Practically the only growing industry in recession-hit Ireland is - growing.

So many people are returning to the land to cultivate their own vegetables that sales of seeds and garden rakes and compost are booming.

Ireland's agriculture and food development authority, known as Teagasc, has been so inundated with inquires from would-be gardeners that this week it issued 'A Guide to Vegetable Growing' for beginners.

Count me among that number.

My wife Zhanna and I have managed to reclaim a once impenetrable patch of thorn trees and ferns behind our home in the Dublin mountains and make it into a garden. It involved cutting down 75 gnarled, thorny bushes and hiring a landscaper to dig the stumps out of the ground with an excavator.

We spent days digging out and burning the fern roots, which spread out deep underground like a mass of telephone cables. Then we erected a ten-foot-high fence to keep out the deer that wander down from the forest at dusk and eat almost anything coloured green.

At 1,000 feet we now have one of the highest gardens in Ireland. It faces south-east so we might just get enough sun to give us a good crop of lettuce, peas, beans, rhubarb and herbs as well as strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrants and gooseberries.

We have also planted a couple of apple and damson trees to see if they can survive in our micro-climate. And of course potatoes, three rows of Kerries.

Everyone is going mad to plant their own potatoes. There's no chance of us joining the British Commonwealth as has recently been suggested but we have no problem with the British Queen, the Duke of York and King Edward, some of the best varieties of potato.

We are blessed to have the space to grow our own produce. Apartment dwellers have to find allotments on council land, which come at a nominal fee.

Demand has been so heavy this year that there are long waiting lists, and farmers are renting out vegetable patches at up to $400 a year.

In the Stoneybatter district of Dublin, where houses have small concrete yards, a former New Yorker, Kaethe Burt-O'Dea converted an empty lot into a very successful communal vegetable garden four years ago.

Other districts are now looking for advice and following her example, she told me. Even people without access to a garden or allotment are turning to the window box.

Ireland's best-loved celebrity gardener Dermot O'Neill recently promoted on the popular Friday night television program, "The Late Late Show" a potato called Lady Christi that can be grown in a small plastic barrel.

Launching a campaign last month for the Irish householder to return to the soil, Mike Neary, manager of horticulture for the Irish Food Board, said that now more than ever Irish people are expressing interest in growing their own vegetables, fruits and flowers.

There's more to it than saving money of course, though that is uppermost in people's minds as they find their disposable income depleted by the harshest budget in the history of the state.

There is also a strong trend in Ireland towards organic food and an awareness that imported food such as Cyprus potatoes mean a lot of carbon miles. There is no good reason when we should be importing potatoes.

The solanum tuberosum, otherwise known as the Irish potato, flourishes well in Ireland's cool climate.

The famine of the mid-18th century happened partly because of a lack of genetic diversity. There are now 150 varieties of potatoes that can be grown in Irish conditions.

Let's hope that the Kerries flourish at 1,000 feet.