For starters we visit Sherron St Clair in Laragh, County Wicklow. Sherron has a passion for natural foods and has brought up her 4 children on sugar-free diets. With some help from her two sons, Khai, aged 8 and Indi, aged 6, Sherron makes yeast bread rolls and then carrot and lentil soup.

Its nice to see that bread making can be fun and educational for young children and there’s a tasty reward at the end of it all! Indi and Khai knew quite a lot about bread making as you will hear!!

We will be going back to Sherron in a later program for a full exposé on the demon SUGAR!!

If you love cooking you might also love pots and pans by Le Creuset, http://www.lecreuset.co.uk
They can be used for frying, boiling and put into the oven. They have a non-stick enamel inside which doesn’t scrape off like the black coating of a frying pan does, which isn’t very healthy as it ends up in your food and then in you!

Im still saving up for one but I reckon what I spend on Le Creuset I can save on gym membership – you will know what I mean when you lift one of these iron pots!!

They are french so you dont pronounce the “t” at the end of Creuset! Oooh la la!! And you need to be wearing a beret and black and white stripey jumper to operate them properly.

Next we are off to Stillorgan in Dublin to visit Owen Rice and his wife Simone who have made raised beds and pots for veggies out of recycled materials such as wood palettes and sheets of plastic. This is the first year they are growing vegetables properly so I thought it would be interesting to hear how they were getitng on and what they had learned so far. In order to have anything left to eat they had to become experts in slug wrangling. In this program they share with us their philosophy of slugs and how to make containers out of recycled materials to grow veggies and herbs in.

We are offering a prize for the best slug recipe!

This is one of their raised beds with herbs in it. You can see chives, parsley, sage, marjoram, thyme and leeks (which aren’t herbs). Again you can get an idea of the wood used and the construction technique from this angle:

Here’s a close up on the corner of the raised bed so you can see how easy it is to screw or nail together. The sides might be a bit high if you dont fill up the inside with soil. If you didnt have enough soil or compost and only filled up the raised bed half way with compost and soil then the sides would shade the plants from the sun which isn’t a good idea:

To the left of the corner in the above photo you will see a plank of wood lying on the ground. This is the slug trap referred to in the interview. Basically the slugs hide under it during the day because its sheltered and moist, so you can lift it up at any time and grab them!
Pretty high tech eh?
It does work!
Try it!!

By adding a simple bar over the middle of the frames Owen and Simone were able to put a sheet of plastic over the raised bed before the summer to keep the heat in like a mini glasshouse and keep the rain off because the bar helped angle the plastic so the rain ran off:

Owen and Simone found that cats were getting in to use the loose soil as their toilet and birds were getting in to eat the leaves of plants so they put netting over the frame to protect them from the wildlife. Again the bar across the centre helped to prevent the netting from sagging in the middle of the raised bed:

These are the peas growing up against a west facing wall in a south facing garden:

The sheets of plastic that Owen and Simone were talking about can be seen in this photo below. The plastic was found in a skip and curled around into a cylindrical shape and taped or stapled. When put vertically into a plastic bag you have a pot for a plant ready to go with almost no cost! There are lettuce plants in this one and the pots were also used for potatoes and tomatoes too!

Here are the pots being used for the tomatoes in the conservatory which became a jungle as the summer passed with 8 foot plants growing out of the free pots:

And again more of the pots with very happy tomato plants in them:

You can now download Program 5 of the 10 part series here:

“Grow it, Cook it, Eat it” Program 5

Please leave a comment once you have listened to it, let us know what you think of the show or share any food related thoughts with us.

Thanks for visiting and remember to come back for 5 more programs in this 10 part series!

Michael Lemass