When I was a youngster my parents tried to inspire me to become a gardener. Particularly, as I recall, a vegetable gardener. I suspect this was a cunning ploy to encourage me to eat vegetables; especially green vegetables. I loved potatoes, but was partial to only a few other varieties and these were usually high-priced species. For instance I enjoyed asparagus and corn-on-the-cob, but peas and beans made me nauseous and I agree wholeheartedly with President Bush the elder that broccoli should never have been allowed to be part of the universe.
My long-suffering mother would insist that I eat some form of green vegetable to ward off scurvy, though to this day I have never known anyone who actually had scurvy. I think it was Popeye who influenced me to reluctantly accepting an occasional serving of spinach and its near neighbour silver beet; to this day, apart from asparagus, the only green vegetable I really eat.
As I recall Popeye got his spinach out of a tin. Just like scurvy, I have ever seen tinned spinach.
My stint as a potential gardener was short-lived. You will recall how long it seemed between Christmas’s when you were a kid; well back then the same time frame occurred when you were gardening. From planting the seed until harvest time took so long that you lost interest.
It’s only as I’ve aged that I have realised just how quickly plants grow.
During a rush of blood to the head a few years ago I decided in early October that it would be nice to dig up some new potatoes for Christmas dinner. Actually I had been thinking of doing that for years, but Christmas’s arrived so quickly I never got around to doing the planting.
On this occasion I planted potatoes at Labour weekend. An avid gardener friend had assured me that if seed potatoes were in the ground by then they will produce an edible crop by the 25th of December, providing I chose the right variety. So I enthusiastically planted a number of rows of varying types in the empty section next door and it seemed I had hardly finished planting the last row when the first row popped up out of the ground.
The potatoes we harvested that Christmas were a shade smaller than the cherries in the bowl on the same table, but there is something quite special about eating the fruits of your labours and despite one potato being less than a mouthful the flavour was superb and the experience uplifting.
On a similar theme and at the same time we planted the perimeter of the section next door with a variety of native trees. Assuming a comparable time frame as my childhood gardening experience I imagined that in about ten years I might have created some semblance of privacy and shelter on the land. I found to my amazement that native trees grow nearly as quickly as potatoes. The section was soon completely hidden from the road.
So now knowing that creating a native tree forest is about on a par with growing potatoes I was surprised to see that an Otaki couple, described as “elderly environmentalists” are being taken to court by the officious Kapiti Coast District Council for daring to employ an arborist to come and prune their native trees and cut down a few that were diseased.
Environment Minister Amy Adams called it madness, but the council CEO was staunch. “We have to teach these people a lesson,” he said.
In my dictionary fascism is described as “a restriction on individual freedoms” and at about the same time I was being encouraged to consider market gardening as a career by my nurturing parents, allied armies were battling to rid the world of this sort of tyranny.
I recall a similar case some years ago when a fellow in Auckland dared to cut down a Pohutakawa tree on his property. He was vilified before a public meeting where one dear old lady seriously suggested that he should be shot.
He had to pay $100,000 in reparation and still faced a two year jail sentence.
I reckon he would have wished he was a whale.
Another lady at the vilification meeting said she had stopped to talk to the Pohutakawa tree each day. This is an alarming trend initiated by Prince Charles and I can’t help but wonder if my potatoes might have reached pumpkin size if only I could have thought of a topic of conversation that would have emboldened them.
Amongst the natives we planted we added a couple of gum trees to encourage the Tui’s, but they grew too quickly and looked ungainly. So without recourse to any authority, local or national, we chopped them down.
If Australian-born Green Party co-leader Russell Norman had been in power we would probably have risked facing a firing squad.
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