in Fiji

A Vegetable Garden in Fiji

By “Amel”

Cl KEEN vegetables are precious in the f tropics. The main trouble in grow ing them is that the tropical quota of sunshine and rain is not evenly bal anced. There is no happy medium. The garden is either drowning or sizzling.

We thought it would be delightful to have a vegetable garden somewhere near the house. Imagine the thrill of just leaning out of the window, so to speak, and gaily decapitating a cabbage for dinner, or nonchalantly snipping a few lettuce for tea!

But four unsurmountable problems rose up and hit us in the eye: (1) Land crabs. (2) Fowls. (3) Dogs. (4) The War, which, according to the sages, causes the price of copra to go down, and the cost of wire-netting to go up, thus creating an economic disparity highly unfavourable to vegetable gar dens.

However, these setbacks merely whet ted our desire to possess a garden. We went further afield. We sought high and low. We explored hills and dales, and at last, in a sheltered valley where a pleasant brook babbled by, we found what we wanted.

Further minor problems confronted us. A fence was needed to bar maraud ing cattle, and quantities of scrub had to be cleared. We ear-marked two or three days for the work, and set to with enthusiasm.

I rather fancied my scrub-cutting prowess, and was making great head way until I put my foot in a nest of black ants!

My arrival seemed to arouse their worst instincts, and they attacked me in mass formation. With a shriek like a soul in torment, I cast my hat and knife to the winds of Heaven, and made a beeline for the lofty lumber, where I tore off my clothes and viciously slaughtered every black ant in sight!

Howls of mirth drifted through the trees. Dad was a happy spectator.

Emerging with all possible dignity, I tripped over a raspberry vine. Eyeing it—and my convulsed parent—coldly, I started off again.

There were no more interruptions and, in due course, the ground was cleared, dug, manured and ready. In went the cabbage, silver beet, lettuce, tomatoes, kohl-rabi and beans —with a prayer attached to each seedling.

We cherished that garden of ours! In hot weather we carted buckets of water from the stream to spray the thirsty plants, and on days when torrential rain battered them, we wondered dismally if they would ever survive.

We waged a ceaseless, bitter war against caterpillars, which we squashed in hundreds, and we almost developed a squint in looking for slugs, snails and other pests. We erected a barrier of wood ashes around each plant to keep the slugs at bay, but the best antidote for the caterpillars was a hawk-like eye and a ruthless nature!

Growing vegetables is no sinecure, even under the best of circumstancs, and in the tropics, difficulties are trebled.

But the results we achieved were worth the trouble. Back-ache, black ants and all—in the end, our garden was the success we thought it ought to be.