The 3rd season of the quite excellent ‘Garrai Glas’ returns to TG4 on Tursday 13th March. The 13-parter is directed by Paula Kehoe, and produced by my friends in Abu Meida, Bríd Seoighe, Eileen Seoighe & my old secondary school buddy James Ryan.
Síle Nic Chonaonaigh returns with a new journey ahead, having just moved into a new house(its awesome) with a bare garden. She travels from her home in Galway to visit gardeners all over the country, from the wilds of Donegal to the lush hillsides of West Cork. She meets people who grow using traditional methods, people who are growing the crops their grandparents did and some who are starting from scratch. Her visits include a water garden, a food forest, an allotment and a garden filled with exotic vegetables.
She also meets many experts, some are friends we’ve visited before and some are new, such as the renowned organic gardener Klaus Laitenberger. We cook, forage and gather as we did in the last two series, and Síle also broadens her horizons, visiting a bog to learn how to cut turf, going fishing, learning about generating your own energy, hand-weaving a traditional beehive and looking at the older handcrafts such as knitting and quilting.
Above all Síle hopes to bring all she learns home to her own garden, and through the season we see it slowly taking shape, from putting in a shelterbelt and building raised beds to making the compost bay and planning for winter. The aim of Garraí Glas is to inspire and show people how to grow some of their own food at home, and we’re given plenty of tips and advice on how to do that.
The series is made special by the people in it, the characters who open their gardens to us and are happy to show us a gentler, but very achievable, life.
John Murphy 