Father's Day

I just entered the NZ Gardener get growing e-newsletter competition to win a Fiskars flash weeder for my Dad for Father's Day. Which I'm quite pleased about because I've planned to enter at least 38 competitions to do with gardening in the last six months and this is the first one I have actually entered. I've composed quite a few competition entries in my head but the judges cannot read my mind unless I put my mind onto an email and send it.

I wrote about how my Dad encouraged me to garden and helped me set up my own garden when I was only seven and I wrote about how we talk about organic methods (he is a synthetic fertiliser man) and it turns out these are methods my grandfather used. Like chook run rotation across garden beds and using beans to fix nitrogen.

Thanks for smudging some green across my thumb from an early age Dad. Thank you also to my maternal grandmother, who is still alive, who also taught me about gardening. I used to gather flowers from the garden with her to go in vases inside and sometimes I went to garden club with her. I have a memory of going up the creek on a far from the house part of their farm with her and an aunty and gathering ferns for the garden. She put in a waterfall and rock garden which I walked past each afternoon to go help round up the cows for milking.

I also remember going to that same creek with my brother and Grandad and catching eels. Hoping to take my own children up there to play next school holidays.