OPEN

Grow Your Own Future

Certificate in Organic Horticulture

FETAC Level 5 Major Award

 Are you a lone parent?

Are you interested in a qualification and career in Horticulture?

Have you an interest in gardening, organic food, working outdoors?

Are you concerned about the environmental issues facing us today?

OPEN (One Parent Exchange and Network – The National Network of lone parent groups) welcomes applications from lone parents from the wider Dublin area for the Organic Horticulture training programme. The Certificate in Organic Horticulture will include 8 FETAC Level 5 modules:

 Communications; Organic Food Crops; Organic Conversion: Organic Soil Management; Organic Crop Protection

Work Experience; Principles of Organic Plant Growth; Start Your Own Business

 The programme also includes study visits to organic centres, organic farms and environmental green initiatives in addition to study groups and one to one support and mentoring.

 Venue: Practical modules take place at Glasanaon Road in Finglas (very near Finglas Village) where the land base for the project is.  Non-practical modules take place at OPEN National Centre (& Red Cow Lane, Smithfield, Dublin 7).

What’s happening with Grow Your Own Future – Year 1 2010-2011?

Well, the sun may not be shining, but it’s still the height of summer at the Grow Your Own Future garden. Our participants are busier than ever at the moment, sowing the last of the summer vegetable seeds, tending the fruit garden, and protecting our growing vegetables from some hungry invaders! We’re three-quarters of the way through the course already – time is really flying – and our participants have been busy with exams and assignments too.

We’ve just started the last of the eight course modules – Start Your Own Business – and are close to completing both the Organic Conversion and Soil Management modules. Of course, all the learning, on these and the other modules – on food crops, pests and diseases, and plant biology – feeds back into the growing skills we’re using on the land. Outside, each of our participants is growing a variety of tasty vegetables on their plots – from cabbages and chard, to onions, kale, beetroot and New Zealand spinach. We’ve just harvested a bumper crop of new potatoes, and have been sampling our spring onions and lettuces as they grow.  We’ve had a few unwelcome visits from the local pigeons, who decimated our first crop of cabbages and kale, but we’ve foiled them with some clever use of netting and chicken wire. In the polytunnel,  our courgette plants are producing some juicy and tender fruit – lovely when it’s steamed simply with some butter and a few of our own potatoes.  We’ve got lots of tomatoes too, though we’re waiting patiently for them to redden up; and our peppers and aubergines are growing fast. 

Down in the fruit garden, our strawberries, loganberries and raspberries are coming along nicely – plenty of berries for our gardeners to snack on – though it will be a couple of years before we see any apples or pears from our trees.

So, it’s been a busy but productive year so far for the Grow Your Own Future programme. We’re grateful to the Mount Street Trust and to FAS for giving us this opportunity to grow, and we’re looking forward to celebrating at our Harvest Festival in the Autumn!

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One in Five households don’t have a bank account.  Following the report on Financial Exclusion by the ERSI, OPEN’s Organic Horticulture programme trainees were featured in RTE’s Six One News.
 

(The delivery of the Grow Your Own Future Certificate in Organic Horticulture has been made possible by funding provided to OPEN from the Mount Street Trust – Employment Initiative.)