My Erection

I AM sure you will all be delighted to learn that my erection is complete.

It really is a magnificent sight — erect, solid, beautifully crafted. I’m not gifted in relation to erections of this kind, so I invited a friend to give me a hand. We shall call him Sammy — as most of his friends do — but that is not his real name. Sammy is immensely skilled in the business of erections, having been responsible for more erections than the rest of our local population put together.

He really was terrific. He has a very deft touch and has been responsible for countless impressive erections over the years, all of them much the same — an imperious stature, strong colours and immense sturdiness and stamina, whatever the weather and irrespective of the criticisms from the know-alls and Johnny-cum-latelys who come to inspect his work.

Unfortunately, Sammy couldn’t handle the pace and had to fly off to Queensland to rest up for his next challenge. However, he did see me through the worst of it, especially the hands-on stuff and some necessary strengthening at the base.

This all came about — the erection of a new timber and wire-netting cage for my vegetable garden — when my wife ceded to me a portion of the shrub and flower garden which she no longer required. The fact that it was adjacent to the existing vegetable garden was a special bonus.

It is also relevant to observe that the cage can be clearly seen from the bridge on the highway, close to our home. This was the setting for some embarrassment in the early days prior to the construction of the erection. Being a diligent worker in the garden and not wanting to waste time I decided one day to relieve myself on one of the garden paths on what was a very quiet day for traffic — late morning, mid-week. I was enjoying this respite when I glanced up to observe a short, well-dressed gentleman standing on the bridge with his camera directed at the house and garden with me in mid-frame and with my wotzit in my hand. I don’t know how long he had been there but he fled when I looked up and I fear that my meagre assets are now a feature of slide shows in Camberwell or Crows Nest or perhaps even Cairns. It is not the kind of fame to which I once aspired but it’ll do. That kind of intrusiveness is probably due to those damned ferries they have on Bass Strait these days.

A wonderful therapy

The reason for the cage is to protect the vegetables from being ravaged by possums, rabbits and birds. There was some protection in the older, smaller garden but it involved inefficient, cumbersome arrangements using floppy nylon netting that kept getting caught on the countless snag points in the garden. Now, however, is the promise of vegie garden paradise. The possums still ravage the dozens of rose bushes around the garden but much as I trap them — and yes, relocate them — the possum population is seemingly expanding at an exponential rate.

For me, a vegetable garden is wonderful therapy and it is as old as time itself. Do you know that Adam was a gardener? Not Adam Smith or Adam Jones. No, the Adam. For this assertion I offer no lesser authority than the Bard himself who avers in Henry VI, Part 2 that “Adam was a gardener.” So there. So I am in good company. Indeed, he has to be right because elsewhere in the same play he asserts that “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” He was before his time was Adam — indeed, he was before everyone’s time — and he was greatly assisted in this respect by not being constrained by an extensive consultation process and a jargon buster.

But back to vegetable gardening and its therapeutic dimension. For example, if I am worried about something early in the day — when my happy pills haven’t fully kicked in — a bit of a mooch around the vegie garden puts me at ease or at least heads me in the right direction. And all the vegetables have their personalities. Silver beet is one of my particular favourites. It is the Leigh Matthews of vegetables — solid, dependable, shrewd but oozing class and skill when required. No sensible weed takes on silver beet because it dominates them, muscles them aside and the weeds are left to cower in the beet’s shadow. Time and again they are first in and last out, these plants of great character and many facets — slick, smooth, elegant in their youth, like the young Lethal; remarkable in the wrinkled resilience and succulent solidity of their grey days.

A bit of a tart

The prima donna vegetable is the tomato. A real tart she is but a glamorous, selective tart — more a Liz Taylor than a Paris Hilton. For example, she hates being planted before the Hobart Show notwithstanding that I have tried to explain to her that Tasmania’s east coast is almost sub-tropical compared to Hobart. But no, she still drags her feet in the early stages and whatever I do makes not a jot of difference. Ultimately, of course, she does her trick in her own way and in her own time and, as ever, emerges triumphant. She makes everything look good and taste good, whether cold in a salad or hot in a pasta dish.

I’m told that asparagus is also a bit of a tart but I haven’t tried her on yet. Next year perhaps. One of her major benefits is that she sticks around for years whereas tomatoes send their kids or sisters in succeeding years. There is a certain nobility, exclusiveness, exotic flair about asparagus — perhaps the Marlene Dietrich of the garden.

My lettuces are always good value but they tend to be a bit “here today, gone tomorrow”, both in the growing and in the eating. Lightweights that are made to look good by the tomatoes and made to taste good by the beetroot, onions and the like. Handy though — a bit like the half-back flanker whom you don’t notice but who gets twenty five possessions and thrashes a Brownlow Medallist.

But standing behind the whole damned lot of them is the unobtrusive spud. The spud is the solid Irish son of the soil. To me he’s Albert Youd, Daniel Griffin, Mick Kennedy and blokes like that who were around the Deloraine area when I was a kid. The kind of blokes who were there when we opened up our outback, fought our wars and built our cities. The spud is demeaned as a chip on a Yankee takeaway. The spud is best taken mashed with a roast of beef or lamb or pork or poultry.

Oh yes, the vegetable garden. A therapeutic place where I expunge the negatives and expound great theories; where I work up a sweat and a thirst. It is a mess at present but that will be made right over the next few weeks. And yet it is never wholly right. I know that because whenever I pass it or go back to it there is a stake to put straight or a weed to be pulled or a lettuce in its dotage showing smudges of rot. A vegie garden is a lover and a teacher, a hard task-master and yet a good friend. A place to purge demons and to set out on the engagingly impossible task of cleansing the spirit.

We need to keep in touch with the soil. In its essence it hasn’t really changed since Adam gardened. It was a productive diversion then, too. And, importantly, it gave Eve a break.

Nothing much has really changed if you look at it the right way.