by Te Radar
I always experience a pang of horror when I hear of priceless machinery having been sent off to the scrapyard simply because no one knew what it was.
I have had the pleasure of experiencing these machines through associations with vintage machinery clubs, and the men and women in them, for whom antiques are not things to be kept behind glass, but living, breathing (usually clouds of smoke) entities.
The destruction of our artefacts even extends to our architectural history. Whereas Europe has castles and cathedrals, our iconic buildings are the abandoned dairy factories, or the reddish-brown woolsheds, symbols of an economic prosperity long past. Now decaying slowly, or being used for some other purpose, they litter the landscape of the countryside.
Jim Downes, the chap who collected the chainsaws now displayed in the Kauri Museum, had been a chainsaw vendor, and as people had brought their saws in to be traded or disposed of, he thought it might be interesting to hang on to a few. Those few formed the basis of a now extensive and unique collection. Were it not for his foresight, these machines would no doubt have been lost to history too, and that would have been a great shame.
They line the length of one wall of the museum, sitting in silent homage to the men who used them. Where some countries display the swords of royalty and warriors, we have the shining blades of the crosscut saws, the pitsaws and the chainsaws. They are our Excaliburs, grimly doing battle with the endless timber that sprouted from the earth of the bushscape that was New Zealand.
Of course, it is a shame they cut down quite so much of it, but anyone who has actually wielded a chainsaw would be loath to blame our forebears, because as it is well known, once you start chopping into things, it becomes very hard to stop.
This propensity for mass destruction by chainsaw is nowhere better seen than back amongst the manuka, where a large pile of logs now lies stacked near the trailer. We have finished felling, and are surprisingly unscathed thus far. I suspect there is not a tree yet that has stymied Pete from felling it. He has a forest of tree-felling stories.
As the sun starts to sink, the dew creeps back in again, causing the grass to become just a bit too slick to provide any traction for Pete’s jeep. The vehicle has a tendency to want to slide sideways down the steep hill, which I take to be a slightly undesirable tendency, as the thought of being involved in a rollover accident in the back of nowhere isn’t overly appealing.
It would be inconvenient and embarrassing. There would no doubt also be some pain, especially as I am in the back with a couple of chainsaws and various apparatus that would be thrown round inside the cab with me.
The trailer is looking much sorrier under the weight of the poles. The tyre is completely flat, and is resting on the wheel rim.
Ten minutes pass, and the jeep fails to pull the trailer up the slope to the track, and so is removed and replaced by the quad bike of Pete’s mate, who has turned up to help. The wheels of the bike are now spinning in as fast a forward direction as they can go, but neither the mud they are throwing up, nor the smoke being emitted in great grey clouds by the screaming motor, is thick enough to obscure the fact that the bike and trailer are moving inexorably backwards down the slope.
The winch on the jeep is not something that can be hauled out with any speed, and the distance it has to go provides quite a lot of time to stand around and watch as it is dragged out and down to where the bike and trailer have come to rest at the bottom of the hill.
It’s now dark.
Ten minutes after the cable is attached to the bike, it’s hauled back to the top, and the decision is made to leave the timber on the trailer at the bottom of the hill and come back the next day.
The next day eventually becomes a few days later, but undaunted, Pete and I and Brett return to reassemble the jeep and trailer and try again.
With the trailer being so short and the wood being so long, most of it not only protrudes over the back, but is hauled forward as far as possible, so that we are barely able to turn through the tight corners of the track without hitting the back of the jeep with it.
As the jeep climbs the hill, some of the wood falls off, dragging other logs with it, which is unsurprising as we forgot to bring rope and are making do with a rotten length of strop.
I clamber down to where the logs have rolled and drag them back up. Or try to. They are so heavy it requires two of us to struggle up the hill with them.
Once they’re finally back on the trailer, we tie the logs on with the severely damaged strop, and by sitting on the front of the jeep, our extra weight manages to hold the wheels down to gain a little extra traction to round the last bend.
Finally we reach the top of the hill, and with the slope behind us we trundle around to the gate, congratulating ourselves on a job well done. It’s then that Brett says, ‘Hey, where’s the trailer?’
The discerning reader will determine from this statement that the aforementioned trailer isn’t where it should be, which is attached to the towbar.
It has come adrift from the jeep, merrily returning to its favourite haunt, the bottom of the hill.
Still, on the positive side, all the timber still appears to be on it.
If collecting the poles was a farce, actually fashioning something out of them is a saga, as I am to attempt the construction alone. In my haste to choose the handsomest manuka from the grove, I have unwittingly caused myself a problem. The poles are clearly too long, and I have no chainsaw to shorten them. The ones I have selected are so heavy that I can barely drag them to the hole into which they need to be placed.
I have dug the hole as deep as I think it needs to be (and as you are now familiar with my digging technique, you will know what my estimation methods are like) and in this case I have estimated quite deep as the pole is quite tall.
I manage to get the pole in without it crushing me, step back, and think, ‘Yep. That hole should have been deeper.’
I push the pole straight, as if by straightening it, it will somehow become shorter. Hope springs eternal.
Wrapping my thighs and arms around the rough bark of the pole, I squat a little and try lifting it out. The strain suggests that there is a very real possibility that I could give myself a hernia at any second, or at the very least blow some kind of fufu valve, and my lifting is to no avail. The weight of the pole has caused it to sink into the sticky clay and it is stuck fast.
How tedious.
If the manuka was not quite so hard, I may have considered sawing it off with the handsaw, but it is so dense and the saw so blunt that I would be better off trying to shorten it by attempting to lick the top off it.
Just as I am about to concede defeat, the cavalry arrive in the form of Pete and his buddy Vic. They just happen to have been passing and have decided to call in to see how the poles are progressing. I tell them they are very fortunate, as not only can they now take a look at progress, but they can help progress it themselves.
Thus we manage to haul the pole out and I dig the hole to the depth I have calculated it requires. We heave it back in.
Pete and Vic stare at me as I stare at the pole that is still clearly too high by a lot more than the amount I had imagined, so we haul it out again, and I recommence the digging.
When the hole is well over a metre deep in the hard clay of the hill, we drop the pole back in for what we hope is the final time. Perfect. Or at least as near to perfect as is necessary.
There is nothing for it but to celebrate with a beer. The other poles can wait until Pete drops off the chainsaw so that they can be judiciously trimmed to a more suitable length.
Over the next few days I sink the now sensibly shortened poles, erect some cross members, and spend a lot of time standing some distance back from the structure, wondering if I have judged the angle correctly, or whether the roof will have little or no slope to it, meaning the water will pool in it rather than running off.
I’ve appropriated from TVNZ a large billboard tarpaulin that has been used to advertise The Sopranos,
and it will provide the roofs for the verandas. After the saga of the pole fitting, it proves to be a straightforward job, and within a short period I have two wonderful roofs.
Standing back to marvel at my mastery of my domain, I realise that I may have put the poles in a little too close to the caravan and it may now be wedged in.
Bother.
21
White butterflies
It was at the point that I discovered I had perfected the technique for successfully urinating into a watering can, without contaminating the handle or surrounding area, that I realised that taking matters of sustainability into your own hands can be more complicated than I had anticipated.
I had certainly not imagined, when lunching all those months ago with the producers, that it would come to this: a man, a plan, and a watering can.
The reason for this degradation is simple: my proverbial field of dreams has become a paddock of nightmares. My Garden of Eden is barely even a garden. Nothing is growing at anywhere near the rate or volume I’d expected. In fact, nothing is growing. I face the ignominious prospect of gardening failure and starvation.
I had thought that by now I would be growing so much that I would have been trading farm-fresh produce for all manner of things, such as alcohol.
Having been conducting my field trial, I have come to the realisation that gardening is more difficult than I ever imagined. It has always appeared so easy on the television: people plant things, some kind of editorial device is employed to indicate time passing, and their produce is suddenly bountiful. I am beginning to feel as if I have been deceived.
In the hay garden, despite my belief that the heat caused by the decomposition of the bales would give the plants a little boost, all that has happened is that the seedlings appear to have gone yellow. The strawberries have diligently clung on, showing some promising signs, but they are virtually the sole surviving thing growing in the hay that isn’t grass. This grass must have germinated from seeds in the hay, and it seems to be flourishing. I’m not sure how much nutrition it is going to provide.
In the sawdust garden it appears as if some of the seedlings have gone into stasis, as after several weeks they haven’t grown at all. Some of them look (if this is indeed possible) to be smaller than when they were planted. The only things that appear to be doing well are the chillies, and some plant I can’t identify, until someone suggests that it might be an aubergine.
The irony. I abhor aubergine.
As for the plants that I had thrust straight into the earth of the paddock, the only things doing even middlingly well are the potatoes.
If there was a contest to see which crop has failed the most dismally, I would have to say that the corn might well take that title.
Of the thousand corn seeds planted, about 10 per cent have grown, which was what I had thought I would be happy with. But then their growth slowed, and now appears to have stopped altogether. There is no corn plant taller than about 60 centimetres. They should have been well over my head at this point, and although I am not a tall man, this apparently is asking too much of them.
Never has a field of corn looked so pathetic.
On the positive side, the corn appears to be remarkably resilient to wind damage. I have returned to Pru’s at Weathersfield Organics to pick up some more seedlings, and her formerly majestic field of corn has been decimated by the wind, whereas mine has survived unscathed.
I need more seedlings because I am trying to master the art of succession planting. As Pru explains, the main mistake that people make is that they buy a whole lot of seedlings at once and fill their gardens with them. The sheer number of seedlings takes a lot of looking after, and there is no succession planting.
The last thing you want, she explains, is for everything suddenly to be ready all at once, and there is nothing available to come on stream once what you have used has done its dash.
Pru is wrong, however. I have discovered that the last thing you want, rather than having a super-abundance of crops all at once, is for nothing to grow in the first place, or for it to grow for a while and then die.
You would have thought that if the paddock could grow such great pasture, then surely it could grow vegetables. Clearly something is going seriously wrong. I need help.
I had met Betsy Kettle at her homestead some time previously. Betsy is a permaculture teacher, and if anyone can help me, it is Betsy. The last time I saw her, we had sat alongside her flourishing, intensively planted raised-bed gardens, and discussed the current state of the food crisis as she saw it.
Her simple abundant gardens are foremost in my thoughts as I wait for her to arrive to analyse my situation.
Betsy strolls around the field gardens, bends to look at the tattered remnants of the plants that remain, and delivers her verdict: they are all suffering from severe nutrient deficiency.
The problem, it seems, is that I am trying to grow things in dirt, not soil. The supermarket of the soil is empty.
Oh. And here I am, thinking it is my fault.
While it is good to find out that this is the case, it also provides a microcosmic metaphor for a larger problem: the sustainability of the country’s soil—something that is Betsy’s passion.
As Betsy explains, soil is the basis of our economic system in New Zealand. It produces our dairy and sheep products, and our fruit and vegetables. Keeping the soil healthy and nutrient rich will be the biggest problem we have in the future, especially with the end of cheap artificial fertilisers.
‘Right now, we’re putting our valuable organic matter in the landfill,’ she tells me, ‘when what we should be doing is creating a cyclic system, where food scraps and organic matter from the city is composted, returned to the rural land, grows the food, and that food then goes back to the city.’
It is timely advice. The newspapers are full of headlines concerning the exponentially increasing price of fertiliser, which is adding tens of thousands of dollars to farmers’ expenses, if they can continue to afford it at all. Of course, at this stage, I have still to master compost, and tell Betsy so.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘you have within yourself just what these plants need. You get rid of litres of the best source of nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium every day.’
‘I do?’
‘What you should use is what I like to call man-tea.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Simply collect it, water it down or you’ll burn the leaves, and use it on your gardens.’
‘You mean…?’
‘Yes,’ she says with a smile. ‘And best of all, it’s free.’
Blissfully unaware of the ramifications that this conversation will lead to, I sit in the sun with Betsy, shooting the breeze.
‘The problem’, she says, surveying my domain, ‘is that none of this is really that difficult. Everyone should have a garden, even if it’s just to grow some herbs and lettuce, but people claim there’s no time. Instead of relaxing in the garden, they’ll spend an hour at the gym, or flop down and watch some rubbish on TV.’
‘Of course, some of the rubbish on TV can be quite good,’ I say, mindful of my situation.
‘Present company excluded.’ She laughs. ‘But gardening and cooking shouldn’t be considered chores—they should be joyous affairs. Somewhere along the way we’ve lost the knowledge and the love of them.’
I can understand her sentiments. The failure of my trial beds has caused me a little disillusionment, so with my dinners at stake I decide that I will try a new tack.
One of Betsy’s permacultural teachings is that those parts of the garden that are used frequently should be planted in places close to the house, along well-travelled paths, so that they are always in one’s line of vision. That way it’s easy to recognise any developing problems, which can then be nipped in the bud.
In the spirit of Betsy’s advice, I decide that I will create some new gardens in the area directly in front of my caravan, sandwiched between the cookhouse and The Chapel.
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bsp; I also decide that, as these are to become the main source of my produce, I will invest in some decent soil. Dirt has failed me, and I don’t have the time to create my own soil through composting.
Money may not be able to buy me love, but it can buy me some lovely soil, and it amazes me how many bags of rich store-bought soil I can fit into the back of the Land Rover. With its tail sagging down on the suspension, I crawl home with my land-bags.
Betsy is also a strong proponent of ‘urban agriculture’ which, amongst other things, involves the setting aside of public land for the production of food. The urban agriculturist argues that rather than simply investing in more sports fields and huge mown parks, councils and local communities need to put some of the land into gardens that produce food. Instead of more ornamental trees, fruit trees can be planted. Space should not be squandered.
I have my own related issues. After the failure of the trial gardens, I’m adamant that I will reduce the amount of wasted space to the smallest area possible. The vast area of land enclosed (barely) by my fence is unproductive to me.
Also, as I rail against the vast acreages of manicured grass that are swallowing huge tracts of formerly productive farmland, I decide to do away with the lawn.
There is still the issue of how I keep the crops protected from the hungry mouths of the goats, cows, sheep and chickens. The answer is simple. I lay out three new box gardens. The first, and largest, is protected by some swimming pool fencing I have borrowed off Demolition Pete. The second simply has a slightly sturdier net structure placed over it than the system I employed in the field trials.
