"FOR everything there is a season, a time to sow [and] a time to reap," says Ecclesiastes 3, verse 1. Noticeably absent is "a time to chill in front of the telly", but that's another matter. We had finally arrived, as advertised, at the time to sow. Of course, the proper way to sow is with seeds, but we didn't have time for that. Not only did we not have the seeds, but it was now well into spring, prime growing season, and we wanted things in the ground. So off we went to the nursery for a buying spree.

Deciding what to plant is a compromise between what you like to eat and what grows best in your area. I knew what I wanted to eat, but our nursery didn't stock sausage roll bushes or doughnut trees, so I had to settle for tomatoes, carrots, capsicums, onions, beetroot and lettuce.

My wife and I spent that afternoon welcoming these vegetables to their new home, teasing apart the carrot seedlings so as not to damage their roots, coaxing the tiny capsicums from their punnets and placing them, with an encouraging pat, in the painstakingly prepared soil. Just to make sure that we'd planted them properly, our two-year-old daughter then went round and ripped them all out again. After lashing her to a tree, we eventually finished the job, and sat back and waited.

And waited. Some plants (the tomatoes, for instance) really took off, but others (mainly the lettuce) refused to co-operate. We planted them six weeks ago, and still our lettuces remain resolutely small. It would be better if they died. But they don't; they just sit there. If there is anything gardening has taught me it's that there is nothing so infuriating as an unresponsive lettuce. They are too small to eat, and yet their continued existence demands that we water and tend them. Sometimes I would come home from work at night and kneel down, looking the lettuces in their leafy little faces: "I give you water, soil, blood and bone," I would whisper. "And yet you defy me."

But of all vegetables, lettuces are perhaps the least communicative. And they're definitely the most passive aggressive. Carrots at least allow your imagination a little room to move: who knows what treasures might be growing under

all that dirt? But with a lettuce, what you see is what you get. And we weren't getting much. It struck me that we might have inadvertently grown the world's first bonsai cos, the kind of thing you use to decorate a doll's house, so Barbie can have a little caesar salad with her pretend tea.

Ecclesiastes says "there is a time to laugh and a time to cry", but neither of these things worked on the lettuces either.

So I went back to the nursery. "You might have a Ph problem," said the woman. What's Ph? I had no idea, but I had to find out fast, or the lettuces were going to get it in the neck.