Gardening made easy: novel idea takes root

Lifestyle  – JUDY MURPHY finds  how the recession has  helped a hobby become  a thriving business

After father-of-four Eoin Flaherty lost his job during the economic crash, his life took a new and unexpected direction.

Eoin has drawn on his love of gardening to create a new product designed to make fruit and vegetable growing easier, for beginner and experienced gardener alike.

There’s nothing like it on sale in Ireland, or anywhere else in Europe, says Headford based Eoin, who shakes his head in disbelief as he describes how simple his GrowGrid mat is.

He had developed a series of polypropylene mats, which have holes pre-punched in them, with the distance between the holes varying in size to cater for different types of fruit and veg. Mats are designed to allow people to grow a mix of vegetables in a small area – everything from potatoes to spinach and strawberries, with holes for the seeds or plant plugs.

The GrowGrid mats, which come in large and small sizes, might be simple in design but they are highly effective, as a walk around his beautifully ordered garden in Ballycasey, outside Headford demonstrates.

There are several raised beds where herbs including lovage, curry and parsley are thriving, while garlic is also doing well. The potatoes are slower than usual, he says, but that’s because of the weather.

Further down there’s a polytunnel, where the mats are laid out in perfect symmetry and a range of food – strawberries, celery, chard, tomatoes, peas, beans and lettuce – are all in various stage of growth.

The holes in the GrowGrid mats are heat sealed to stop the fabric from fraying and the big advantage is that the membrane prevents weeds from growing so the plant is not competing with them for light or nutrients. 

Eoin, who is originally from Inis Mór on the Aran Islands, was always interested in food. After school, he trained as a chef at the then RTC in Galway and gained extensive experience in the hospitality industry, working in restaurants from Roly’s Bistro in Dublin, to Park House here in Galway.

But when the property boom came, he changed careers and went into the construction industry. He was newly married and the father of a small family and needed a change.  Working as a chef, with long and often late hours, is not a family friendly occupation, he says.

“I had a great career and worked at the higher end of it, but it’s a young man’s game. We were married, and both working shifts, so something had to give.”

However, like thousands of others, Eoin was left without a job when the property bubble burst. His wife, Catriona, is a nurse, so they made the pragmatic decision that, rather than returning to cheffing, he would become a stay-at-home father, while Catriona continued to work.

That’s when the idea for the pre-punched GrowGrid mats first came about.

Eoin had been growing vegetables all his life, except for the period when he was working fulltime, when he was too busy. But once he decided to stay at home, he returned to gardening – the family home is on a three-quarter acre site, which offered plenty of scope. However, a combination of bad weather, which saw weeds flourish, and having four small children to mind, left him strapped for time.

He originally put the matting down around copper beech to inhibit weed growth and it was then he realised its potential in the vegetable patch, as did other people who saw it.

“So I developed the pre-punched matting myself.  It’s much the same as membranes you’d put on soil except for the holes. There are four different spaces depending on what you want to grow.”

The mats are made of treated polypropylene and each will last up to five years if properly maintained, but he has several that are older than that. Each one comes with biodegradable pegging which secure the mat onto the ground. The small ones are 1.5 metres wide and 2.2 metres long while the large ones are the same width and are four metres long.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.