Wild Irish Foragers is a philosophy as much as a business. “If you make enough to keep a roof over your head and food on the table, then why expand into a huge farm?” argues Sharon. “We are unconventional,” she laughs. “I suspect we are the enterprise board’s biggest nightmare! We believe you have to work instead of waiting for someone to hand it to you. We are a small farm surrounded by large farms; they all think we are nuts.”

When home, all of the family help with picking but Gordon is the main forager. Sharon is in charge of making the products. “We have a small one-woman kitchen – my husband was very clever about that,” she jokes.

The Greenes handpick a bewildering array of fruits, herbs, grasses and flowers including rosehips, elderberries, damsons, elderflowers, gorse, rowanberries, sloes, nettles, blackberries, honeysuckle, goosegrass and clover.

From these, they make a variety of potions including syrups, preserves, fruits cheeses, jellies, pontacks, shrubs and pots. All are traditional. “I am fascinated by our food history and heritage,” Sharon tells me. “Since the famine we have this attitude that if you ate out of the ditch, you were poor. Yet our hedgerows are a huge source of food. Pontack – an elderberry ketchup or sauce – for instance, isn’t Irish but it has an Irish connection. In 17th century London, Frenchman François-Auguste de Pontac set up the first ever gastro pub. He created his eponymous sauce to accompany game and other meats, and it became a favourite of author Jonathan Swift, who was a regular there.

Shrubs, in case you wondered, are drinks that arrived here through the ports in pre-famine times, it’s the name coming from an Arab word to quench. If all this seems a little daunting, take a look at the Wild Irish Foragers in the Good Food Ireland Collection of Makers. I did, and discovered a whole new world of Irish ingredients, buying a range of fascinating syrups, pots and preserves for drinking, cooking and enjoying with all sorts of foods.