No matter how hard I’ve tried not to, I’ve learned a lot about New Zealand since moving here.
If not for Meat Week at the Pak 'n Save, I'd never have learned you could buy it by the liter.
Take gardening, for example. I didn’t know until recently what a popular hobby it is in New Zealand.
Everyone’s doing it. Buying shovels, coming home late at night, digging holes in dark corners and putting something I couldn’t quite make out (but looked quite bulky) in said hole.
Plus, there’s composting. I bet most Kiwis get into gardening just for the compost heaps.
Now, if you grew up in the Bronx, as I did, you’d think gardening was strictly reserved for that guy down the block with his shirt tucked into pleated suit pants pulled up to just under his man-breasts, the guy who always bragged that his was the best homemade wine in the neighborhood and he’d let you try some if you went down into his basement.
But you’d be wrong: gardening isn’t just for creepy loners who produce consistently bold, complex Cabernet Sauvignons year after year after year despite whatever else the police might say.
Gardening is for everyone.
And as the weather in Auckland plods tepidly into summer, I find the thumbs I’ve been sitting on all year have turned green for whatever reason.
It's impossible to say what's more fun: watering plants, or popping a couple Valium and watering whatever gets in the way. (Photo by Philip-Lorca diCorcia)
It was Jacquie that turned me on to “the scene.” She’d already bought a bunch of flora for the deck, including a young olive tree (pictured).
One day we were reading in the lounge.
“Do you mind if I read some of my gardening magazine out loud?” she said.
“––,” I said.
She started in on an article about mulch. After she finished, she took her watering-can (pictured) and poured it over my face to wake me up. Then she started in on the next article and when she was done with that she took her watering-can and poured it over my face. This must have gone on for two or three hours before she got to a feature that caught my interest. It was about the joys of pulling potatoes out of the earth.
“Wow,” I said.
“I know,” Jacquie said. “Have you ever watched potatoes being dug out of the ground?”
“Once, but unfortunately they had to re-buried right away.”
That’s only partly true.
There was a small courtyard behind the house I grew up in, a cobbled area for us and the neighbors to park our cars.
And there was a narrow plot of dirt back there, hemmed in by thorny roses and an apple tree that produced very sour fruit.
And once in a while, my parents tried to plant vegetables.
And one morning we got a rooster instead. We don’t know where it came from, but it mysteriously vanished a few days later, on what turned out to be what my mother called “Stuffed Capon Night.”
So as far as my experience with gardens is concerned, sometimes it was famine, sometimes it was Meat Week, but I never saw potatoes being dug out of the ground.
Well, that’s all in the past now. And if there’s anything I’ve learned recently it’s that the past is better off in the past.
If you don’t napalm your epidermis with Veet, how can you show off your sexy new top-of-the-line sea-girdle? This old newspaper ad is taped to the window of the sometimes offensive Antique Alley on Dominion Road. The ad offends me for obvious reasons. I mean, as a trichotillomaniac, why singe away your hair when you can pluck?
Another Antique Alley classic. A toby jug shaped like a man holding a toby jug. It's like an infinity mirror for dipshits.
These days, I’m all about helping around our nascent garden, in sort of a hands-off, supervisory role, with a concentration in quality control.
Watering the fern. Jacquie's one of my star waterers.
Only through trial-and-error can you determine which plants thrive on vodka martinis and which plants don't.
Tags: Antique Alley, Dominion Road, Meat Week, Pak'nsave, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, toby jugs, Trichotillomania, Veet
December 14, 2010 at 3:03 am |
I’v always thought of gardening as mulch ado about nothing.
December 14, 2010 at 6:57 am |
Yeah, just a lot of pottering around.
December 17, 2010 at 6:31 am |
Now, as I recall, we did manage one year to raise three stalks of corn which yielded 3 somewhat defficient ears of corn.
As for that rooster, you give us too much credit. No way could either your father nor I capture the thing, let alone prepare it as a meal. We do suspect that it may have eventually been thrown into the pot of one of our more knowledgable neighbors.
December 25, 2010 at 2:24 pm |
As both a gardener and a tricky little maniac, I enjoyed this post!
December 25, 2010 at 3:10 pm |
“tricky little maniac”… love it
December 30, 2010 at 7:17 pm |
[...] The only time I got a pet research dolphin was when one got snagged in a drift-net, only to show up later mixed in with my tuna surprise. Granted, it was always a pleasant surprise. But when it comes to frolicking in the living room, chunks of dolphin meat just don’t stack up to a living, intact dolphin. For one thing, drift-net dolphin chunks start to stink up the house after a few hours and your mother makes you bury them in the back yard next to the potatoes. [...]
February 15, 2011 at 9:28 pm |
[...] started years ago, back before my parents turned their black thumbs to puttering around the garden, when my family lived in a rented, second-floor apartment overlooking the Cross Bronx [...]