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He’s proved me wrong on that one.

Turns out his city-slicker job had been in environmental management, so he understood more about soil composition than half the old-timers who’d been farming since before he was born.

He pissed off quite a few farmers round here by raving on about water conservation strategies, but when he was still managing a good stock load while the rest of us were selling off sheep during the drought, people at the pub began to listen more carefully to what he had to say.

Maybe that was what bugged me about him? The way he’d sauntered into this tight-knit community, all effortless charm and styled hair, and suddenly had everyone fawning over him.

They don’t have to be a neighbor to the guy. They don’t have to constantly interact with him about shared water rights, boundary fences, and his organic fertilizer experiments that drift onto my land whenever the wind picks up.

I’m not a complete stick-in-the-mud. I’m prepared to learn and adapt.

But some of Benji’s experiments belong in one of those fancy agricultural magazines, not in the real world where mud and machinery don’t always play nice with computer programs.

Like last spring’s debacle with his newly installed automated feed stations. They worked fine until the first proper southerly hit, then the whole system went haywire. Meanwhile, my simple hay feeders kept my stock fat and happy through the worst weather.

I don’t have a good comeback to Lance’s accusation that Benji winds me up more than anyone else, so I ignore it.

“Need to go so I can finish fixing this bloody trough,” I grunt.

“Pub tomorrow night?” Lance asks.

“Yeah. See you then.”

I end the call and wrestle with the ancient pipe wrench. The metal groans in protest as I force it to grip the corroded fitting. Water sprays in my face, tasting like rust and minerals, but I don’t flinch. Been doing this since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, watching Dad curse at these same troughs while I handed him tools.

The sun beats down on my neck as I methodically work through the repair.

My shirt’s soaked through by the time I’m done, but the repair holds when I test it. I straighten, my back protesting.

With the trough sorted, there’s nothing left to delay the inevitable.

Time to go into battle with Benji.

But instead of heading straight to my truck, I go via my vegetable garden.

The raised beds are coming alive after winter, with the early potatoes pushing up through the soil like green knuckles. My early variety broad beans are humming with bees despite the spring breeze.

The tension in my shoulders eases as I walk between the beds. There’s something settling about good soil under your boots and the smell of things growing.

The rest of the farm might be all about profit margins and stock rates, but here…there are no complicated regulations or fancy modern methods. Just dirt and seeds doing what they’re meant to do.

My great-grandfather established this half-acre vegetable garden and acre of fruit trees back in the thirties. It’s designed to feed a whole family, but because I’m by myself, I end up giving most of it away.

Benji is a big recipient of my vegetable garden.

It’s the neighborly thing to do. No matter how much Benji and I argue over whose stock caused the damage to the new section of boundary fencing or whether his fancy irrigation system sends too much runoff into my lower paddocks, he’s still my neighbor.

And in this small corner of rural New Zealand, that means something.

It feels like summer inside the greenhouse compared to the spring chill outside. I check my tomato seedlings first, which are standing tall in their pots, each labeled in my careful handwriting. I used to stick to just Money Makers, but in the last few years, I’ve grown more varieties. Black Russians, Green Zebras, those fancy Italian ones with the ridges.

I’m a few months away from harvesting tomatoes, though, so I head to the back of my greenhouse, where my cucumbers are showing off, growing faster than gossip at the pub. I pick a couple, along with the last of the winter lettuce that keeps me in salads when everyone else is paying ridiculous supermarket prices.

Armed with the vegetables, I jump in my pickup truck and drive the kilometer to Benji’s house.

When Benji’s uncle lived here, the house was a testament to bachelor living, with peeling weatherboards that hadn’t seen paint since the eighties and a garden of whatever managed to survive without attention.

Now…well…now, the weatherboards are a soft gray that probably has some fancy name likemorning mistorcoastal storm. The wraparound porch sports hanging baskets full of natives. And because he’s Benji, he’s got those windchimes made from old farm tools hanging everywhere. They shouldn’t work, but somehow, they do, just like his other mad ideas.