The overvaluation of plant life

When I was a youngster my parents tried to inspire me to become a gardener. Particularly, as I recall, a vegetable gardener. I suspect this was a cunning ploy to encourage me to eat vegetables; especially green vegetables. I loved potatoes, but was partial to only a few other varieties and these were usually high-priced species. For instance I enjoyed asparagus and corn-on-the-cob, but peas and beans made me nauseous and I agree wholeheartedly with President Bush the elder that broccoli should never have been allowed to be part of the universe.

My long-suffering mother would insist that I eat some form of green vegetable to ward off scurvy, though to this day I have never known anyone who actually had scurvy. I think it was Popeye who influenced me to reluctantly accepting an occasional serving of spinach and its near neighbour silver beet; to this day, apart from asparagus, the only green vegetable I really eat.

As I recall Popeye got his spinach out of a tin. Just like scurvy, I have ever seen tinned spinach.

My stint as a potential gardener was short-lived. You will recall how long it seemed between Christmas’s when you were a kid; well back then the same time frame occurred when you were gardening. From planting the seed until harvest time took so long that you lost interest.

It’s only as I’ve aged that I have realised just how quickly plants grow.

During a rush of blood to the head a few years ago I decided in early October that it would be nice to dig up some new potatoes for Christmas dinner. Actually I had been thinking of doing that for years, but Christmas’s arrived so quickly I never got around to doing the planting.

On this occasion I planted potatoes at Labour weekend. An avid gardener friend had assured me that if seed potatoes were in the ground by then they will produce an edible crop by the 25th of December, providing I chose the right variety. So I enthusiastically planted a number of rows of varying types in the empty section next door and it seemed I had hardly finished planting the last row when the first row popped up out of the ground.

The potatoes we harvested that Christmas were a shade smaller than the cherries in the bowl on the same table, but there is something quite special about eating the fruits of your labours and despite one potato being less than a mouthful the flavour was superb and the experience uplifting.

On a similar theme and at the same time we planted the perimeter of the section next door with a variety of native trees. Assuming a comparable time frame as my childhood gardening experience I imagined that in about ten years I might have created some semblance of privacy and shelter on the land. I found to my amazement that native trees grow nearly as quickly as potatoes. The section was soon completely hidden from the road.

So now knowing that creating a native tree forest is about on a par with growing potatoes I was surprised to see that an Otaki couple, described as “elderly environmentalists” are being taken to court by the officious Kapiti Coast District Council for daring to employ an arborist to come and prune their native trees and cut down a few that were diseased.

Environment Minister Amy Adams called it madness, but the council CEO was staunch. “We have to teach these people a lesson,” he said.

In my dictionary fascism is described as “a restriction on individual freedoms” and at about the same time I was being encouraged to consider market gardening as a career by my nurturing parents, allied armies were battling to rid the world of this sort of tyranny.

I recall a similar case some years ago when a fellow in Auckland dared to cut down a Pohutakawa tree on his property. He was vilified before a public meeting where one dear old lady seriously suggested that he should be shot.

He had to pay $100,000 in reparation and still faced a two year jail sentence.

I reckon he would have wished he was a whale.

Another lady at the vilification meeting said she had stopped to talk to the Pohutakawa tree each day. This is an alarming trend initiated by Prince Charles and I can’t help but wonder if my potatoes might have reached pumpkin size if only I could have thought of a topic of conversation that would have emboldened them.

Amongst the natives we planted we added a couple of gum trees to encourage the Tui’s, but they grew too quickly and looked ungainly. So without recourse to any authority, local or national, we chopped them down.

If Australian-born Green Party co-leader Russell Norman had been in power we would probably have risked facing a firing squad.

“God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man; without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks” - Francis Bacon

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The picket fences of gentle people

Shane Jones has initiated a furore over a supermarket chain he alleges have used mafia tactics to improve returns to their shareholders. Jones reckons Countdown is extorting money from suppliers by asking for retrospective payments and threatening banishment from its shelves for those who don’t pay up.

The allegation will probably be shown to have some validity.

In one form or another competitive supermarkets have been doing this for years, probably to the distinct advantage of the consumer. To be fair it does keep prices honest though the suppliers are the ones who suffer the slings and arrows of competition.

I’ve had personal experience with this.

In the 1980s I owned the Wairarapa Bacon Company in Carterton. We produced an excellent product using pork from local producers, but supermarkets wouldn’t let us put our merchandise on their shelves unless we actually bought the shelf space. When supermarkets are under the construction phase they will offer shelf space to potential suppliers provided they actually pay for the fit-out. This is, or at least was, particularly applicable to refrigerated shelving as these are costly plant items for supermarkets to install.

The “Big Boys” got in first and back then this was Hutton’s and Kiwi and a small Carterton producer couldn’t make any headway.

On one occasion I did convince Foodstuffs Central division to take our hams steaks on special. We were given six weeks lead-in time and then on a particular week our hams steaks were to be promoted under the Stevlon brand at an extremely competitive price.

Foodstuffs central division covers all their stores from New Plymouth across to Hawkes Bay and down to Wellington.

We worked tirelessly to stockpile the product during the six week lead-in period and waited for the orders to come pouring in. We got one; a modest order from a New World supermarket in Havelock North. All the others bought their “Stevlon” ham steaks off Hutton’s who deviously offered them at the same generous discount we had negotiated.

Supermarkets by now were almost the exclusive purveyors of bacon and ham and without the capital necessary to buy my way into their stores I had to eventually close the factory.

In the light of the Jones allegations there is now a protest circulating through the social media asking consumers to boycott Countdown supermarkets. It seems plausible, but imagine if this caused the demise of the Countdown brand and left the field wide open to Foodstuffs. The jovial Pak’n’Save stick figure wouldn’t have to proclaim that their aim was to save you money and all your grocery prices would go through the roof.

The sudden dislike of Countdown has been boosted by the fact that Progressive Enterprises allegedly recently asked that all New Zealand made products be taken off their shelves in Australia.

A few years ago I visited a small town in Queensland called Melany, inland from coastal Coloundra where Woolworth’s - Countdown’s owners - had just opened a brand new supermarket. Melany is not much smaller than Masterton and had a fast-growing population and yet had only one other supermarket, an IGA store in the middle of the town centre.

Woolworth’s new Melany store however was almost totally bereft of customers and there were signs on fences all over town proclaiming: “we won’t shop there.”

It seems Woolworths had bought the old saleyards at one end of the main street which was next to a stream that housed among other things, Australia’s prized, but rare, platypus. The locals were aghast that Woolworth’s would construct such a supermarket virtually over a creek and protested vigorously to stop the store from being built. Police reinforcements had to be brought in from Brisbane and the situation had got pretty rugged.

Eventually Woolworth’s won their case in the Environment Court and went ahead with the project, but when we were there the carpark was empty.

Some people even pretended to go and shop there, piling up the trolleys with groceries then leaving them unpaid at the checkout. This was known as the “trolley challenge” and protestors right across Australia were reportedly filling Woolworth’s trolleys, leaving them unpaid with notes showing their support for the Melany stand-off.

Locals I spoke to at the time admitted the whole protest was a bit of a sham. The creek, next to the leaching saleyards was hardly pristine. In fact Woolworths had cleaned up the area and had acted impeccably in their treatment of the environment. But to be seen shopping there meant you risked being ostracised by the more militant members of the green community.

I doubt that we will see “we won’t shop there” signs on fences around Masterton. Sanity will eventually prevail and we mustn't forget that Countdown has a substantial investment in the town and a large staff who will be relying on continuing employment.

It would be a bit mean-spirited to let them down.

“I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated people decently. This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.” - Anita Roddick

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The best and worst in the world

An absorbing Australian television programme Ask the Butcher screens on Choice Television on Thursday evenings at 8.05. Host is Sydney meat retailer Anthony Puharich who takes viewers on a culinary journey from farm gate to dinner plate via his family-owned butchery called Victor Churchill.

A few weeks ago he featured lamb on the programme and said among other things that Australia has the best lamb in the world. Some of the owners of the rural properties he visited reiterated that claim.

I recalled that earlier in the evening TV One screened an advertisement on behalf of Silver Fern Farms that featured a lanky New Zealand farmer escorting a suited city dweller around a well-stocked sheep farm who made the statement: “New Zealand has the best lamb in the world,” as he jumped a barbed-wire fence. 

Now surely they can’t both be right?

Actually, having had some experience with the retailing of meat in both countries, I’d have to concede that Australian lamb is better than ours. However not having critically examined the product further afield I can’t honestly say with any certainty that either of us can necessarily lay claim to having the best lamb in the world.

That accolade could well belong to any number of countries.

But it seems there is something in our makeup, probably because we are so tiny and situated at the bottom of the world that makes us want to proclaim to anyone who will listen that many of our features, good or bad, are “the best in the world.”

I read recently for instance that New Zealand has the biggest number of problem gamblers in the world. We’re also said to have the most teenage suicides, and the highest level of obesity. It is even claimed we have the worst child poverty rates in the OECD.

We blithely accept all these allegations which I suspect are made by people who are pushing their own particular barrows wanting support for what in most cases are justifiable causes.

I thought about this when I read an article in last weeks’ Time magazine on the many veterans returning from the variety of wars that America has got itself involved in who are ending up in prison. Time said there are about 200,000 incarcerated veterans in the US who may have committed crimes due to untreated post-traumatic stress.

In a later unrelated paragraph it said there are 49,000 inmates in Illinois prisons.

Whenever the conservative Sensible Sentencing Trust in New Zealand calls for more of our criminals to be jailed for longer terms, liberal commentators invariably claim that we already incarcerate more people per head of population than any other civilised nation in the world.

So here was a chance to do some comparative research.

First I checked out the population of Illinois; 12.8 million. New Zealand’s population is 4.5 million. So Illinois in population terms is almost three times larger than we are.

To match or exceed Illinois 49,000 prison population would mean we would need to have around 16,000 incarcerated in our penitentiaries. In fact New Zealand has 8618 people in prison, 6764 actually serving a sentence and 1864 remanded in custody. This looks to be about half the population of the US jails.

Now I’m not saying that locking up people for longer is the answer to our crime problems, but I’m simply exposing another statistic that is quoted for effect without having a grain of truth to sustain it.

So I suspect many of our ‘best and worst in the world’ claims wouldn’t survive closer scrutiny.

One interesting statistic about the New Zealand prison population is that only 527 are females. I suspect many of these will be there due to mistreatment by men in the first place.

We are told that in China with their one-child-per-couple policy, baby girls are not particularly welcome and often aborted if the gender is diagnosed in the womb.

Perhaps if we reversed that policy and only accept girl babies here we could eventually breed a law-abiding society.

When Phyllis Diller was asked what the world would be without men she said, “Free of crime and full of fat, happy women.”

Fat, happy women; so now we’ve resurrected the obesity problem.

“There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.” - Maya Angelou

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The good, the bad and the ugly

I was standing at the checkout counter at the Warehouse recently waiting for what seemed to be an inordinate amount of time for the young lady in front of me to have her transaction completed. She was purchasing quite a large amount of bedding and it required her to sign a number of forms. I was about to return my meagre purchases to their original shelving when the proceeding was finally completed and the young lady exited the store with her goods. I asked the checkout operator: “What was that all about?”

She told me that the lady had bought the bedding on layby. This surprised me because in my day if you bought goods on layby the shopkeeper kept the items in store until they were fully paid for. It was an eminently sensible system and in most cases no interest was charged, though in some instances a modest storage fee might be added.

What the young lady with the bedding had actually done was to buy on hire purchase. No doubt a high interest rate was in train and the Warehouse took the risk that the goods would eventually all be paid for. It would be difficult to repossess used bedding.

I can’t help but conclude that the layby system, as we understood it, was a much more sensible procedure and would have taught thrift and frugality in it processes.

I don’t like the expression “in my day” much because all-in-all things are  better today than they were and our recollections of the past our usually clouded by tinted memories and we conveniently ignore those aspects that weren't so rosy.

So please excuse my indulgence.

Back “in my day” per head of population New Zealand was considered to be the greatest trading nation in the world, yet the finance ministers of the day were prudent and never allowed us to spend more money than we earned. For instance you couldn’t buy a new car unless you personally had overseas funds. The government did allow some new cars to be available, but these numbers were determined by the amount of the surplus in our offshore accounts.

When I was twenty-one I bought a second-hand Volkswagen that had travelled 14,000 miles. It cost me 914 pounds. A new Volkswagen cost 900 pounds. The Volkswagen dealer might put you on a waiting list for a new vehicle, but only if you had a car to trade-in and he was then able to negotiate the trade-in price from a position of great strength.

So there’s an example of the good and the bad. The government was behaving in a common sense manner by not allowing overseas goods to come in without us being able to meet all our commitments as a nation, but the end result was high prices and limited access.

I am convinced however that there was one thing that was better “in my day” and that was the music. It played an important role in our lives. For amusement in that pre-television era we listened to music on the radio, went to movies described as “musicals” and at parties we stood around pianos and sang.

I’ve looked at today’s music and have concluded that much of it is drug-induced poetry set to tuneless dirges. I suppose this was inevitable. As Julie Andrews lyrically explained to Captain Von Trapp’s kids in The Sound of Music with her hit song Do-Re-Mi, there are only seven notes in the chromatic scale and it was generally assumed that popular music, with so few options available, would eventually run of out of tunes that were original.

I’m convinced that time has come.

I was as proud as any other New Zealander to see Lorde take to the Los Angeles stage and wow a sophisticated audience, but none of the music I heard on the Grammy Awards night could hold a candle to the melodies we grew up with.

I tried to think of a song from “my day” with the same message as Lorde’s Royals and came up with “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” sung by Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm. Their song sensibly describes in a less complicated manner what I think Lorde had in mind.

It surfaced in the 1956 movie High Society which also starred Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby and the irrepressible Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong. Miss Kelly was arguably the most beautiful woman in the world at the time.

Crosby and Kelly sang a romantic ballad called True Love which topped all the hit parades in its day and apart from the Sinatra/Holm duet, Sinatra and Crosby, whom the world has never seen the like of before or since, performed the harmonic “Well, Did You Evah”.

The highlight of the movie for me however was Crosby and Armstrong’s classic rendition of a song called “Now You Has Jazz.”


Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra; now their records were well worth putting aside on layby.

“The Beatles are a Shakespeare for the twentieth century.” - Helen Reddington

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