Rosemarie Smith - champion gardener

Rosemarie Smith, Southland Times garden writer tells us this morning that mining ruins good garden soil, or something along those lines, only she does it a little more obliquely and entertainingly. Rosemarie has put a cat among the pigeons with her latest article, which focuses on the Moanataiari subdivision of Thames, her old stamping ground. Or rather, place of cultivation. She describes the harm done to the soil there following the mining and the legacy that still exists, years after the batteries stopped pounding. It's not a story that's new, but it's timely. Rosemarie is presently living nearby to the proposed lignite mines of Mataura and clearly is concerned that damage like that she's seen up north, will affect her gardening activities down here, should Solid Energy's open cut lignite mine go ahead. Her whole article raises the alarm over just what mining does to the soil and for how long it does it. She's to be congratulated for raising the issue of the real effects of large scale mining on ordinary people and their livelihoods.
There's a photograph of Rosemarie (I can't post it or the article as it isn't on-line), showing her holding a handful of the soil she presently cultivates, and the caption reads:
"Unknown: What's in this soil?
The Moanataiari case has made me think about the history of the soils in my own garden beds and about long-term air and water quality issues that might arise from Think Big lignite developments upwind."
Curiously and coincidentally, I had a letter published in the same newspaper this morning, on the theme of gardens and lignite.

Mining ruins farms


I struggle to believe Greg Visser's assurances that the Mataura farms destroyed by mining for lignite will be put back better than before once the mining is finished.
  Solid Energy plans to remove millions of tonnes of lignite from beneath some of the best farmland in the world.
  To do that, they'll have to bulldoze that excellent soil off to one side, dig up the layers of subsoil and pile it somewhere, then with their huge machines grind the mass of lignite out and carry it away.
  If I imagine this happening on the scale of my garden, I have no confidence whatsoever that what I've developed during the years could be "put back better than before"., especially given that so much of my garden would become a deep-pit lake, as is promised for Mataura.
  Mr Visser might believe that the wonders of diggers and bulldozers, urea and propaganda can care for the farmland of Mataura, but I don't."

Robert Guyton

Serendipitous, eh!