Farmer Dave

As those of you who know me well enough know, I'm not a huge fan of gardening. And by not a huge fan, I mean I have about as much interest in nurturing plants and shrubs as I do in contracting Cholera. So you can imagine my reactions when Leigh-Ann declared last Christmas that she was applying for a community plot. Without going into the ins-and-outs of how and where we applied, but let's just leave it at: We got a plot.

As it transpired, the plot is attached to my workplace, and as such, I have spent a reasonable amount of time, be it after work or during my lunch-break. I do what I can. Basically, I water it and try to not to touch anything that I know nothing about. Which is everything. And I mean everything.

I've been telling Leigh-Ann for weeks that our Bean plants haven't been sprouting beans. Sure, they've got a lot of leafs, but no beans that I can see. She came down to the plot this last Thursday, for the first time in about a week. And harvested a good 7lb of beanery. I was shocked. I genuinely hadn't seen them. Mind you, I had no idea what I was looking for. As has been pointed out since, I had never seen beans outside of a tin can before.

Quite what I expected beans to grow as, I'm not so sure. I suppose I figured they'd be like grapes, and they got squished down by stomping on them and thats how we get Scooby Doo spaghetti shapes. That is, after Bachelors and Heinz picked out the good ones for their tins, of course. It's opened up a whole possibility of "what does our food grow on?" in my head. Marshmallows, chewing gum, calamari. The mysteries abound. Leigh-Ann is a wealth of information. I'm also surprised at just how many things grow on trees in Brazil.

Regardless of my ignorance in all matters green, however, things seem to have thrived. We've had radishes ("what are they for when they're at home?"), peppers (one is now literally glowing in the kitchen) and lettuce ("we need a rabbit for this amount"), among other things. There's beets, carrots, tomatoes, a variety of herbs (leaves for putting in stuff), some exceptionally hardy kale and one plant which has sparked a serious degree of debate as to it's exact nature. Experts on the differences between Cucumber, Squash and Watermelon should apply here.

I've come to the conclusion that growing stuff is not that hard to do. And that's a sad state of affairs, because growing stuff is the first step on the road to Civilisation. It's why we're not still hunting bison with arrows and sticks, and why we're no longer living in caves and hastily erected huts. Above all else that man has done, agriculture is the one that has granted the most freedom. Everything else about our world is there because we don't need to go and hunt our food - someone else will grow and raise it for us and sell it to us at a reasonable price.

And now that has been mastered by a lazy sod who doesn't know what a bean looks like.