Across the River: Veggie gardens, blokes and adultery

Seriously though, gardening has got to be good for you, hasn't it? Good exercise, good for the head and in the case of vegetable gardening, good for your larder.

VEGGIE gardening seems to be enjoying quite a resurgence as people realise the wonderful taste of home grown tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries or whatever they can raise in their backyard. They have so much more fresh flavour than some of those tasteless supermarket offerings, don't they? Right across the Southern Highlands, gardeners are popping in seeds and seedlings as the spring sun warms up our chilly soil, but don't be sucked in, the last sneaky frost hasn't unloaded its deadly bag of tricks yet. Last year many keen gardeners will remember a cracking frost in late October which turned emerging potatoes into mulch, killed tomato plants and made a mess of any other frost-tender vegetable we had eagerly rushed to plant in haste.

EVERYONE wants to pick a ripe tomato before Christmas. Where we live across the river in a cold Moss Vale hollow, there is no hope. But every year we try. I know one bloke who has tomatoes planted in wine-barrels on wheels. Every night he drags the tubs into the garage, then back out next morning. Sure as hell he'll forget to wheel them in one night and old Jack Frost will claim another scalp.

A FEW years ago, the Berrima locals were having a contest at the pub to see who could get the earliest tomatoes and some of them went to great lengths by growing them under glass, bringing the young plants inside or planting them on warm sunny walls. One bloke even took his tomato pot to Sydney with him each day, using the car as a sort of mobile hothouse to encourage ripening. Brilliant! The lengths some will go to get a tomato by Christmas.

WHAT IS IT about blokes and tomatoes? Women buy tomatoes, cook tomatoes, eat tomatoes and many grow tomatoes, but they do it quietly. They don't bang on about tomatoes like us blokes. If a couple of vegetable gardening types bump into each other, they say "g'day," then immediately ask, "how are your tomatoes going mate?".

They never ask about the artichokes or the celery, just tomatoes. Mind you, a fresh backyard-grown tomato on a cracker biscuit with lots of pepper is one of life's delights. No wonder blokes rave on about them - it's probably the only gourmet meal some of us culinary philistines can prepare.

OLD FRED was a keen vegetable gardener. One day the word spread quickly down at the pub that Fred had died. The poor old bugger had just gone out to dig up a cabbage for dinner, had a heart attack and dropped dead right there in the middle of the vegetable garden. The next day Dudley and Grace went to visit his widow, Marge.

"Oh Marge, I'm so sorry to hear about Fred," said Grace. "What did you do?"

"Opened a can of peas instead."I often think of Old Fred when Barbara sends me out for something from our veggie garden. What if I dropped dead? Barbara hates tinned peas.

LIKE Old Fred, Dudley loves his vegetable garden, but one Sunday, he gave up tending his tomatoes, to join his wife Grace at church, where he met the new Irish priest for the first time. After delivering a fiery sermon about adultery, the priest took aim at the local parishioners saying that the first thing he noticed was how much fence-jumping seemed to be going on in his new parish.

"Adultery is a terrible thing," he said, banging the pulpit with his fist. "If there are any adulterers in this congregation today I promise you that I will find out about it, I will cut off their crown jewels and I will plant them in the flower garden at the front of the church, as a lesson to other men who may be tempted by wicked lust of the flesh."

"Bloody hell," muttered Dudley, "the garden will look like an asparagus patch if he manages to catch all the blokes who are playing-up around here."