In Cherry Orchard, a community garden threw a party to celebrate strawberries

Kendall Byrne clenches her fist and wiggles her wrist, as she waits in the queue.

Clare O’Donnell nudges her on. She nods at her 7-year-old granddaughter. “Just like her mother,” she says. She fidgets with her wrist when excited, too. 

There are four kids ahead in the queue for the face-painting table. 

Some are back for the second time. Ahead is a boy with a giant strawberry painted on his forehead, and a girl with one smaller fruit on her hand.

“Can I have two strawberries?”

“On one hand!”

“On two hands!”

Nicola Moran gestures to Kendall to come around to her station. 

“What are you getting?” says Moran, as she picks up one brush in one hand and two in the other. She’s a volunteer from the Family Matters team at the Liffey Partnership, drafted in for the Strawberry Fair. 

“On your hand?” she says.

Kendall speaks quietly, and nods with a shy smile, and rests her hand palm down on the corner of the table and Moran daubs a bright red strawberry and white dimples – the motif of the day.

This is the first year of growing a big strawberry crop at the Cherry Orchard Community Garden, an expanse of fields and polytunnels that covers 2 acres towards the western end of the west Dublin suburb.

They had gotten a fruit tunnel with funding from the Community Climate Action Fund,  says Peadar Lynch, the garden manager.

Growing strawberries was a bit of a no-brainer, says Lynch. “They’re so popular. Everybody loves them.” 

Also, the crop was a good excuse to throw a strawberry fair. To celebrate and tempt more people in, said Dave O’Connell, who heads up social enterprise development for the Liffey Partnership, which owns and supports the garden. 

“One of the big priorities now, and has always been, is that community engagement bit,” says O’Connell. “Really kind of bringing more people from the community in.”

They do that a fair amount already, he says, with Tús and CE work placements, and courses with the City of Dublin ETB. 

Lower-income communities such as Cherry Orchard can be excluded from so much,  including the chance to get directly involved in climate action, he says.

The team is also conscious of how the wider area is also a food desert – or even a “food swamp”, with too many takeaways –, he says. The garden donates about 150kg of salad leaves, fruit and vegetables a year to local food banks, he says, trying to balance giving what they can give away with being a sustainable working garden. 

The garden has been here for years. But it’s still evolving, he says.

O’Connell applied a while back for a grant to set up a kind of a swat team, which would go plant vegetable gardens at the back of homes around the neighbourhood – and come tend to them, too. (Similarish, to the Community Roots project in Cabra.)

His idea though was a kind of subscription service, he said, and a way for people to source food as locally as is possible. “They wouldn’t be reliant on strawberries coming in from Luxembourg.”

They didn’t get funded for that though, he says. But the aim is still to do more.

Staff have just drawn up a strategic plan for the coming three years. It includes more community outreach, community use, education opportunities on site, and volunteering, he says.

Fourteen kids line up at a tall green gate into one area of the garden.

Amie Moylan helps steer the kids in high-vis – all from at an afterschool service on Drumfinn Road – through the other side, which opens out onto fields, and the long polytunnels and rentable allotments.

Moylan hasn’t been in before, she says. “I knew it was here and stuff,” she says. Just, she never had an excuse to drop by. 

“I didn’t realise it was so big,” says Moylan, as the space stretches out, her eyes drawn towards yellow sunflowers in the distance. 

The kids move as a pack. They crowd a small tree, heavy with green apples. They rush the fence and line up like a paper chain to peer over to the salad-leaves patch. 

Lynch, the garden manager, leads the tour. He hands them a flat white pattypan squash. They fumble it between each other, in a circle, pawing at it and turning it over.

Guess what this is, he says.

“An onion!”

“A pumpkin!”

Or a spaceship, he says.

The garden grows a bunch of fancy pumpkins, says Lynch later. They don’t make loads off them, he says, but they’re nice to grow and a way to introduce weird-looking vegetables to people. 

He is also growing pumpkins with kids from nearby St Ultan’s School, he says. This year, he planted an Atlantic Giant that can grow as big as a barrel. “It’ll be fun to show the kids.”

The children pause for a moment at the entrance to the strawberry polytunnel, until Lynch gives the nod that they can go explore. 

Inside, the strawberries are planted in long beds. They’re raised up high to save the volunteer pickers from backache.

“Can we eat some?”

Lynch’s eyes widen. 

“I found one!”

He watches the kids move between the rows. “Just the red ones!” he says.

“I found one!”

“I found one!”

They pillage the dangling berries. 

“Not the green ones, they’re for next week!” says Lynch. He pulls a comical grimace. Just joking, he says.

“You have to leave some for the other children!” says Moylan.

Now that strawberry season is here, they harvest twice a week, says Lynch, and sell the strawberries on to Dublin Food Co-op in Kilmainham. 

It’s not a massive crop, but a steady one. “I would expect it to keep going until the end of October,” he says.

They’ve two rows of raised beds that run the length of the tunnel right now. Maybe they’ll do three next year, he says.

On the way back, the kids spot another fruit tree. 

“Carrots!”

“Pears!”

By the green gate, they pass a table with cups of cut-up strawberries with squirty cream. 

Beyond, kids play pin the calyx on the strawberry and line up, again, for a strawberry paintings on their hands.