YOUR GARDEN AND MINE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 91, 21 March 1941, Page 44

YOUR GARDEN AND MINE

By

Ann Earncliff

Brown

(No. 62)

ARCH gardeners have little time to be wasteful like fhe poets who see in the tawny reds and golds, and _ royal purples of the autumn borders the pageant of the passing year. Our hearts may hold a tiny ache fer the long days that are drawing in, or for the hopes of spring that perhaps have become the despair of autumn. But because there is always some harvest to be gathered, bounteous or niggardly, we go out to gather with full hands our ripening fruits and fat roots. So short a time ago it seems that I protected tender tomato plants from the frost and now I have vainly tried to keep the ripening fruits from the birds. Despite yards of precious black cotton woven into intricate cat cradles, the blackbirds and _ thrushes manage to dig deep into my tomatoes, and leave not a feather behind. Willingly would I spare them a generous percentage, if only they would leave me the rest of the crop; but no! Let any tomato show more than the yellow of approaching maturity-it is immediately marked by those darting beaks. Now I have to gather my tomatoes minus the real authentic tomato red and possibly also lacking some vitamin that only outdoor ripening provides. The cotton that has failed, on the tomatoes will serve more effectively on late sown peas, and on the young lettuce plants that also suffer badly from birds at this season, Continuing the battle in

the vegetable patch, the gardener who hopes to grow cabbage, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower successfully, must either dust these with derris dust or spray with some lethal spray. Quite recently I saw stout-hearted cabbages that in their early days had been greatly troubled by white butterflies. After tiring of powdering with derris dust, their owner had sprayed them with black leaf 40 and from then on had sauntered down his garden path. happy in the knowledge that his cabbages were obnoxious to all known garden pests. In this garden also were solid heads of lettuce that flanked the celery, also carefully sprayed against celery fly. Very soon now those lettuce will be salad and the rich damp earth in which they grew will then be drawn carefully up round the celery. ' Inspired once again by the pen of Negley Farson, I myself plan a patch of strawberries, and now is the time to plant. Alas that only in this may I emulate that Hacienda in the valley of the Cauca between the two blue walls of the Andes!