You reap what you sow ...

Since I was a child at the end of World War II, I have loved growing vegetables.

My first old teacher was my grandad, born in 1875. He lived, as did my dad, well before the commercial advent of chemical fertilisers and spray poisons.

I always remember my old grand-dad instructing me as to the first rule of gardening — ‘‘You can’t take out of the soil more than you put in.’’

That old rule, I’ve come to realise, was just as valid then as it was in the time of Adam and Eve, and as it is now. Though I’m a simple engineer, such was my passion that for a number of years I wrote a weekly page in a provincial newspaper about growing vegetables as nature does — with a little non-chemical natural help, of course.

A carrot? A pine tree? Same rule applies folks, you can’t take out of the soil more than you put in.

What of forestry then? We all know that each progressive crop takes longer to mature, and as each crop is harvested, the soil is the more impoverished.

Soil that took many millennia to be. I’m well retired, but what of future generations?

I wish you well, Shane Jones, and your heart is in the right place, but we simply can’t keep treating the planet as we have since the 1930s.

At least this Government now tells us (as I had previously claimed publicly) that 70 per cent of our pine forests are overseas-owned.

A fact that the previous government, while laughing in our faces, lied that they didn’t know.