me, humans can assist watermelon plants breed, get pregnant, become fertile, pollinate – whatever the term is in garden lingo. My best friends Brother Brent and his wonderful partner Michelle showed me how by using the male flower to tickle the female stem or bulb can fertilise the plant. So my friends regularly give their plant a helping hand if the female bulbs look a bit barren. Watermelons self-fertilise, with the female flower being pollinated equally well by pollen from a male flower on the 
same or a different plant. 
They’re not strictly hermaphrodite though and unlike worms which are, watermelons need the wind, bees, birds or loving human guardians to transfer the pollen along the same plant or across to a neighbouring one. So I found this titbit of knowledge fascinating because it was so rudimentary in a cycle-of-life, universal inter-connected co-existence kind of way. I suppose the smallness of the deed – the tickling of a bulb to produce substanance to feed not just a small family of four but an extended whanau and friends totalling over 100 (a large well producing plant can bear over 20 watermelons), that’s humanity at grassroots level.
My two friends Brother Brent and 
Michelle, they’re clever people. They live in Mt Albert the same suburb as me and my little family. That’s not why they’re clever; they’re smart because they can grow food in a tyre. The couple reckon it retains heat especially when the temperature drops and I suppose it’ll be a great deflector of frost in winter almost as good as a glasshouse. They have full, healthy kamokamo and tomatoes packed into that broken truck tyre. As soon as I saw it, it brought back memories of my neighbours the Meads in Galbraith Street. They had blue, green, 
yellow swans made out of discarded car and truck tyres. The Meads planted flowers; pansies, carnations and daffodil bulbs inside the hollowed-out middle. I always thought them ugly. But a tyre with food in it, now that’s a much more attractive sight, practical, principled, purposeful.I won’t be as ambitious for my garden as Brother Brent and Michelle are with theirs. I can’t be because I’m starting over again after a ten year hiatus. I have to relearn things,
how to grow what to grow when to grow. It’s a whole new relearning. But more than that I’m older and the back isn’t as strong as it used to be and what used to take me an hour seems to take me a day. It was good to visit my friend’s garden. Wonderful to watch Michelle tickle the watermelon bulb, discuss the merits of discarded rubber tyres and to spend time and share food with wonderful people.
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