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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 10 (February 1, 1934)

Gardening and Garnering

Gardening and Garnering.

Let us, for instance, run the gimbals over gardening. Gardening is an attempt to “get the works” on the earth-works, or a getting down to earth and waiting for something to turn up. As in two-up and other forms of tail-spinning, the uncertainty of gardening is the essence of the equation. Ma Nature, even when she is top-dressed and marceleryed, has to contend with slugs in the beds, grubs in the granny-bonnets, bugs in the spuds, beetles in the beet, and croakers in the crocuses. Even when gardening and garnering are unattached, the gardener has the consolation of knowing that his efforts constitute a kind of kindness to animals by providing grub for grubs and lunches for lepidoptera. To quote the lines of Tom Ato, the Bard of the Beanery:

When the slithery slug goes glug, glug, glug.
And the wire-worm, too, and the big black bug,
And the greedy green-fly chews and champs,
And the big black Tom of the neighbour's,
stamps
Over the beds so new and neat,
And the boozy beetle bags the beet;
When sparrows come from far to feed
On the Brussels-sprouts and the garden seed,
And the blighted blight make drooping “duds”
Of the brand new crop of spanking spuds;
When earwigs wiggle and listen-in,
While they give the spinach a spikey spin,
And every bug that flies or creeps
Or lopes or gallops or springs or leaps,
Comes round from morning till late at night,
To nip and nibble and pierce and bite;
When caterpillars and centipedes
Commit despicable dirty deeds,
And a drought comes on, and the water-man
Comes out to catch you if he can,
A'using the hose to squirt the green—
Now what would you say these omens mean?
They mean one thing, and only one—
That some stout-hearted son-of-a-gun
Has pitted his courage in generous wads,
To raise a garden against all odds;
And if he fails—as well he might—
To beat the beetles and bugs and blight,
At least he has the thought o’ nights
That he has whetted their appetites!

When the bean turns out a has-been, when the lettuce won't, when the horse-radish proves a non-starter, when the scarlet runner refuses to run, when the spring onion gets “sprung,” when the French bean goes Dutch, when the marrow's motto is “to-marrow”; when the potatoes go cock-eyed, the turnips fail to turn up, the leeks drip, the currants
“If the vacuum cleaner broadcasts the racing results.”

“If the vacuum cleaner broadcasts the racing results.”

page 11 fuse, the carrots re-fuse, the asparagus becomes disparagus, and the curly kale turns over a new leaf and goes straight; even when all or each of these errors occur in your agricultural accountancy there still remains the fun of nursing a sick parsnip back to pars-nippiness, of crooning to a crumpled cabbage, or sitting by the bed of a restless radish.