Of course we could grow our own vegetables. 
We had seen celebrity gardeners on TV do it. It looked so quick and easy when the whole process was shown in fast motion. One minute the celebrity gardener was turning the first spade full of soil and the next the vegetables were planted and growing and the next he or she was picking the crop to make into vegetable soup, stew or salad depending on the willingness of the vegetables to cooperate. We asked our neighbour Jim about growing vegetables. He’s the local vegetable expert and is always offering his home grown vegetables to other neighbours. Not that anyone knows what to do with Jim’s vegetables. How do you cook Jerusalem artichokes? Steam them? Bake them? Or use them as missiles for your catapult when besieging a mediaeval city? Jim knows more about vegetables than we do so we asked him over to give us some advice.
“First,” said Jim with the air of a vegetable parent “you must build the walls for the garden beds, to protect your little babies, then buy some really nutritious soil. It’s like feeding your children good food”
“Then,” he went on “add some fertiliser with lots of nitrogen. Blood and bone is essential. Think of it as veggy vitamins. Make sure you dig it in well, water it, leave it for a week or two to calm down and then plant your little veggy weggy seedlings.” We listened carefully to his advice while trying to make allowances for his confusion between human infants and vegetable bambinos.
“I recommend silver beet as a good beginner’s vegetable. It’s like having an easy first child. But don’t forget the anti-pest protection: coffee grounds for the caterpillars, saucers of beer for the snails and a border of wood ash to keep out the slugs.”
We wondered how we would supply these horticultural essentials as we drank instant coffee, preferred wine rather than beer and had gas heating not a wood heater. But Jim ploughed on.
“Weed the bed every day and put netting over the whole thing to keep out the naughty old birds and possums. Make sure the garden is in full sun and has plenty of water for them to drinky drink.”
With that, Jim was off to plant his next crop of asparagus spears to help with the siege of Constantinople.
With the arrogance of beginners we decided to ignore Jim’s advice about raised garden beds. Why not plant directly into our garden soil? So we did, forgetting about the local hazards. No matter how hard the children tried, their soccer ball regularly smashed into the carefully tended rows of silver beet seedlings like a wrecking ball through a timber shack. We realised Jim was right about the raised garden bed and so we put in solid wooden sleepers as walls to keep out the marauding footballs. We also heeded Jim’s advice about the bird netting. It kept out birds during the day and possums at night. The possums were very angry about this and gathered around hissing and growling in jumping on an off the garden fence and keeping everyone awake. We had to placate the possums with daily fruit and vegetable peelings which kept them away from the vegetable garden and reduced their hissing and growling to a reasonable level for our sleep. We also decided to try Jim’s advice of special nutrition laden vegetable growing soil. We bought a load from the local garden centre. It was amazing. It was so full of rotting plant matter and seeds that it grew things without us planting anything at all. Dandelions, dock weed, ivy, onion weed, invasive grasses, thistles et cetera. You name it, we were growing it in our new garden of nutritious soil. So we had to weed it every day as each new species burst forth from the fecund fertility of our veggie garden. After we had won the War Of The Weeds and worn out our knees from weeding, we replanted the silver beet. It did grow but it was a bit limp and yellow on the edges. Jim said we had neglected the blood and bone. He was probably right but the real reason we hadn’t done his bidding was that we didn’t know how to get blood and bone. We tried the local butcher as the most obvious source asking for some very red meat and some bones. “For the dogs?” grinned Barry the butcher. “Nothing like some bloody good meat and a few bones to gnaw on to keep them healthy. Do you know what they put in canned dog food? It’s mostly rice and vegetables! Who would feed dogs with rabbit food?”
We took the meat and bones and carefully dug them into the soil of the veggie garden.
This addition had a dramatic effect.
The local population of foxes made a bee line for the buried meat and bones, ripped apart the bird netting and dug up everything in their bloodlust. We had to secure the veggie garden with fox proof wire netting on steel poles set in a concrete foundation to stop the foxes digging underneath. It did keep the foxes out but the red meat diet didn’t seem to help the next round of vegetables. They were still yellow and sickly like someone with yellow fever. We wondered if we had planted the wrong crops in our super enriched soil. We saw an advertisement in an organic gardening magazine for a company offering to analyse a sample of soil and make recommendations as to what vegetables to grow. We duly posted off our small sample of our super soil. In about a week we received a report telling us the percentages of various minerals in the soil as well as soil elasticity, water retention, good bacteria, bad bacteria, fat content, clay content and humus content. What was this – a human blood test? Would our soil need anti-cholesterol drugs or blood thinners to ward off a soil stroke? As for humus content we thought we had sent them a package of soil not a container of middle eastern dip. We obviously had a lot to learn about growing vegetables. Along with the soil health report came recommendations as to what vegetables would grow well in our meaty, fatty, inelastic, waterlogged, humus poor, faux Middle Eastern soil. They recommended endives, tunipinis (a hybrid vegetable that comes from crossbreeding turnips and zucchinis) and crabapples. We managed to track down some crabapples on sale at a “heritage” fruit market. After tasting the crabapples we decided that these fruit had probably been kept in a museum for a few decades to qualify as “heritage.” Or maybe Huck Finn in Mark Twain’s adventures was the best guide to crabapples when he said they “ain’t ever good.” We did wonder about endives. We asked the local fruit and vegetable shop owner when endives were in season and he said “never.” We suspect that the endive is a mythical vegetable invented by Lewis Carroll or JK Rowling.
Meanwhile, we have let the vegetable growing mania go to seed. The raised garden beds are growing a great crop of Scotch thistles and dandelions. Someone told us we can make herbal tea from the thistles and herbal coffee from the ground and roasted dandelion seeds, but we don’t have the energy. Growing our own vegetables has worn us out. Now we buy our vegetable matter from the supermarket packed in plastic bags or on plastic trays. It’s very cheap that way and a lot less demanding.
