HUNG OUT TO DRY: A tobacco harvest in the American Museum of Natural History. PHOTO/AP
You won't remember me," a fellow retiree said in town the other day.
He was wrong. Vague memories surfaced of learning to swim and the black-and-white penguin logo of the Wanganui East swimming club.
We had last seen each other in the 60s when we were teenagers in the Castlecliff Surf Life Saving Club together.
We agreed that the surf club had been a formative influence in our lives as we gained confidence in huge West Coast dumpers and learned about smoking, drinking, cars and girls.
We reminisced about the good times when there seemed to be far fewer rules than there are today. Yes, there were a few drunken car accidents and unplanned pregnancies and ashtrays on the armrests in the NAC aeroplanes, but there were also a lot fewer people in jail.
"I started smoking when I was 12," he recalled. "The paperboys back then bought packets of 10 and when you went in there to get your papers they'd all be sitting around smoking, and the air would be thick with it."
He proceeded to tell me that he was now growing his own tobacco and hadn't bought a packet of cigarettes for over a year.
There are three main varieties of tobacco, he said - Virginia (bright leaf) which is flue-cured in sealed barns, producing a gold/yellow leaf; Burley (which is what was grown in Motueka) produced a brown leaf and was added to Virginia in New Zealand manufactured cigarettes; and Turkish, which was sun-dried.
Tobacco can be grown anywhere with 65 to 70 frost-free days, and Nelson and Whanganui both have suitable climates. The soil should be acid, around 5.8 pH and to produce big leaves, the plants should be well fertilised, particularly with potassium, and shouldn't be over-watered, which will make it bolt to seed.
"They say if you can grow tomatoes, you can grow tobacco and - like tomatoes - you need to take the laterals out to get a good leaf," he said.
"It's labour intensive - that's why they grow it in the Third World.
"When you get into it you realise how underpriced it used to be before the Government taxed the hell out it - that's because the poor old Third World farmer gets virtually nothing for it."
He had made lots of mistakes before producing an acceptable product but said these days there was the internet where you could find lots of information.
"The people on the Fair Trade Forum are generous with their advice and you can get seed from Wicked Habits. In New Zealand you can grow up to 15 kilograms per year legally - though big tobacco is lobbying against homegrown tobacco, saying the black market in tobacco is rampant, which it's not. Few persevere when they realise it's hard work.
"People think you can just pluck it and smoke it - nothing is further from the truth. It can be colour-cured in 30 to 40 days but it's not really smokeable for another six to 12 months."
He told me that to get a really good product it had to go through another process, called fermentation.
"Fermenting is not the same as flue-curing. With fermentation you take a leaf that has already been colour cured and you rehydrate it, pack it together and ferment it at 54degree C for about a month.
"Some people use an old fridge; I pack it in plastic containers and use an old wardrobe and an oil heater. I ferment it for about a month opening it up once a week to let some of the moisture out.
"Hard up home-growers are sometimes so desperate they don't bother with fermenting, not going through the whole process gives homegrown tobacco a bad wrap. If you do it properly, you get a better product, with no chemicals, no saltpetre, no flavour enhancers - fermentation gets the bad things like ammonia out."
Curing was an art and a well-grown plant should give about 50 to 100 grams of tobacco, he confided. This year he was aiming at two years' personal supply. "I've had to outlay quite a bit of money on all this. I could afford to still buy cigarettes but it's my way of giving the fingers to the Government.
"I'm not saying smoking is good for you but it's an outlet for different things and it's better than bashing the wife.
"This mean-spirited initiative to force people to stop smoking is not working, you just have to watch the ant trail in and out of the cut-price shop in Victoria Ave to see that."
*When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller. In his spare time he is co-chairman of the Whanganui Musicians Club