Our Story
Humans
Amy Jennings is the founder, and heart and soul, of Glendalough Organics.
Amy Jennings is a horticulturalist, botanist, conservationist and beekeeper with a deep appreciation for nature. A masters in biodiversity conservation allowed Amy to further explore her interest in ethnobotany, which looks at the connection between people and the plant kingdom. This interest took her to countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, India, Tibet and Tanzania. Amy loves teaching and has experience developing and delivering training internationally in sustainable water and land management. Amy manages Glendalough Organics, where she practises sustainable growing and land management methods and offers practical ecological consulting and training for community groups, schools, and private landowners. Amy also facilitates meditation and corporate retreats with Hometree charity and the Deerstone where she teaches about ecology and mindfulness techniques that help connect people with the natural environment.
Debbie is a professional photographer and creative director, a humanistic psychologist in training and holds a masters in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Studies from The University of Cambridge. Raised by the animals she lived with as a child, she has worked around the world volunteering at animal rescues, sanctuaries and animal-based therapy schools with a focus on working with traumatised animals. She spends most of her time in the sea or in the mountains, paddleboarding herself and her portly husky along the coast or walking barefoot in the forests. Her interest lies in reconnecting humans to their natural world to save themselves and the planet.
https://www.wolf-james.com/
Hives
We rear the Irish Black Bee
The Irish Black Bee was threatened with extinction but populations are now increasing.
We mindfully manage our hives taking every step to reduce stress for the bees.
We don't prioritise honey harvest over the health of our bees. We only take surplus honey from our hives.
We are a member of the Native Irish Honey Bee Association and the Federation of Irish Beekeepers
We will be hosting beekeeping courses for those interested. Check the Courses page for more info.
Horticulture
Glendalough Organics is based at Wild Birch Farm,
We are a small-scale biointensive farm that focuses on achieving maximum yields from a minimum land area, while at the same time increasing biodiversity and sustaining the fertility of the soil.
Understanding that soil health is the most important element to growing good quality disease free produce, we take many steps to nurture the soil. We use horses instead of large machines to reduce soil compaction, add compost and compost tea’s to feed soil life, and carefully rotate crops.
Horses
After a series of serendipitous events, two horses arrived into Amy's life.
Faith is a Suffolk Punch and Toby is a thoroughbred cross.
Owning a very large and strong willed mare and a jumpy nervous thoroughbred cross made Amy realise she knew very little about how to work with her horses safely without using a LOT more pressure than she was comfortable with. She started looking at what the equine behaviourist were finding and studied about how horses learn, the emotions of horses and the power of positive reinforcement and connection in training horses. She saw immediate benefits to this kind of approach and has continued to learn with horse trainers such as Hannah Beddington, Dr. Susan Fay and now experiences a connection with her horses that she never thought possible.