One of my earliest memories is of my grandparents' vegetable garden.
It was a place I both loved and loathed - it was fun to pick the sweet green peas which came in their own little pod-boats and munching on small ears of feathery corn was an illicit treat.
But it was also the source of stringy broad beans and silverbeet - regulars on the Sunday lunch menu.
Latterly, my own green thumb was restricted to an "investment" in some 700 saffron bulbs which are yet to show a profit.
In fact, having brought the bulk of them to Queenstown last year, they protested the lack of sunlight by stubbornly refusing to flower last autumn.
As the pungent spice comes from the vermilion stamen of the big purple crocus, there was no saffron this year.
My first Queenstown flat was not much of a gardener's paradise - a strip of gravel with six tussocks was about the extent of the greenery.
But a recent move to a house with even less sun but much more garden space wakened the self-sufficient gardener within.
With the price of vegetables at record highs, a few packets of seeds could save hundreds of dollars over the summer.
I even had visions of jars of pickles and preserves lining the pantry next winter.
The first task: tame a sprawling daisy threatening to take over one of the two small raised beds out the back.
Simple and it only took about half an hour.
But under that lay a new challenge.
The soil where I had planned a bed of carrots and beetroot was a bed of slightly dirt-covered schist.
Nothing would grow in that - the rock had to go.
After an entire afternoon of digging sharp rocks out of the ground I had cleared about half of the bed and had enough of a work-out to last a week.
Tired and aching from the unaccustomed work, I sat back, looked at the hole I had created and pondered a new problem.
Where was the dirt to fill it back up again? That was something I would have to put some thought into.
