meat a minute. Like, you get these offers on meat too. And people, like our house, could be guilty of this too. You could say, like, I bought too much meat, but it didn't go to waste because I used it again the next day and I liked it cold, like the bacon was nice and cold, I used it up again. But it might end up, and doctors have told us we're eating too much red meat and what have you, but often we, you know, by having some leftovers can be in our culture. And it is a kind of a waste, really, in that we're eating it just to use it up. You know, that's kind of food waste too. Yeah, it wouldn't strictly be called food waste because you're still eating it. Because really what we're calling food waste is the food that gets taken out of the, yeah. Yeah. But you make an interesting point about us eating too much meat. And I suppose what I want to say is, you know, most of us have a freezer in the home and you can't underestimate how wonderful an invention the freezer is. So if you have a bit of meat left over, if you have some veg left over, put it in the freezer. And what we try to do here in my house is, you know, once a week we make sort of a smorgasbord of, you know, lots of little portions of leftover food and then we bring it out together and, you know, we reheat it with a bit of pita or whatever. And we make it into a little festival of, you know, different flavors on the one table. So, you know, you can do other things than just reheating the same food and eating it three days in a row. You know, there are many ways in which we can make using leftovers. Yeah, we're nearly out of time. But more than climate change and water quality, everything, it's all these small little actions. They might appear to the individual insignificant, but cumulatively they add up to a lot. If we got more people just realizing the power of and the taste of your own veg, like salad, vegetables, even, that's simple. And they are all going to help the world, the global picture. And I think we might leave it on that, Hans, because time calls. You said it better than I could have, anyway. No, I didn't. Thanks so much, Hans, for joining us with that. It's really making us think. These programs make us think. It's making me think of things. So, thanks for all that, Hans. Thanks for having me on the show. So, now, that was Hans Zomer. Now we're going to go with PJ Murray singing Pat Murphy's Meadow. Because it's that time of year, it's harvest, and this is kind of a reflective song. Maybe we've got some exile looking back when he mowed Pat Murphy's Meadow. Our local great Phil Kyan got rest in his singing perfectly for us. But now here we have PJ Murray. The autumn days are here again And the night winds still blow The woodlands turn to golden hue And the harvest moon to glow To hear again of days long past To come no more, I know When I mowed Pat Murphy's Meadow In the sunny long ago I see again the ocean And the distant sails of past As the mazin' in the meadow Strikes of dark-lucked gals There was music soft and tender In the winds that whispered low When I mowed Pat Murphy's Meadow In the sunny long ago Where are the happy boys and girls That sang in the gay quadrille Are the singer who warbled sweetly The morning granite mill To hear again at sunset Where sweet action was told When I mowed Pat Murphy's Meadow In the sunny long ago The days are both a memory Like the snows of yesteryear And when evening shades are falling And when evening shades are falling All alone I sit here On my cheek I feel the soft touch Of the winds that whispered low When I mowed Pat Murphy's Meadow In the sunny long ago Now I'm going to join our regular gardening expert here Local Clifton-based gardener Eleanor Magnion So you're welcome back again to us Eleanor Thank you very much How are you? Good Eleanor, good The lovely weather I think is a help to everybody's mental health And people seem to be in good humour And it's great gardening weather Because we have had three really very good weather Since the first of September Oh we've had, yes We have But it's strange because we're getting We're getting enough of the wind It's coming from the north, north east, north west It's very unusual I think anyway Yes it is, yes it is Yes east and north But at least it's drying up the place I know out in town more where I garden is very wet It's very dry And one of the things of course that we have to do now Is collect the leaves And I noticed this up outside our church last Saturday night The collection of leaves outside the church was unbelievable And I never saw them there before So it just, it was wherever the wind was coming from Yes You know, it's causing a circle And they landed in the front of the church Yes, funnily enough gardeners, I'd say other people just see leaves as As kind of waste and a nuisance Especially if they get wet But I also look, even at the back of the radio station today I was looking at heaps of leaves Because we know how good they are for making leaf molding And I bet you felt like getting a plastic bag and putting them in it I sure did Now is there any truth? Are different leaves more beneficial? I think they're all the same A lot of people have a set on the Sycamores Yes Because they have black spots But I don't think that matters No, I don't I think the black spot is not a problem at all No, no I think once it's broken down And you see, you collect them dry And then you wet them You know, when they're in the bag you wet them Because it's easy to collect them when they're dry And then put them into the bag and wet them And I find putting kitchen waste in with the bag as well And if you can, get some seaweed And you'll get, you know, it breaks it down faster Because the leaves take a long time to break down And then, I'm sure you do it You put them at the north side of a shed or the house or something And, you know, kind of even under bushes and things like that And leave them there for about a year And at the end of that time I'll even tell you now that I came on bags that I forgot about But that's, I suppose, all the better Because sometimes we tend to use them too soon Yes But it's a great time to weather And make a use of the fine weather And October's often going to be fairly dry It's a good time that you'll be getting bulb sun And don't forget the garlic Don't forget the garlic Yes Tell me a little bit about the garlic You plant your garlic this time of year Because it takes a long time to mature Ok, and I was reading I would, sorry John, I would put it into a container Like, you know, what's a big, what would I call them You know, the plastic crates There's no such thing now as a wooden box They've gone by the wayside But if you had plastic crates and filled them with compost It doesn't have to be very rich And it can be kind of sandy But they do very, they're not They don't, you know, you don't really have to feed them Very much with, we'll say, nitrogen Because that would only make them green So you just make sure there's plenty of potash in it Yes Now I was, was it online or some gardening book or something I was, I read where people were advising Don't buy shop garlic and so on Get the real seed garlic from the groceries Or Mr. Middleton or somebody like that Yeah, well they recommend that But personally, I put, if I can't get my hands on You see, you have to go to Galway Norman Yeah To get the prepared garlic But I will actually put in some of the others And it, you know, it does a certain amount Yes, yes Now I just, it's one of Ireland's oldest mail order Mr. Middleton And their postage is cheap, it's only 6.50 Now tulips are advised not to be sold until later Maybe into No, because they come up, they come up too soon Ok So you delay sowing tulips until November Or maybe late November Yeah, because you see they come up and they could be battered Or whatever in the, in the wind, you know And it's just not the time of the year for them They're better off in early spring Rather than coming up around Christmas Because they just won't, you know We could get very bad weather With the way the weather is going this year You don't know what we're going to get around Christmas If it continues coming from the direction it's coming from Yeah And one of the things, sorry John too You could plant this time of the year is mustard and crisps I'm always on about it Because if you have a few pots of that in the house Like put them on the windowsill And you can, you know, you can always put them on your salad Yes And another thing too, you can, your cuttings You can take your cuttings this time of the year as well And would they be hardwood cuttings, not the hard Oh yeah, they would be the hardwood cuttings Like it would be this year's growth But they would be darker They wouldn't be very, you know They wouldn't be soft like the earlier ones Yes, they'd be kind of woody They're woody And you do them at a junction Make sure you do it at a junction Because that's the most place that roots Yeah, I like that word junction The same nodes, but yes Junction is a lovely name for it It's kind of swelling where a leaf or something would come out And it's more inclined to root And then of course people that You could buy plants now For very early spring cabbage The seeds would have been sown In about August or early September And there's a type there called April I know I sowed it last year And it worked out very well It worked very well But I ended up planting it It got mistreated It wasn't sown outside And I ended up sowing it in a tunnel In a small pepper tunnel And it really made powerful cabbage then And I sowed in the tunnel in about January Yeah If it was outside you'd have to really earth it up an awful lot Because like that It could even be blown out of the soil Yes, with wind But it's amazing how if it's put out in October It can make enough growth just to make root And then it'll sit dormant for the winter And then it'll start growing real fast again in early spring Now, I also this year sowed seeds of Sweet William In about September And they're lovely little plants now And they will be planted out next spring Yes, well they're kind of a biennial anyway The seeds of the Sweet William You plant them the year before And the flower the following year But they're old plants They were the real old-fashioned plants And they're still great Because there's a marvellous smell from this The wallflower Oh yes, yes And some people say That you could be sowing Scallions like White Lisbon now In modules And that they'd be strong just to plant out in spring Oh yes, well you see like that Onions can go from seed to plant And there was something one time That you plant one on the shortest And you harvest it on the longest Yes, they used to say that about shallots anyway Yes Oh shallots are lovely you see And to get shallots now is the thing Yes, quite hard lately You know the way you can use If you're a person that does most of your own garden You can go out and you can take a few shallots Of each plant You don't have to take the whole lot in Yes, and they're nice and mild They are And people should continue to cut their lawns If they get a chance Yes, yes Well of course then Once the spring starts Then they're on about you leaving the lawn You know until it goes over And you cut it later in the year But I think it's a matter of choice Yes, I was on a very good talk by our own local By our own gardening man here The great Brendan O'Scannell One of his talks up there in the park during the summer And I was very interested He made it very simple for me For all the audience He said it should These kind of nature lawns It should mimic the hay meadow That you cut it early in the year Then like when the farm would close off the hay meadow long ago You'd let it grow from April Let it grow from May He said he'd stop cutting in early May And let it grow out into the end of July And maybe the last days of July, early August He'd cut it again as if you cut the hay And then your teeth would cut every year And he was cutting walks through it Eleanor, we're really out of time But pleasure as always And John, don't forget to deadhead Don't forget to deadhead I'd nearly say Even at this stage you can still deadhead a lot of stuff Now I know the cosmos and that I've taken an awful hammering in the last bit of storm Yeah, now I have shelter And my cosmos, I sow them some seeds They're just growing, they're slow They're just late putting out And they really end up crying now You're not the only one that said that to me And I found it myself That my cosmos were long, long time sitting there Now I didn't plant seeds, I bought plants And I had them sit there in my body I like some seeds, but then I get careless putting them out But they're good But yeah, Eleanor's message of gardening always is deadheading And of course, alright you are You'll fool the plant into continuous flowering if you keep deadheading Yes, exactly So thanks Eleanor And without a doubt we'll be in touch with you again soon Thanks for joining us Bye Thanks Eleanor, that was our local gardening expert there Experts there from Clachán, Eleanor Manion Now, we will soon be lining up now Seamus Branagh is from Caranagh And they're going to have a walking festival down there I used to associate that with Lena and around May weekend But Caranagh has one coming up the 18th to the 20th of October You are listening to Connemara Community Radio Broadcasting on 87.8 and 106.1 FM You can also listen in to us from outside of the Connemara area On our website www.connemarafm.com Good morning to you And hope all is good with you on the lovely island this Sunday morning 09541616 if you'd like a song played Yeah, Lee Dorsey followed by Captain Beefheart Where else would you get it, Connemara Community Radio? And I hope you can tune in again next week That was a great tune by Fairport Convention And I'd come all evening, bit of singing going on there We'd have you dancing around the kitchen So that's it for tonight Hope that you will tune in again next week Connemara Community Radio, thank you very much for listening And I hope you enjoyed all of the music Thank you very much Seamus, can you hear me? I can indeed, can you hear me? I can indeed, and welcome to Connemara Community Radio Thank you You're welcome here Seamus We're going to have a chat with Neil And the rest of the group But you have an exciting walking festival coming up Seamus Well we have indeed It's our 10th or 11th walking festival It's happening on the 18th to the 20th of October Down in Carnagh here, round Carnagh Village And on Phoenix Island Oh you're going out to Phoenix Island? We hope to on this Sunday Excuse me, on this Saturday It's depending on the tide We're going out on Saturday morning To Phoenix Island Meeting in Linscow at half ten in the morning And then we'll take a bus to the nearest harbour to Phoenix And then we'll walk across when the tide is out So we hope to spend about an hour, an hour and a half more there Maybe a bit more Is Phoenix kind of more out from Ardmore and more towards Kilkarn, isn't it? It is indeed, out from Califenish really And brushing the money up from Califenish Half way between Carnagh and Ardmore, Kilkarn Way And Phoenix is not populated now at all? No, Phoenix has been deserted for one or two months Since the mid 80's The last family lived there in the mid 80's It's a lovely walk And it's on a beautiful strand Hopefully we get the weather There are beautiful beaches there There are middens there People were living there back thousands and thousands of years ago And we have a great tour guide in Coleen Herman Whose mother came from Phoenix And he is a store of great knowledge of Phoenix Island Oh yeah, I had the joy of listening to Coleen down in Down there in Carnagh with Martin O'Coffin there about a month ago And that same day I was there after you were talking about the guys over in Montana They went over to Oregon, yeah Oregon I had a lovely trip myself Out to MacDaris Island We sailed out there from Mace Shortly after that, it was just amazing But anyway, we'll kick us off Seamus On Friday evening what happens? Is it Friday evening it opens? Yes, Friday evening on the 18th of October At half four we meet in Glenscow And we'll have just a short walk up by Bog there Down the Bog Road And we'll have a bit of a chat up by And the history about it And where it lies in the life of Carnagh people Going back over the ages So that's the first walk It's an easy walk It's only about maybe an hour, hour and a half The evenings are getting shorter So we'll be curtailing it a little bit But it's a nice gentle walk And then start of Oregon 19th We'll meet in Glenscow again at half ten And then we'll take a trip across to Fiannais And we'll be back on the mainland On the moorhead as they say in Irish Back around two o'clock And hopefully then it's half past four After people have a bite to eat and a rest We'll head for the Carnog and Lough Scanna It's another bog walk Just east of Carnagh there We'll have a chat about the convent The history of the convent The history of the lay school And bits and pieces like that It's a walking festival But it's a festival as well with both folklore And giving information about how people lived In the past around Carnagh In the bad days and in the good days So that'll be Saturday And then Saturday evening we're launching We're at the moment getting a calendar printed During our walks around Carnagh And all parts of Connemara A lot of nice photographs have been taken So we decided to put a calendar together At nine o'clock And then we have a We're going to see We're going up to the Arctic Circle At nine o'clock or half past nine We'll have a talk on the north-west North-east passage By the first Irish boat to do The north of us With Michael Brogan and Jarrett Conan Now Jarrett can't be with us But Michael Brogan is going to give us a talk on that And a talk as well on the White Sea Canal And how they traversed that And the sad story about that About the White Sea Canal In Stalin's time It cost 10,000 lives per mile Lord So That talk by Michael Brogan that evening That's about nine o'clock Saturday evening Nine o'clock Saturday evening We'll have the launch of our calendar And then we'll have the talk by Michael It'll be about an hour, hour and a half And can people join in that way Can they join in these events At any of them Oh indeed they can We have a timetable there So if people want to do the Crown Elk Walk It just costs about five euro An hour and a half on a Saturday evening And then they can join the The talk on Saturday night with Michael Brogan And it's a very interesting talk And Michael is a good friend of mine We've done a lot of sailing together ourselves Oh lovely And where is Michael from himself? Michael's from Ballyholmes But he owns the Galway Hooker from up north Oh lovely And he's quite familiar with Carna He's been here quite often now Michael and I go back Maybe too many years to remember now At the moment Okay Okay Sunday Seamus We'll just finish the timetable now a minute Okay, Sunday evening on the 20th At half ten we'll meet again at Glensk And we'll get a mini bus Or a bus to Mairis Beach So we'll take part in the Mairis Loop And this is our accredited trail By the National Trails So it's a shore walk But we'll be talking bits and pieces We'll start off maybe in the 10th century We'll talk about the Spanish Armada We'll talk about the church missions Even an item on The Portuguese Civil War In 1832 When the boat was lost off Carna The loss of 300 lives So it's a And then we'll go to the The area sign The World War 2 sign And then up to the lookout point in Mairish Head And if we get a fine day We'll be able to see the Brandon and Kerry Hopefully in a fine day It's sort of a It's a necklace of islands around Carna And the Aran Islands up to Slinehead as well It's amazing like at sea Things that seem far away on land Are quite near Like Dara's Island, I couldn't believe That I was looking across at the Aran Islands The Aran Islands are only about 12 miles across from here I've spent most of my life at sea And the Talks Sorry not for Russian because we're kind of Conscious of the time The Talks They'll be bilingual The Talks will be bilingual Definitely because A lot of people Have come to this now over the years Which have a Have a great understanding of Irish And that's no disrespect to them But we do both Talks in English and Irish Ah yes definitely because People might be Afraid that it'll be all in Irish And they might not be able to understand The Talk on Saturday night is all in English Although he's quite Quite good at the Irish But he's more comfortable with English Slideshows and Headings are in English as well Oh yes, it's lovely What I find very interesting about the Chambers is Like it's really much more Than a kind of walking festival It's a really historical You know There's so much more in it than just walking To keep fish and Well look It's way more than that you know The terrain Excuse me, the bog walks You could walk fast to keep fish But going around by the shore now You know you don't keep fish going around by the shore Because you're watching every step you take Of course And we tie in the culture of the area And we tie in the history And the folklore of the area Taranagh is renowned for it's folklore Of course Our generation tries to keep it on To pass on to the next generation Yes and you have great traditional singing And of course you have Like a Taranagh And all the Well I said good folklore But we have the Shandos singing and Shandos dancing Unfortunately that's nice now We won't have any of that I know but you have so much packed Seamus We are really out of time I think you have sold us The weekend very very well and very eloquently And you've got a lot in there In a short bit I'd love to talk more time If people go into Taranagh Walking Festival Facebook page They can get more information as well And thanks very much for the opportunity No it's a false road So go into Taranagh Walking Festival And they will get more info there And it's the 18th to the 20th Friday the 18th to the 20th of October This month to the 20th Tomorrow two weeks And the Friday kicking off evening at We kick off about half four Half five o'clock Thanks Seamus You did a great job for your community there And the festival committee should be proud of you Right thanks very much Thanks Seamus Go raibh maith agat Go raibh maith agat So now we have the ads At the top of the hour On the road again I can't wait to get on the road again On the road again On the road again On the road again On the road again On the road again I can't wait to get on the road again I can't wait to get on the road again On the road again On the road again Community Notices is kindly sponsored by Connemara West TLC 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 0872485422 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