With her love of crafts and nature, Irene Kelly has built a business specialising in imparting practical – and often forgotten – skills to her students and social media followers.
But the Wexford woman says that she owes much of her success with ‘Green Road Gardens’ to her parents; and to her upbringing in Ramsgrange.
“It’s at this stage of my life that I appreciate them [my parents] a lot more, because I realised, ‘How do I know this [skill]?’” Irene reflects.
“I’ve kind of picked it up by osmosis. They didn’t say, ‘This is how you do A, B and C.’ They just did it with us and we learned.
“They saw the value in it and they allowed us to take a path that a lot of parents wouldn’t have. A lot of people of our age group want their children to be engineers and have high-flying jobs where our parents were quite happy to let us do what we loved.”
Basket making
Although Irene had a love for home economics and art, she didn’t think too deeply about what she wanted to do after school. It was “purely by chance” that she became a basket maker after meeting a master craftsman while she was doing work experience with a family in Kilkenny.
“I could equally well have ended up being a potter or something else, if things had worked out differently,” she says. “I started an apprenticeship with a fella called Joe Shanahan in Carrick-on-Suir, at the age of 20.”
Getting married at a young age and having three children, basket making was something Irene could fit in when she had the time to do it.
At the time, there were very few full-time basket makers in Ireland, so Irene and her sister Barbara travelled to different corners of Ireland teaching others the skills. It was purely the demand that got Irene into teaching and then she discovered a love for it.
Now, Irene teaches adults in a community setting, working for the WWETB [Wexford and Waterford Education Training Board] teaching horticulture and crafts.
“I teach through community education; it’s bringing people back to learning in a very hands-on way, not in a threatening sort of way. The whole social element is as important as learning. They kind of learn without knowing they’re learning and learn on a need-to-know basis,” says Irene.
Irene teaches in a daycare centre in Wellington Bridge. This includes working with volunteers in the community who come in and do the gardening, along with teaching people who live there in sheltered housing and others who work there.
Irene also teaches the parents of children in a local primary school.
“‘We have a little garden and sometimes the kids from the school come out and we introduce them to the ‘veggie world’, as many of them would have no idea where a carrot or a pepper comes from,” she says.
Bringing back lost skills
According to Irene, there are definitely a lot of skills that have been lost over the last number of years.
“It is absolutely a generational thing. People of an age group who are my children’s age group [30-40] missed out on all that crafting and growing.
“There was a generation that missed out on that. I don’t know why it disappeared,” says Irene.
Running hands-on classes has allowed her to bring back lost skills and teach others about growing, sowing, crafting and cultivating.
“What I find is that people are often coming from a very stressful job. I’d often say to them at the beginning of the class, ‘Do you know what we’re doing today?’ and often times, they say, ‘Actually, no, I just wanted to get out into a nice, relaxed and nurturing environment.’
“I think you learn an awful lot more – I do anyway – by doing rather than reading,” emphasises Irene.
Starting Green Road Gardens
Calling her garden ‘Green Road Gardens’ and developing it as a business was incremental for Irene.
“While I was teaching out in the community, I began to think to myself, ‘I spend a huge amount of time in own my garden doing what I love. Why don’t I make a business from it?’” she says.
Public interest grew very gradually and took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Irene started producing tutorials on Facebook during lockdown that people could follow along and join in with.
“I was just about to start an eight-week series of night classes and COVID struck and I couldn’t do it. I had all my notes and everything prepared, I said, ‘I can either go into a decline here now or I can just do this online,’” she explains.
Irene took a notion to start making little videos every other day on whatever she happened to be doing in the garden and sharing them on Facebook. It wasn’t long before she started gaining hundreds of followers and thousands of views.
Using social media
“The amount of people that came up to me afterwards and said it kept them going during lockdown. It was the connection, but also it gave them something to do as it was very hands on. I was doing it in such a way that I knew the parameters of what they could and couldn’t do,” Irene explains.
There was one day that Irene couldn’t get seed potatoes, for example, so she went into her kitchen cupboard where she found some potatoes under the sink going to seed, and used those.
“My most popular [video] actually was one where I took a basil plant from the supermarket. I did three different ways that you could propagate it by dividing them up individually making little plants, or just clumping big lumps of it in the tunnel or taking cuttings. The amount of people who did that was huge,” she recalls.
“People started following and commenting and then people putting up little pictures of what they have done, it was mind-blowing really.”
To view the full list of classes at Green Road Gardens, visit https://greenroadgardens.ie/ or sign up to the newsletter.
If you are interested in attending a class with Irene, there are openings for willow basketry classes, a three-day foraged basket workshop and her Christmas decorations/forest folk workshop. Irene is also hosting a number of gardening classes for Spring 2024.
GIY's Mick Kelly on Food Matters, Grow HQ and our food system