YES, I admit it: I once stole public property. And yes, I admit it, I was quite prepared to use my 2½-year-old daughter as a human shield to stop moustachioed gunmen from blowing my kneecaps off. But do I regret it? Not for one minute.

Do I take responsibility for my actions? Of course not. Why? Because it's Peter Cundall's fault. Yes, he of the many-pocketed waistcoats and unintelligible Yorkshire accent. Cundall is the intellectual author of my misdeeds. He is my eminence gris, my vegetable svengali.

It all began when I read Cundall's recent comments about how there is a depression coming, and that one way to survive is to grow your own veggies. When Cundall talks, gardeners everywhere turn up their hearing aids to listen. As did I.

And what I realised was this: if we were to survive the looming fiscal apocalypse, our urban farm needed more crop space. We already had three beds, with about 17 square metres under cultivation. By Cundall's reckoning - and let's face it, when has this man ever been wrong? - I needed another planter bed.

I determined right away to steal - sorry, glean - the timber. The good thing about Australia's otherwise completely insane renovation obsession is that there is always some perfectly usable timber being thrown out in skips. All I had to do was keep an eye out.

Filling the bed with soil was more complex. Luckily, however, I live just around the corner from a horse-riding school whose owner has no objection to me carting away the manure, piles of which I compost into the rich peaty soil.

By a strange quirk of fate, the riding school is right next to a rifle association and firing range. Generally I try to avoid judging people based on their hobbies - except when that hobby involves high-powered firearms, and especially when the people holding those firearms have moustaches. That's just a little too much like Ivan Milat for my liking.

Anyway, there I was on my way to the horse club when, in the bushes on the roadside, I noticed a large pile of timber sleepers. The sleepers were perfectly proportioned for my veggie bed, and so I immediately determined to help myself to four of them - before noticing that they happened to be right opposite the rifle association's clubhouse.