"Oh, shut up, O'Gaygun! Get out, you miserable misanthrope!"
Nevertheless, I think our Irish chum was about right in what he said, after all, especially in the last part of his remarks.
Dandy Jack had been training horses, and Old Colonial had been gentling bullocks; so we had a choice of draggers for the plough. We ploughed in those fifty acres, fenced them round, and put in potatoes for a cleaning crop, to thoroughly break up the old turf. We hope to get two crops in the year. The second will be maize and pumpkins. Then, next year, wheat.
The new-ploughed land is surveyed with rapture by us; but it is something different from an English field, after all. The ground was so irregular and rough; our beasts were not too easy to manage; and then--but this is unimportant--it was our first essay at ploughing. The furrows are not exactly straight, and there is a queer, shaggy look about them. But the potatoes are in, and a crop we shall have, no doubt about it. What more can possibly be needed?
I have mentioned that we have several enclosures that may be termed gardens. So we have, and what they produce fully bears out O'Gaygun's opinion, as to this being essentially a fruit country. Of course our spade industry gives us all the vegetables we require, when we lay ourselves out for it. The worst of growing anything except roots is the immense amount of weeding required; the weeds spring in no time; and they are of such a savage sort in this fertile land.
We grow large quantities of melons--water-melons, musk-melons, rock-melons, Spanish melons, pie-melons, and so on. Also, we grow marrows and pumpkins in profusion, as the pigs are fed on them as well as ourselves. These plants do not want much weeding. They may be grown, too, among the maize. Kumera, or sweet potatoes, we grow a good deal of; also many other vegetables, when we think we have time to plant them.
But in fruit we excel. There is a neighbour of ours who goes in for tree-culture exclusively, and who has a nursery from which he supplies Auckland. To him we owe a greater variety than we should otherwise have, perhaps.
First, there are peaches. We have a great number of trees, as they will grow from the stone. We eat them in quantities; pickling, preserving, and drying them sometimes. But the principal use to which we put them is to fatten our pigs. We have several kinds of peaches, coming on at different seasons. The earliest kind are ripe about Christmas, and other sorts keep on ripening to March or April. Then we have some few apricots, nectarines, plums, cherries, loquats, etc., all yielding bounteously.