On farmers as gardeners

Sometimes farming husbands are quite useful in the garden. Mine, for example, dug sixty holes for me this morning into which I then planted the bottle brushes seen in the picture. These are Callistemon citrinus “White Anzac”.



I usually have to cajole and wheedle my Hunter Gatherer into doing anything in the garden. “I’ve got nearly twelve thousand acres to garden without your bloody acre too” is a well worn cry in this household. If there is the slightest whiff of a menial gardening task, both he and the dog are on that four wheeler motorbike and off in a cloud of dust faster than a kid sneaking biscuits from the pantry....and that’s lightning fast I can tell you.

However, mention the phrase “I might need a chainsaw” or “The backhoe might do it,” and suddenly you have a gardening maniac on your hands. A farmer with a backhoe will ignore seeding, harvest, or any really important farm job, if given the slightest opportunity, to dig up twenty years worth of eucalypts, garden beds, lawn, orchards; in fact he’ll dig up anything he can place his digging and ripping tool into given half the chance. A backhoe is like drugs to most men. Once they get a taste for it they are hooked for life. This is because they never really wanted to turn their backs on all their Tonka toys in the sandpit of their youth.

My advice is to supervise constantly. Do not, under any circumstance, pop into the house to quickly get that load of washing out and onto the line whilst leaving the husband to rip out the single dead tree you wanted removed. Big mistake. I did that once, and we now have no eucalypts at the front of the house at all. The same applies with the chainsaw. Men go crazy with this power tool in their hands. A light pruning or simple request for the removal of a few diseased branches on a fruit tree can leave you totally branchless, fruitless, leafless and staring at a single stick in the ground.

“I was only trying to balance it up” he will declare.

Finally, never forget that women sit on a potential fortune. Use it. Men always complain that they ‘never get enough’, so use your asset to get what you want done in the garden. In line with gardening terminology we call this “The Root System”. Warning.....never pay up front, and never offer a totally unreasonable amount of “roots” in order to get the job done. I did, and we now have a heart shaped piece of concrete by the swimming pool fence into which are scratched the words “One Root X 200”.

A banker friend out for lunch one year casually asked if the debt had been repaid. When told that it hadn’t, he quipped,

“What about interest?”

Nice one, Dave. Needless to say I have not invited him back for lunch since.