It happened again this week. I was walking through our back garden with a mate and you couldn’t help noticing spring going off like one of North Korea’s festive ballistic missiles. The hum of the bees had taken on a dull roar. The scent of blossom was heady.

“You’ve become an old greenie,” he said. “Growing your own food, composting the chicken straw. You don’t need to measure your food in terms of food-miles, you can measure food metres.” And so on. Making out that we’d had some green epiphany – especially when he noted the new solar panels on the roof.

The jokes about decorating the man-cave soon with vintage No Dams stickers, and planning to live in a hole and eat dirt, came flying thick and fast.

How did this happen?

We’ve always had a productive garden. Not because it was a greenish thing to do, but because it’s fun, good for you and tastes pretty damn good. We put the solar panels up not because it made any statement other than: “Strewth, I’m sick of sky-rocketing power bills, and this just makes common sense.”

(A small confession: - it is true that the beat up old campervan has a few stickers on it which have an ageing hippy feel. And maybe the crystal hanging from the rear-vision mirror echoes the Age of Aquarius. But it’s a sort of back-handed joke. Okay, okay, so when I was 16 I had a kaftan. Who didn’t?)

From our kitchen window I can see:

There is a deep, almost genetic satisfaction in any garden, even a few pots in a small courtyard, but when you also use the garden to grow food, the satisfaction multiplies many times.

The curious thing is that it’s not much work because even digging over the beds in the greenhouse, or pulling out things which have gone to seed and opening new spaces have simple satisfaction.

Take yesterday for example. Mrs Whack had cleared one raised bed of the stalks of whatever had been in there for the past year, and she asked me to dig it over. The smell of the soil was pungent with productive promise. It was loose and packed with ageing organic stuff. I swear if you put a brick in that dirt, it’d grow to be a dunny by next Tuesday.

Spring is springing all over the place. The Irises we’d almost forgotten last summer have snapped to attention, shouting: “Look at moi! Look at moi!” And the line of poppies planted from seed two years ago but sulked last year have secretly been propagating their heads off. There are surprises and delights everywhere.

Even the pets seem to be enjoying it. We’ve discovered the thick cat, Boof, in a bay tree, Pat The Cat lolling in the agapanthuses, and two corgis amid the cactus.

Oh, did I tell you Mrs Whacked has named the chooks Dora and Meryl? Dora The Explorer and Meryl Cheep. That’s not very green, is it?

WAYNE GREGSON