Gearing up

Things are looking up. After several rounds of looking around for another garden company to join, I decided, why go through bullying and torture again of working like a slave and just be independent, and garden where I like to garden and where the owners too like me to garden. So I feel like I've struck gold by being given the cart-blanche on development... an overgrown garden out in bushy Swanson that will keep me busy for the forseeable future...and the Kimberley Daycare and Preschool right next door to St Giles church.

Then I may have enough to live on to pursue another project next year.  Gardeners on Air, or maybe...Plant FM.
I have a keen co-host Joanne from Ranui Community Garden who's very into holistic gardening. And I'm into herbaceous horticulture. So I think we will complement each other well.

I need to take inventory of my tools. After losing a niwashi on my last job (it was maybe a bit rusty anyway) I bought another one. But I'm thinking I may need to invest in some other kit.

Sharpening stone
Hedge shears
Backpack sprayer (for seaweed/fish fertiliser)
Gloves with claws
Parka
Brush and pan
Rake
High vis vest.

Now, Santa was very kind to me.  Last year he gave me a subscription to Kiwi Gardener, which is still active. I don't need another subscription as my bookshelves are now groaning with books and garden magazines of which I still haven't read them all. But there is one new book that caught my eye and is on my library request list called 'Flourish' Extraordinary New Zealand Women and their Gardens. I don't know if maybe there's a companion male copy called 'Thrive' Outstanding New Zealand Men and their Gardens. But this lavishly photographed coffee table book may be just the extra inspiration I need.

I once considered co-authoring a book called 'Roundabouts and Carpark Island beds 101 spectacular ideas'. I mean there seems everything under the sun in gardening books, books on garden design, books on gardeners and their famous gardens,  books on organic gardening, complete books that tell you everything you need to know, books that have handy hints and tips, books on herbs, books on flowers, books on trees, books on pots,  books on borders, books on natives, books on outdoor rooms, books on topiary,  but none of these books ever showed you how to garden right in the middle of a busy intersection. Tip - put out traffic cones and wear high vis gear.

Garden hunting

I have a new occupation - garden hunting.
I have found several neglected gardens that need the TLC of a gardener - the more weedy and overgrown the better. Not for me the fanatically clipped, over manicured and brand spanking new. As long as these owners are willing to give a decent wage, or failing that, food in return for time and labour, and a thank you, then I am happy. Not for me being shortchanged, starved and told to hurry. Or sworn at. Also, if the garden has dogs, I'm inclined to refuse to work there. I am not a fan of yappy dogs that bark and bite. And that goes for supervisors and bosses too.

My own garden is now too tidy in comparison. I've got it to the stage where I can relax, everything is as it ought to be this season at least - all the areas I've planted and looked after.  Aside from the fact mum cut down the maple tree and my brother massacred the buxus hedges. I'm rather ashamed of that because it now looks absolutely terrible and not something I can do anything about.  Come autumn I will be planning on expansion. Also it might be because I don't have any income right now to be spending - being a pauper means I have limits.

The sun is pouring down and I'm meant to water the potatoes at Woodside. After dinner. But I'm exhausted. It's one of those days.  I don't know why I volunteer for the job, it takes me a while to walk to the garden on my own and then I must walk all the way back through our dodgy park thats sprayed with Roundup, and by the time I'm finished watering, it's dark.  Sorry. I just can't get over that. Our playground is totally neglected for over 20 years yet council workers come every six months to spray poison and think they've done their job in maintenance. I weep for the creek, that runs along side, one that nobody ever swims in anymore, because of the pollution.

I have done some small things today. Moved a parsley that was getting to much sun and drying out in the pot to the shady side of the house. Moved the watermelon in the pot to beside the fence. Fed the worms. Scattered some love-in-the-mist seeds.

Nothing too taxing. Surprisingly I am not really missing watering 300+ pots at the retirement village anymore. I was at church on Sunday, and our preacher was saying something about if you didn't want to do something, you hired a contractor in. I thought he was talking about me. But maybe it was not that you didn't want to do something, it was that you wanted something done but you just couldn't do it yourself. Because if you could actually do it all yourself, why would you pay someone else to do it? The difference between slavery perhaps and servanthood?

Sometimes I don't listen in to the sermon too much at church. Because sometimes I think the preacher is really talking about himself and confessing his own sins more than anyone else's.  I could never treat someone like a slave. But I have come to the conclusion slavery is alive and well in the 21st century it was never eradicated, just moved to different places and has a new name - workplace bullying. Thank God I  have been set free.

The barren suburban wastelands...?

It's too late. Someone has already written a book called 'Little House in the Suburbs' and they've made it all self-sufficient. I know because I picked it off the withdrawn trolley at the library today.

Well. Non-plussed, I bought it home, along with some other tomes. I'm educating myself, since at school I was never taught how to do these things. The most I recall being taught at school was how to pass exams, so that I could go to university, be in debt, and then work to pay off that debt. Or, be indebted to my parents, who paid for the degree. Not a practical thing about how to build your own house or anything like that! I can't believe I'm learning how to build a house out of logs from a children's book.

Why weren't wasn't I ever shown this in school?? Lamenting the state of the New Zealand education system doesn't change anything though. Left to my own devices, all I ever learned was what I found out from books, since I really had no teachers to guide me. Want to make a dress? Mum knows how to sew, but she won't teach me. She says go do it yourself. How to cook? Oh no, you do it yourself, otherwise you will never learn. So I just learned that she didn't want to teach me anything. Next thing I know, I am making a mess of the kitchen. You said cook something. Oh, no, she meant first I had to buy my own house, and then I could use my own kitchen. Right.

I look at the property ads in the paper. Ok, if I want to buy my own house in this neighbourhood, where am I going to find half a million dollars?
I start setting up a stove in the garage. Mum comes in. What are you doing? Making my own kitchen. Oh no I can't do that. I consider, if Dad parks his car outside, and I park my car outside, I could take over the garage, but mum has packed it all with her things in boxes and it looks like the Warehouse. I know several people who lived in their family garage. If they could get in that is.

Then I decide its a stupid idea to live in the garage, because if you did that you might as well live in your car. I have reclaimed a strip of land by the garage, which now has lemon balm, parsley, silverbeets, and other miscellaneous flowers and herbs. But it's not enough, I'm thinking of doing another border, when I have made enough compost to do expand them, and plants to move into them. This is a sloow process, why because first I have to grow the plants enough so I can make cuttings and divide them to fill out the border. Unlike some people, I can't just buy a ready made garden. So the little garden by the olive tree is slowly coming along, now blooming with salvia, daisies, cosmos, and geranium. There's a grapevine, some iris, and rhubarb as well. I'm planning on edging the path with lambs ears and more lavenders, and growing more jasmine over the fence.

My aunties come over to visit and cluck and say wow your gardens looking nice. Mum says oh it's because she's got nothing better to do. I don't know what is worse, her assessment or my former boss, who responded to the oldies who were praising the gardens and my work by  dismissing me with ill-disguised contempt -  ' that was what she was paid to do'. I saw him the other day. He wasn't happy and the weeds had grown. I know where he'd rather be, retired in Lake Taupo fishing and living in his caravan. But he was stuck here in West Auckland where the weeds always threatened to take over with every shower of rain, ensuring that there will always be year round work for the gardener.

 He still hasn't forgiven me for cutting down the iresine to remove the weeds all around it. I'm sure it will grow back. Everything grows back eventually, it's Auckland after all. I did not do the worst thing and accidently poison it with Roundup, like council workers did spraying around base of trees. I'm still in shock about that. I am sure they are keeping mum and claiming they didn't kill them they were just killing the weeds around them. Yeah right. The official council propaganda on that is there's this mysterious disease that's killing Kauri and we have to find a cure, so nobody is allowed to walk in the forest anymore. But I suspect one of the reasons is because that most tracks have glyphosate (Roundup) sprayed around them, to keep weeds down, and that it got to the tree roots, making them more susceptible to this water mould. I mean what else can be on the base of your shoes, many walk on grass sprayed with Roundup, unless we walk around barefoot, and I haven't really seen people do that because most people wouldn't dare walk barefoot on grass that the council sprays with Roundup.
Anyway, maybe this is all falling on deaf ears but I'm still going to write about it anyway because, I'm really not happy that people feel its ok to trash our environment, spray poison everywhere and end up turning it into a barren wasteland.

Little House in the Suburbs

In a Goodreads group I belong to we have a challenge this season to read a book set in another member's region. Since our group is online and consists of members from all over the world (mostly America) some have been reading books about New Zealand where of course yours truly is from and I have been challenged to read books set in the midwest of America, as well as Vancouver, Canada and New York City.

This is how I got on to reading 'The Little House on the Prairie' series of books and about the places author Laura Ingalls Wilder grew up in the late 19th century which is the midwest plains of America, west of the Mississippi river.  Laura wrote about seven books in this series starting with Little House in the Big Woods, where she lived in a log cabin and her father had to fend off wolves, bears, and panthers. The second book is about her future husband Almanzo's life as a farmer boy, and the third is the famous 'Little House on the Prairie'.

I am now on to reading the second book 'Farmer's Boy' in which Almanzo, aged nine, is constantly working - he even skips school so he can work at home on their family farm, and they have a lot to do! In fact I am so overwhelmed by all the work he does on the farm that I am comparing what I did when I was nine and I just cannot remember a thing, except going to school, where I was told I needed to stay in for as long as I can so I can get a good job (and, it wouldn't be farming, because, we don't have a farm) so I can earn enough to leave home and buy a house.  I know other people are told different things for example, some girls only went to school so they could flirt with the boys and eventually have babies. In some cultures, if you weren't coupled up by age 20 and left home to marry you might as well be an old maid. Hmm. I don't know that motherhood is any easier because I've seen mothers in their 30s and some are absolutely shattered by the sheer drudgery of looking after a household of children. Not to mention separated and divorced!

Anyway Almanzo, ever keen to prove himself as a young man, can't wait to grow up so he can do grown up things like drive horses. Meanwhile he helps breaks in calves, cuts ice for the ice-house, shears sheep, grows a massive prize pumpkin for the county fair, binds oats into sheaves, saves the corn from frost, plants potatoes, chops wood, milks cows, makes candles. His work ethic is amazing...and he isn't paid. His sisters sew, cook and make preserves. Then they go to school and with an education decide to get jobs in town that earned money instead of staying at home doing unpaid labour.

I am just exhausted reading about it. The homesteading American Dream, apparently, did not work out for a lot of people. Back in the day, the white settlers drove the Native Americans off their land as they headed further west, and basically claimed the prairie land as theirs to develop i.e farm. But the Native Americans knew that prairie land was arid and not suitable for farming, only grazing buffalo which soon became extinct. The American government's Homestead Act allowed people to claim some of that land, basically as squatters, farm it and make it pay. But because of ignorant farming practices, and lack of water as the land was in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains and flat as a pancake with no rivers, most homesteads failed to make a profit, and then...the great dust storms came. The 1930's were known as 'The Dirty Thirties' and devastated the midwest of America. So many abandoned houses and land when drought and wind whipped up the plowed to dust top soil, turning the area into a giant dustbowl. It was horrific.

At this point in time, you could say, people were ignorant and should never have farmed the prairies in the first place. Then it wouldn't have happened. The prairies are now mostly gone, replaced with irrigated fields of monoculture, but problems remain. Now the land is doused in chemicals to grow Round up ready crops. Grain and corn which is then processed into the junk food that people buy at their convenience today.

The Little House books are about a time when most things were still done by hand. So they are fascinating in the details of things, like, new shoes. You didn't go to the Warehouse and pick out a ready factory made pair, and get overwhelmed with all the choices available. A cobbler came to your house stayed for a few weeks and made you a pair! And it would last until they fell to pieces or you grew out of them.

On that note I am thinking when I am old and grey (which is probably not too far off) I might write a nostalgic children's series about growing up in the 1980's about this Little House in the suburbs and how Dad worked all his life to pay for said house and how Mum helped him.  In many ways, it's a dream, to own ones own house, and the land it's on. What's remarkable is the everyday sacrifices people make to make that dream a reality. Home Sweet Home indeed.

Season's Greetings

Don't panic - go organic. The late Margaret Jones, one of the stalwarts of the Soil and Health Association, used to say this phrase a lot. I don't know if people are aware of the oil crisis that seemed to have been going on ever since the 70s, but somehow managed to get subsumed by Al Gores 'Inconvenient Truth', climate change, and reducing 'carbon footprint' movements. 'Sustainable' has become a byword and to be vegan is now a trendy thing. Although, I noted, it can be quite expensive to be vegan and hipster. Sometimes its laughable at peoples hypocrisy, you might buy vegan cheese, but it's wrapped in a plastic wrapper which is unrecyclable, and could kill whales. Plus it might be shipped from miles away consuming polluting fossil fuels to get to the market.  To consciously NOT consume and make do or make our own goes against everything the global economy tells us, especially around Christmas time.

I had been watching 'The Power of Community' How Cuba survived Peak Oil. This documentary showed how, under communism when oil was restricted commodity, the Cuban economy ground to a halt. The nation nearly starved because much of the food grown was for export and they didn't grow enough to feed their own nation.  They had relied on imports and chemical agriculture to run their farms but when they had no access to fertilisers and no oil to run the tractors, guess what happened? The people started growing their own food and converting vacant lots to organic gardens, out of necessity. The market place became local. People had to ride bicycles or convert trucks into buses and wait hours for a bus ride because oil was scarce and expensive.

Everything became slow. Energy that depended on fossil fuel was restricted, so people looked to free solar power to heat their water. At first, life was hard and it was a massive change, people had to adjust but a few years later people were thriving. They learned to grow their own food using permaculture methods. They learned to make do..and families and communities became closer as a result because they needed each other to make it work. People became gardeners and farmers and it was no longer a lowly position but one held in highest esteem - it was putting food on the table. Instead of buying things, people swapped and shared goods. The Cubans called this economic/energy crisis of their history the 'Special Period'.

Would my mum survive if she could no longer eat rice imported from China as her staple? Could we grow enough of our own to feed ourselves? I think we all have the brains and know how and resources to manufacture our own goods and grow our own food, and we are blessed with a good climate and fertile land to do so. But currently, we are wasting a lot of resources in a bid to become 'world class' and attract the almighty dollar. Even our organic food is exported overseas while our own native citizens end up becoming homeless and we constantly import non-organic food.  We import drugs and harmful pharmaceuticals but export life-giving food. I don't know when it will end but in a global economy the bigger nations are going to always have more buying power than the smaller ones. That's just simple mathematics. Unless we make our money from gambling. But I digress. John Key already did that, it was called investment banking and allowing land to be sold to overseas speculators and developers.

I say this Christmas, please, don't spend it at the shopping mall, the temples of consumerism. Let's enjoy the season and enjoy sharing its fruits, especially with those who are less fortunate,  the miracle of the birth of a King, and the crimson pohutakawas and christmas lilies which are blooming early this year. Instead of a silly season, it could be our special season.

No compromise

I once believed that people who got married had to compromise. Most married people have shared that  "marriage is a compromise" which means in many cases the woman has to give up everything to suit the man. That disturbing on many levels, but it also suggests there is no such thing a real promise. A compromise is not a promise. It makes me wonder why people marry when they just cannot agree on anything. How can two people walk together if not agreed?

Where is this going? Well I am in a quandary, I could lie, but I just can't do it. My fault is I'm too honest. And I cannot remain silent. So, perhaps another way to put it is I REFUSE TO USE POISON.

This is the thing. I know what a weed is, and I know what a good plant is. But even a weed has it's uses and it's still a plant. So if someone tells me that for a gardening job they would like me to spray poison around a tree to get rid of the weeds, I'm rather sceptical. Firstly how would anyone spraying be able to avoid contacting a tree's roots or part of the leaves (trees can put out suckers with leaves from the base) and poisoning them and the beneficial bacteria and fungi as well? How would anyone know, within a few years time after constant contact with poison, such as glysophate aka Roundup that stays in the soil for six months or more so weeds don't grow back, is slowly killing the tree?

How can anyone do this without being suited up like a beekeeper/astronaut and not be exposed to poisonous chemicals by breathing in drift spray or contact with bare skin?
Is this gardening? Or is it  'maintenance'? Or is it a con by the chemical poison manufacturers to get people to use their toxic products forever?

These are questions I am asking. And how is this related to Kauri tree dieback? I believe it's very much related.
And not only that, how about human infertility, cancer, autism and other modern day diseases related to toxic chemical exposure, in the air, in our water, in our food? If this poison was 'safe' as manufacturers may claim, then it wouldn't be a poison. But this poison is sprayed in our parks, our reserves, our school playgrounds, our vineyards, nurseries and farm crops where organic gardening (real gardening)  is unheard of.

What can we do. I believe we need to speak out. And ban these products. For our environment, for God's creation. This is not a thing we ought to take lightly. If you are exposed to these chemicals you WILL die. Maybe not right away, but it's like the forbidden fruit, Eve ate of it and she felt fine, she didn't drop dead that instant. But it changed everything and from that day she began to die.

Do I have an immunity to all the poison I've been unwittingly exposed to in the world today? After all I've managed to reach 38 years of age without dying yet.  If I drink any deadly thing, will I die? Maybe some of us are thicker skinned. But it doesn't mean we should willingly, knowingly expose others to it either. Babies. Young children. Elderly. Our flora and fauna. I believe they are worth protecting and caring about. And therefore no compromise.

Showtime

Went to two Flower shows over the weekend, and left feeling inspired.

At the NZ Flower and Garden show Buffie again won medals for her creative upcycle display -  with a theme of native birds and pohutakawa flowers made from scraps and cast offs, while her food basket for Ranui Community Garden was fantastically lush.  Henderson Garden Clubs and Te Atatu Floral Circle combined theirs into a kiwiana/asian inspired courtyard setting, with backdrop of palms, anthuriums, ferns, birdbath and paua shells.  Others in the community garden exhibit were Yates, NZ Butterfly and Moth trust, West Lynn Gardens, Ark in the Park, New Zealand Gardens Trust, The Auckland Bonsai Society, and the Bromeliad Society.

Suitably attired in my floral ensemble I  entered a dazzling pavilion of flowers, many florists were making floral handbags and shoes arrangements, decorative umbrellas and candelabras. I really wished I could have chatted with the florists at work but they all had signs on their stands saying 'please don't talk to the florists' and so I just had to admire their handiwork in respectful silence.

Garden highlights were the Fairy Forest garden in which you peaked into a magical enchanted fairy forest, an bee pollinator garden that included beehives planted up with bee friendly flowers, a garden that had a hanging bed and pool (obviously for wealthy leisure lifestylers), a beach front bach garden created by school children. One that wowed everyone was a Japanese style garden that had a shinto style bell, maple trees, and stepping stones all lushly planted up that people could wander through.

Of course I was cajoled into buying things by the persistent retail traders. So I admit to buying as well as lunch,  'genie' salt and oil scrub and jars of herbs and spice rub mix. And purple iris rhizome.  I can't resist purple irises. Something about them...

So with all my money gone, I headed home, but I think the best thing about the show was talking to and meeting other enthusiastic gardeners.  And some even wanted to join our club!

The Sweet Pea Festival, was actually packed when I visited, with all the blooms on display, not just sweet peas but other flowers in all their glory. I dragged mum along, and she grumbled that it was all old ladies (herself, not included?) but I wasn't really looking at the old ladies I was looking at the flowers. Some really exquisite ones in all colours. I suppose it was a bit like Miss Universe beauty pageant for flowers. I'd been reading about one of our former Miss Universe Lorraine Downes, she had written a memoir about what it was like representing New Zealand and then winning the honor of being chosen as the most beautiful woman in the Universe, well for 1983... it  sure makes for an interesting life. If nothing is required of you except to smile and look pretty, and that brings joy to people, well thats a good thing isn't it? But even she said this got old after a while!   I wonder if my flowers will one day win awards, but isn't it enough that I think they are already beautiful in their own way anyway.