Off the Radar Read online

  2

  On the snail trail

  I am standing in the middle of the garden, holding a snail delicately between my fingers, and experiencing something of a conundrum. I consider the snail a pest, whose desire to eat the plants that I rely on to survive means that it is worthy only of eradication. However, it is also considered by many to be an excellent source of food, and if there is something I am short of, it is food. What am I to do?

  While it may be possible for a man to live on a diet based entirely on eggs, silverbeet, potatoes and grapefruit, I am not that man. Even though I certainly won’t develop scurvy, and have to suffer the ignominy of losing my teeth, diarrhoea, and bleeding from all my mucous membranes, that diet would cause me to wish I did, if only to relieve the monotony.

  Many of the vegetables I plan to plant won’t be ready for up to 90 days. Leeks take a staggering 21 weeks. That’s five months. Who can wait that long? I don’t think at this juncture that I’m that desperate for a leek.

  I’ve been living in a world of seductive convenience. When it comes to buying fruit and vegetables I don’t worry about the vagaries of seasonality, or weather, or pests, or the length of time a plant takes to mature. I go to the supermarket or the greengrocers, and whatever I want is generally available.

  What I need now, though, is an emergency garden, one that will bear fruit—or vegetables actually—as soon as genetically possible to tide me over until the rest of my crops have matured.

  I have never really grown anything before, bar a successful crop of cherry tomatoes the previous summer. I have no idea where to begin, or even what is possible.

  Fortunately, a short drive north of the nearby village of Matakana, up in the low hills, nestles Rainbow Valley Farm, the El Dorado of all things sustainable.

  The land the farm is situated on was once deemed by local farmers to be nothing more than ‘rubbish land’—good for little more than growing the weeds and pests that proliferated there. Then, 20 years ago, up the long winding valley a house-truck hove into view, ground its way up the hill and down the steep, winding driveway, and out onto the heavy clay soil that was a veritable bog in winter and like concrete in summer leapt Joe Polaischer and Trish Allen. They were the new owners of this 20-hectare block and they had arrived with the goal of becoming self-sufficient.

  Now, descending down the driveway, it really does seem as if I am entering an abundant oasis.

  Crossing the lawn, next to a lush vegetable patch, I approach the house that Joe built. Tucked into the side of a hill, the long, low-slung house features thick adobe walls, and a roof upon which a luxuriant crop of grass grows. I’d often seen it on television and in magazines, but in the warm spring sunshine it is even more impressive than I had imagined.

  Joe hobbles past a few idle chickens to meet me, apologising that only a few days ago he had a hip replaced, and isn’t his usual self. I would never have known, as he looks pretty damned sprightly. In fact, both he and Trish positively glow. There is a light that shines in their eyes and in their cheeks. Smiles seem to fall from their faces. It’s little wonder they and the farm are spoken of in reverential tones by those who know them.

  After a cup of tea and some cake, Trish offers to take me on a leisurely perambulation of the grounds. ‘We’ve planted a few trees since we’ve been here,’ she says as we stroll through the orchard. They certainly had. Where once there were weed-covered slopes, there are now over 13,000 trees, including over 800 fruit trees. ‘What we’ve created is an edible landscape,’ she says with a certain degree of pride.

  Everywhere, something useful grows. Through the orchards all manner of birds strut and preen. Large gardens overflow with vegetables of many hues.

  Rounding a corner we are confronted with a huge, richly aromatic, sacking-covered mound that sits squatly, steaming. ‘I think that’s the best compost pile I’ve ever seen, Trish,’ I proclaim.

  ‘That’ll get up to sixty degrees at its peak,’ says Trish. ‘The key to great compost is layering the carbon and the nitrogen. Nitrogen is your green material—chicken manure, coffee grounds—whereas the carbon is your straw and twigs, that kind of thing.’

  I had no idea there was a science to composting. Why are we not taught these things? Perhaps I had been and had forgotten. Until this point in my life there hasn’t been a great call for compost knowledge. I don’t think I have even had a conversation about it prior to this. I am beginning to suspect that I might be slightly unprepared for the next few months.

  Trish explains that Rainbow Valley Farm was designed in line with their belief in permaculture, so that everything on the farm has a place and a function.

  Permaculture, a contraction of ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’, is a system that was initially formulated by a couple of Australians in the 1970s. In its most simple form, it is the belief that one should allow nature, and the natural cycle, to provide solutions to problems. By integrating various aspects of nature, you should be able to eliminate a lot of the work normally considered essential in farming, or gardening, thereby saving energy and eliminating waste.

  Their toilet epitomises this. Over the years I have experienced many toilets that have taken my breath away. Literally. I have always been a little dubious of any toilet that won’t flush. Piles of human effluent sitting in tanks or holes not far beneath me, producing odours and insects—or worse, being visible—has never appealed. Mercifully, long gone are the long drops of old. Not only are they illegal in many places, but there is no way they can compare with the modern composting toilet, the likes of which is now being explained to me by Trish.

  They are breathtaking in the most pleasant way. Large, airy and colourfully tiled, they are as far from the image of what a composting toilet would look and smell like as I can imagine. They are the ultimate in recycling, as the composted manure returns to the soil from whence it originally came, where it fertilises new crops, and so the loop begins again. I would like to ask if I can try it out, but I am too embarrassed to do so.

  As I stand inside their main vegetable garden, surrounded by a little picket fence, eating snippets of plants that Trish has plucked from the beds, I ask: ‘How long will it take me to get something like this garden here happening?’

  ‘Oh, not long at all,’ replies Trish with a sense of unbridled optimism that indicates she clearly doesn’t know just how little experience I’ve had with plants.

  I have often tried to establish gardens in the past, with limited success. More often than not, after an impulse stop at the nursery, I have ended up with trays of seedlings that I’ve never quite got around to planting, and I then spend the next few weeks watching them slowly die in their little pottles.

  Trish hands me the orange flower of a nasturtium to sample. It tastes slightly floral. She smiles at me again. I’m smitten in the most wholesome of ways.

  As we talk, Joe, considered to be one of the world’s great permaculture teachers, bustles about, instructing someone here, planting something there. People from all over the globe have flocked here to be taught about life and living, and I can well understand why. Trish and Joe’s optimism and generosity are infectious, and I leave determined to create my own Eden.

  All I need are some plants.

  While beginning my garden entirely from seeds may be cheaper, what I need are seedlings. Thankfully there is yet another handy woman who can help.

  A quick trip up the road in the Land Rover brings me to a jaunty yellow sign on a sharp bend just south of Kaukapakapa. It marks the entrance to Weathersfield Organics, a vegetable and herb seedling-raising enterprise developed and run by the enchanting Pru Broughton.

  ‘You see, Radar,’ Pru says, as we stand squirting water in the general direction of tables of lush green lettuce seedlings, ‘conventionally bred plants are bred for their eye appeal in the supermarket. It’s all about size and colour, and their ability to last in cool stores. They’re not bred for their taste appeal, so you don’t necessarily get a lot of flavour out of th
em.’

  Having pottered around with plants her whole life, Pru and her husband Roly were in the process of setting up the nursery in 2002 when Roly died suddenly. Determined to carry on their dream she persevered. From a few tables covered with shade cloth she has built Weathersfield up to the point that it now has several shade houses and contracts for virtually as many seedlings as she can supply.

  As demand grew, Pru decided that shipping the seedlings she raised in Kaukapakapa all over the country would not exactly be in line with her organic principles and beliefs in local produce. The answer was to franchise the operation.

  This adherence to a philosophy of sustainability is something I will encounter repeatedly over the next few months.

  ‘The most important thing about an organic garden is to keep feeding the soil, and the soil will do the rest,’ she says. ‘I like to think of it this way: that the soil is the supermarket, the roots do the shopping, and the leaves do the cooking. If there’s nothing in the supermarket, then there’s nothing for the shopping basket, and nothing to cook, so the plant’s not going to grow. You have to feed the soil, preferably with high-quality organic material, not chemicals.’

  This belief was for a long time one of the central areas of mockery directed at the organic types. Why, when we have science providing us with supposedly quicker and easier ways of improving the soils and protecting crops, is any of this necessary?

  The main problem is that, other than any questions as to their negative environmental impact, these fertilisers and the pesticides are manufactured with, and transported by, cheap fossil fuels. With the fear that the era of cheap fossil fuels may be over, those who spent years being regarded as flakes because of their emphasis on natural, organic methods don’t seem so flaky now.

  As I am leaving, Pru wishes me luck, and says that gardening’s pretty simple, and that even a child could do it: ‘My grandkids graze straight from the garden. They graze on the spring onions, they graze on the parsley, and they graze on the silverbeet,’ Pru informs me. ‘Getting down and dirty is half the fun of being a kid.’

  ‘It’s half the fun of being an adult,’ I respond.

  As we laugh and load the Land Rover with trays of seedlings, I make a mental note that not only do I have to worry about slugs and snails and caterpillars and chickens, but I’m now going to have to go to all the effort of building a childproof fence, as the last thing I want is to have my crops raided by a voracious horde of grazing children.

  Actually, that isn’t quite the last thing I want. The last thing I want is for all my crops to die, although now that I have them back at the farm and planted, if they do die, at least it will be in their beds.

  With everything planted, I stand back and survey my handiwork. Two raised beds of seedlings flutter gently in the wind—one, a plot of organic plants; the other a group of ordinary, conventionally bred ones.

  Faced with the question of whether I will embark down the path to total organic production in my season of sustainability, I have decided instead that I will hedge my bets and trial both organic and conventional methods. This way, I can judge which seems best, and reduce the risk of one crop failing by having two crops.

  All I need to do now is to protect them from the myriad of dangers that will confront them, including predators such as slugs and snails and birds and caterpillars (not forgetting grazing children).

  Having been told that neither the slug nor the snail has the ability to swim, I have scrounged a few lengths of old spouting, from which I plan to create a simple moat filled with water around my vulnerable plants.

  I will never know if the theory behind the moat system is correct, as regrettably I never manage to implement it.

  I assemble most of the parts required, and I even get as far as to lay those I have in place. But then I stop. Well, not stop as such, but just postpone finishing it.

  If there is one thing that is going to cause the failure of my efforts to live off the land, it isn’t going to be starvation. It’s the fact that I am an inveterate starter of projects that never get finished.

  I’m a hopeless procrastinator.

  I often wonder whether or not procrastination is a mental illness. It would be grand if it were, for at least then I’d be able to confidently state: ‘I’m not lazy, I’m sick.’

  On several occasions I have even found myself procrastinating by sitting at the computer reading online articles about how to stop procrastinating. Most of them seem to be written from the intolerable viewpoint of the non-sufferer. I guess if the real procrastinators were writing them, they’d never get written, unless the procrastinator was writing an article on procrastinating as a form of procrastination in and of itself.

  So with no moat, I have to consider what to do about the snails. Lifting a snail in my hand closer to my face, I inspect it thoroughly. I realise that in the interests of the sustainability experiment, I should at least consider harvesting and eating them. All I need to do is collect the snails, feed them on some flour, or a little carrot, for a short period to ‘clean them out’, and then fry them in a little garlic and butter, and voila! I will have a nourishing and, I suspect, a healthy meal. I can’t imagine that there is too much fat on a snail.

  There are several reasons why I do not do this.

  Firstly, I have no idea how to kill them.

  Secondly, not even the chickens seem interested in eating them, which I take to be a sign.

  Thirdly, they are snails.

  And even if I do eat them, I will still be faced with the problem of what to do with the slugs. I have never heard anyone utter the phrase, ‘I feel like a good feed of slug.’

  While I don’t mind a snail, I cannot abide a slug. I guess some of it has to do with the fact that you can avoid touching the body of the snail as its shell provides a handy handle. A slug is unadulterated mucus.

  I guess they couldn’t be any worse than the misleadingly named Chinese delicacy, the sea cucumber. While it lives in the sea, the sea cucumber is most assuredly not a cucumber. It’s an animal, a fact of which I am aware as I once boldly pointed to it on a menu, and said ‘One number 174 please. Yes, the casseroled sea cucumber.’

  What I didn’t know at the time was that the creature breathes by drawing water in through its anus, extracting the oxygen from it, then expelling it from the same orifice. Had I known this prior to ordering it, I may well have asked, ‘Do you have any snails?’

  Eventually I decide that the easiest way to deal with both the snails and the slugs is to use something that is the answer to so many of life’s other little problems—beer.

  Poured into a container that is then placed in or near the garden, the beer entices the snails into the container, whereupon they fall into the beer and drown. What a way to go.

  While the beer seems to work for a while, its main shortcoming is my desire to consume more of the beer than the snails do. The thought of pouring hard-earned beer into these vessels in order to drown snails seems like a waste of good beer to me, for if there is anything that needs drowning, it’s my sorrows.

  3

  Three fat turkeys

  The phrase ‘Apparently you are going to let me shoot your gun’ is considered by some to be at best a little effete, and at worst, decidedly camp. Nevertheless, it is my opening gambit upon meeting the chap who has been conscripted to help me gain a little game.

  Shawn is a nuggety jack of all trades who happens to live just up the road. Goodness only knows what he thinks as he arrives in his ute to meet the television guy who wants to do a bit of hunting. Whatever it is, I cannot imagine my greeting will inspire him with any degree of confidence in my abilities.

  Despite this, he agrees to take me out into the field in pursuit of dinner.

  ‘There’s good eating on a turkey,’ he promises.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yeah, and we’ll find them easily, no problem at all.’

  The only problem is that he doesn’t inform the turkeys, so as we drive aro
und his mate’s farm on a warm spring morning, there is nary a sign of our feathered prey.

  Hunting with a TV crew in tow lends a certain air of expectation and pressure to the occasion. There is an imperative to find the game, because having a cameraperson, a soundperson and the director amble around, filming me standing around, might be good for my ego, but it is not great value for money. Nor does it create overly riveting television.

  After much scouring of farm, combined with some head scratching and the use of a considerable amount of colourful language to describe the turkeys’ intelligence, lineage and non-appearance, we finally locate some. The only problem: their location. This particular flock has decided to loiter next to a herd of cows, which in turn are located next to a house. These are not ideal conditions under which to unleash a barrage of shot at the feathered food source.

  ‘No problem,’ says Shawn. ‘We’ll move them.’

  ‘The cows?’

  ‘No, the birds, you wally.’

  ‘Oh. Of course.’

  The concept of shooing game to a more convenient locale is not something I have previously experienced, as one generally sneaks up on whatever it is one wants to shoot in order for it not to run or fly away.

  Leaving the crew by the ute, Shawn and I stroll in a wide circle around the birds in order to begin shooing them away from the cows, away from the house, and towards an empty paddock.

  ‘They’re quite a popular trophy species in the States,’ says Shawn, as he eyeballs a bird that seems to want to walk the wrong way. ‘Guys’ll sit under trees all day waiting to shoot a big male so they can collect his beard as a trophy.’

  Turkeys have beards? I had no idea.

  I’ve only ever been close to supermarket turkeys before, and they don’t even have feathers, let alone beards.