Migrants and their bizarre, foreign ideas

Green fingers tangled in the weed that is red tape.

You changed the law NCC, now police it! Please. the structure, with no reason given other than that bamboo stakes are not allowed on Housing Corporation property, and the suggestion that her garden, which deserves a medal rather than condemnation, is in some way unsafe.

I wish whoever sent this instruction to Xia had bothered to check out the safety or otherwise of bamboo. Its tensile strength has been compared favourably with steel, and it’s claimed that it may be the strongest material on the planet.

You see building sites in Asia where the scaffolding, up many storeys, is all bamboo, used because of its high strength to weight ratio, and Asia seems to get along OK. I can’t take seriously the idea that bamboo stakes will morph into actual growing bamboo, which can be a pest.

So what else can be the problem after 12 years in which no disaster struck?

Syria got along OK too, by the way, growing things without Housing Corp approval. Al Jouja was a market gardener there before its current troubles meant he had to uproot his wife and children and find a new country.

Gardeners from as far away as Taupo rushed to help him when they learned of the attack on his garden, which they instinctively understood as an attack on all gardeners who struggle to grow things to eat, or just enjoy.

Gardening is a skill that used to be valued, before people began shifting from place to place and never gained the skills they’d have learned from family and neighbours.

How would it be if, instead of demanding the destruction of a garden, the Housing Corp – all of us – realised we can learn from new immigrants?

While vegetable gardens, and bamboo itself, offend the Housing Corp, it seems that dogs don’t, and tenants may soon be allowed them on their properties.

This is in line with another time-honoured state house tradition, the dog on a chain driven mad with boredom on a barren section no child would dare to play on, which barks night and day, setting up maniacal barking all over the neighbourhood. And then there’s the biting, the territorial threats to passers-by, the ferocious breeds chosen, and the excrement.

A 2009 study in this country by Robert and Brenda Vale found that, factoring in the land needed to feed animals grown to feed a medium-sized dog, its ecological footprint would be double that of fuelling a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Unwelcome news I’m sure, for dog lovers, but nothing compared to what gardeners have to put up with.