A Treatise on Taters

     This “tater treatise”  was the first Bob’s Little Acre that was ever published, if not the first ever written.  (That was “The Great Lies of Gardening,” which really was the BLA manifesto.)  The then-editor of the Dade County Sentinel, Chris Conley, wanted a few columns in reserve before he printed any, and by the time he got around to printing me at all it was St. Patrick’s Day and he chose to start with this one.  So it was my inaugural piece, in March 2005. 

     There are as many ways to write about potatoes as there are to cook them, so somehow I started writing a new potato piece every year.  Here I have gathered them all together and posted them in – I believe – the correct chronological order.

   

A TREATISE ON TATERS

By Robin Ford Wallace

On Saint Patrick’s Day, Irish pubs across the nation serve green beer, without which lubrication no human could achieve the high parts of Danny Boy, the performance of which may yet be classified as an Olympic sport; and without whose mellowing influence nobody would want to.

No Irish pubs may be found here in the Rising Fawn, Ga., metro area.  Here the closest thing to a pub is the dirt road in front of my house, where discarded bottles and cans give evidence of our area’s secret drinkers,  whether of Irish extraction or otherwise.

So what , in our publess neck of the woods, do we do to honor St. Pat?  Personally, I plant potatoes.  March 17 is a reasonable date for root crops in our area, and I find it a fitting memorial to our Irish ancestors.  After their importation from America, potatoes became such an important food for the Irish poor that they began to replace bread as the staff of the life. 

Not everybody saw this as a good thing.  Aristocrats sniffed at the sight of peasants rooting in the earth for food like pigs, and even pro-labor economists, who you’d think would be in favor of feeding the hungry, had no higher opinion of the spud.  Growing potatoes meant that the Irish got, almost, enough to eat, which meant that they were able to marry and have children earlier, which meant that there were more workers glutting the labor market, which meant a lowering of the average wage. 

Chilling?   One feels impelled to say something about the boons of family planning, but then one remembers one is writing about gardening.

In any case, potatoes betrayed the Irish cruelly in 1845, when a fungal blight wiped out the nation’s crop and caused thousands to die by starvation and thousands more to come to America to avoid it, profoundly shaping the ethnic and cultural makeup of our country.  So potatoes, at least indirectly, are the reason that so many of us feel impelled to wear a bit o’ green on March 17, and that I know all the words to Danny Boy, though I never sing it until the end of a long social evening, when guests linger unattractively.  Danny Boy can clear a room faster than a SWAT team.

I read about the history of the potato, and you can too, in Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, a fascinating book if you love gardening.

Now, how to plant potatoes:  This is an easy way that I learned from Ruth Stout, creator of a famous deep-mulch method of gardening.  Ruth’s mantra was:  All you need is hay, and though some have argued with that, I can recommend hay as the hands-down simplest, most dazzlingly successful way to grow potatoes.

First of all, preparing the ground:  You don’t.  You lay your seed potatoes on grass, on weeds, on dirt, on whatever you’ve got, though perhaps removing anything larger than a Volkswagen from the garden area.

Then:  You dump hay on them.  You can use spoiled hay – hay which has lost its food value for animals, and which therefore you can get for cheap or free.  The idea is to mulch thick and heavy, covering the potatoes with at least a foot.

Then:  That’s all.  The potato plants come up right through the heavy layer of hay, which meanwhile kills grass and weeds underneath it, adds nutrients to the soil, keeps everything moist and attracts earthworms.  You don’t have to water, you don’t have to fertilize, you don’t have to hoe.

The one caveat is that you do have to keep adding hay to the plants as they grow.  The tubers grow close to the surface and if you don’t keep them sufficiently covered, they develop a nasty green color. 

A note on seed potatoes:  Some people insist you plant them whole, others recommend halving or quartering.  Personally, though, through my regrettably slip-shod approach to composting, I’ve learned it’s possible  to grow baking-size potatoes from peelings, by accident.  So ignore the experts, but perhaps one good eye per segment is a good rule.

            Tubers begin to form after the plants have flowered and they may be eaten at any stage thereafter, as tiny “new” potatoes early in the season, mighty bakers later on, or at any point in between.  With the deep-mulch method, you can pull back the hay and sneak a peek at the size of your spuds before deciding to harvest. 

And as for harvesting itself, gathering potatoes from under hay is easier than digging them out of dirt,  though it’s still not a squeaky-clean process.  The bottom hay is constantly composting as you add new hay on top, so that the potatoes grow in a substance you might call dirty hay or hayey dirt – beautiful stuff, in fact, so that after the potatoes are finished, you will probably be unable to stop yourself from planting something else in the plot, late peas or zinnias.

More about the deep-mulch method later!  I have overrun my space here and must be off, before somebody starts singing Danny Boy.

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

A CROP FOR THE LAZY

By Robin Ford Wallace

            There’s something about my Irish blood that makes me ache, on St. Patrick’s Day, to malign the English, a cold and vicious people who crushed the Irish for 700 years, whose unjust and antiquated class system persists into the new millennium, and who even today eat desserts with names like “spotted dick.”

            Spotted dick is a boiled pudding made with raisins and suet .  I ordered it, out of sick curiosity, at a restaurant in England, and must admit it’s not as toxic as it sounds.  On the other hand, the English are rather worse.  Try entering an English eatery wearing blue jeans, accepted American garb for all occasions including burial, and you will gain new appreciation for the terms “cold” and “vicious.”

So this St. Patrick’s Day, in celebrating my Irish blood and American birth, I may raise a glass of green beer to the happy fact that both peoples eventually wrested their independence from this nation of sartorially snobbish suet eaters.  A country silly enough to require evening dress for the consumption of a food that sounds like a venereal disease is not one that may feasibly entertain ambitions of empire.

            Another thing St. Patrick’s Day makes me want to do is plant potatoes, a crop that is historically significant to our Irish ancestors and enormously popular among modern Americans – statistically, we each eat 126 pounds yearly.  Even given that some of this poundage is consumed in a crisp form out of foil packets, that’s a lot of spuds.  

            People often tell me, “I’d garden except I don’t have the time.”  I have noticed that this usually translates to:  “I’d rather spend my evenings eating crisp things from a foil packet in front of the television.”  To these people I reply:  Grow spuds.  The potato is your botanical soulmate and you can raise a fine crop without leaving the sofa more than twice.

            Some seed packets instruct us, with a straight face, “Cultivate ground to a depth of 12 inches.  Finely pulverize soil.  Adjust Ph.”  It is natural that such instructions should send couch potatoes scuttling back to the safety of their furniture.

            But to grow spuds with the Ruth Stout method I have described in this space, it is only necessary to place potatoes on unprepared ground – grass, weeds, whatever – and dump a foot of hay on them.  The thick mulch kills weeds, the potato plants push right up through, and bingo, you are growing a staple crop while breaking wind lethargically into the cushions..

            This is not rocket science.  If you plant potatoes whole, they will grow.  If you cut them into quarters, they will still grow.  I have grown baking-sizes spuds from peelings, by accident.  And if you start too early and the plants are killed by frost, the seed potatoes will send up new ones.  

            As the hay compacts, you may find it expedient to waddle out and throw another armload on.  Exposure to sunlight produces solanine, a toxin, and causes potatoes to turn an ugly green.  But if your butt is so velcroed to the upholstery you can’t get up, most of your spuds will be fine anyway.  This is a crop that thrives on benign neglect.

Corn, if we are to believe the literature, must be picked within minutes of attaining maturity, and then you have something like 30 seconds to cook it before the sugar begins turning to starch.  I don’t grow it anymore because I can’t stand the stress.

The potato, by contrast, doesn’t much care when you harvest it.  Like the couch potato, it just lies around getting bigger.  Any time after the plants flower, you can go out during a commercial and collect tiny, delicious “new” potatoes.  But if Gilligan’s in a pickle and you can’t tear yourself away, wait a few weeks and the potatoes will be medium-sized; wait a few more and they’ll be bakers.

The only hard-and-fast rule is to harvest potatoes while you still know where they are.  Whether because of bugs – just shake your head sadly, they won’t really hurt the tubers – or simple age, the vines eventually wither, and if you don’t dig before they disappear entirely you may not be able to locate the potatoes when you do finally heave into action.

However, if you’re such a sorry sack-o that you still haven’t dug when the fall lineup starts in September, you’re still okay.  Your unharvested potatoes will send up shoots next spring and you’ll have a crack at a new crop.

After harvest, no frantic activity is required to preserve potatoes.  They are content to lounge unrefrigerated around the kitchen for months.  Mash the last of your June crop at Thanksgiving, or yell for your mom to while you watch football.

Not that it is necessary to expend that much energy.  New potatoes are better boiled unpeeled, and to bake an older one you just pierce it with a fork, stick it in the oven, and forget it while you channel surf.

I rest my case.  If, after all this, you can think of a reason not to grow spuds, you can probably also think of a reason why civilized nations should eat boiled suet.

Otherwise, please join me in celebrating St. Patrick’s by planting potatoes.

There is no dress code.

END

     Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Sex, Lies and Potatoes

     This was published probably in 2006 or 2007.  It's going to make my brother Frank hoppin' mad, but the chronicles of Bob would be criminally incomplete without this classic title.  Anyway, how can you feel sorry for anybody who tells lies about potatoes? 

SEX, LIES AND POTATOES

By Robin Ford Wallace

            My brother Frank once told me a story about potatoes.

            He’d been packing up to leave from a camping trip at the Chattooga River one spring, said Frank, when he realized he hadn’t cooked the potatoes he’d brought.  On a whim, he cut them up and planted them. 

Sure enough, the next time he went to the river, his spuds had grown plants, the plants had produced a crop, and Frank cooked delicious new potatoes at his campfire.

            This site on the Chattooga is one where I still go myself whenever I can.  So after Frank told me the spud story, every time I camped there I would wonder where he planted his potatoes.  Under the trees where we pitch our tents the soil is rich and black, but there are roots and no direct sunlight.  How could a potato grow there?

            Down by the river there is plenty of sun, but it’s all rock and sand.  Besides, whitewater rafters take out there, which makes for a great deal of foot traffic.  Could spuds thrive in such an environment?

            Ten or fifteen years passed, and I would ponder this charming mystery every time I visited the river and every spring when I planted potatoes at home.  Then one day, for no apparent reason, the truth hit me so suddenly I spilled my beer:

            My brother Frank is such a terrible liar he should have sold used cars or sought high political office.  No potatoes had grown at the Chattooga, and I was a moron to believe him for a moment. 

            Frank probably developed his easy, pleasant style of lying as a result of his complicated love life, which at any given point includes a minimum, though by no means a maximum, of two female persons who are always called soul mates.  He has children on two continents by three different soul mates, and those are the ones I know about.

            He was married for about five minutes in the 1980s until his wife found him soul mating with an automobile dealership magnate, whose millions he did not reap because of the soulfulness of the girl who sold him his beeper, and I forget who outsouled her except it was probably plural.

            Women apparently find Frank attractive because he’s handsome, enjoys gourmet cooking, and speaks several languages, having gone to college in Europe because, at the time, he was engaged to a Swedish girl.  

Who had a sister.

            So Frank didn’t marry the Swedish girl; rather, he returned to the States in some haste.  In fact I believe there is now an international treaty in effect forbidding my brother to set foot in Europe, where in any case he would be as welcome as Hitler.  Philanderers, take heed:  Philander with someone other than the sister of the philanderee, or have your passport in order at all times.

Frank is now pushing 50 and still pulling it off.  Last time I visited him, little pastel dishes of seashells and potpourri upstairs evidenced the unseen presence of a sensitive and girlish soul mate, while downstairs a horsy, whiskey-drinking soul mate chased him around the house like in a cartoon, shouting things like, “Ah need me some kisses!”  And sometimes he talked on his cell phone furtively, in Swedish. 

So for someone like Frank, lying to women is a necessary survival skill, and I expect he told me the potato story just to stay in practice. 

I’m not really mad.  Frank may lie and he may be untrue to his teeming soul mates but as a brother he’s been rather fun; our family always has something to talk about at Thanksgiving.  And his example does provide a useful moral nudge toward honesty, which, though it may not generate as much interesting conversation, is infinitely less trouble to keep track of.

            But lying about potatoes is particularly perjurious because no crop could be more honest or forthright.  Plant them and they will grow.  Nurserymen after your buck will recommend that you use their seed potatoes, but for years I have grown much of my crop from elderly food potatoes and have produced baking-size spuds from peelings.

I think the reason I believed my brother’s story so long is that potatoes are such faithful performers.  They may not grow untended along scenic rivers but they will grow just about anywhere else with almost no trouble.  I plant mine on unprepared ground, under a foot of hay, at or around St. Patrick’s Day, on the principle that that is about the right time of year, and there is generally beer.  Schlepping a foot of hay is hot work.

        The potato plants come right up through the mulch, and if frost kills them, they come up again.  Forget them until they flower, after which you may harvest them at any stage.

         If you, too, like to start from food potatoes, now is a good time to stick them in the pantry and forget to eat them.  You can get the exotic yellow and blue kinds from Green Life in Chattanooga.

         The South Beach Diet has turned some of us away from the noble potato because it is unapologetically that regime’s worst enemy, the carb, but it is a carb that for centuries, thank you, fed entire nations almost single-handedly, and one that faithfully rewards the gardener’s minimal effort with amazing bounty. 

         Unlike a certain member of my family, I don’t believe in lying, unless it is funny, and I do believe in fidelity, horticultural as well as the other kind.  So I say, in the words of Matthew Arnold, more or less: 

        “Oh spud, let us be true to one another!”

END

      Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Gardening Tips From the Swamp Thing

POTATOES:  GARDENING TIPS FROM THE SWAMP THING

BY ROBIN FORD WALLACE

Recently, a crossword puzzle clue sent me for a sad walk down Memory Lane. 

The clue was “hippie-chic footwear,” and suddenly I flashed back to a Saturday morning in 1970-something, when I was staring at an ad in the newspaper for a cool store in Atlanta that sold a certain cool kind of shoes that the cool people wore.  I positively ached for those shoes.  I thought if I bought a pair, I could be cool, too.

What was sad about the memory was not that I couldn’t afford the shoes back then, and it was not that I was now a middle-aged woman with nothing more exciting to do on a Saturday morning than the crossword puzzle.  What was sad was that I realized I had long ago lost that innocent belief that there was anything on the planet I could buy to make me cool. 

I’m just not the cool type.  My feet are too big and I spit when I talk.  I’m awkward, unpopular, a freak.  I am the Swamp Thing type.  While the cool people hang out at the cool places, I sit at home and bite the heads off chickens.

Somewhere along the line I became resigned to it.  Maybe it was after the time, somewhere in the ‘80s, that I tried wearing aviator sunglasses to a rock concert, resulting not in Coolth but in a degree of visual impairment highly detrimental to cocktail tables and sound equipment.  Did I mention that the concert was indoors, at night?

  More Coolth-seekers than your humble narrator have tried that one and it always looks like trying too hard.  Really I think the only way to get away with sunglasses indoors is to be blind, and seated at the piano.

Anyway, I have given up on Cool.  They put Geek on my little bracelet in the neonatal ward and I expect somebody will chisel it into my tombstone.

            Which brings us to this week’s subject, which, as I’m sure you’ve already surmised, is potatoes.

            Foods, like footwear, go through periods of being in and out, cool and uncool.  Sometimes it seems related to puzzling spelling.  Quiche was all the rage before people got used to the French, and arugula and edamame had their own shining moments before the dining public learned to pronounce them.

            Some foods can achieve Coolth by showing up in unexpected colors, like blue corn chips or green pasta, or by being seemingly inedible, like sushi.

            I’m not sure what foods are cool right now, but the potato at present seems to be the vegetative equivalent of the Swamp Thing. 

It was not always so.  Back around the time I was yearning for those shoes, nutritionists were ardently defending the noble spud from the ravages of the new low-carbohydrate diets.  The unbuttered potato, they said, was not only low in calories but also loaded with potassium and vitamin C.

But the nutrition people, like the class geek’s last friend in the seventh grade after she accidentally breaks wind in home ec class, have now turned their backs on the spud, mumbling treacherously about something called the glycemic index.  One book placed “white potatoes” on the same list of nutritional baddies as Twinkies and Sugar Pops.

Eat sweet potatoes instead, the books urge us.  They are higher in fiber and lower on the glycemic index.

They are also orange, and what my brother Frank vomited all over the back seat of our car when he was 4.    Thanks, but I’d rather stick to those chicken heads.

More to the point, I’ll stick to potatoes, which, by the way, were not always referred to as “white,” as in bleached and over-processed, like white bread and rice, but as “Irish,” a nice word evoking visions of leprechauns and whiskey. 

I can’t see how something you harvest direct from the earth and pop unprocessed into the oven can be mentioned in the same breath as a Sugar Pop.  In fact, I read once that you could live quite healthily off nothing but potatoes and milk.  The Irish did for generations, though probably minus the milk and plus the whiskey.

In any case, spuds are so easy and fun to grow I can’t resist raising them no matter where they rate on either the glycemic index or the Coolth chart. 

Usually I plant mine on untilled ground, under a foot of spoiled hay.  This year, unable to procure hay for love or money, I resorted to the traditional method, planting them in a trench.

Healthy green plants arise from the eyes of seed potatoes, and if you are raising them in hay you should add new mulch as they grow.  If you are growing them in earth, hill up the dirt around them to keep the tubers protected from the sun.

Potatoes may be harvested at any point after the plants flower.  At first they will be tiny “new” potatoes, but if you let them grow until the vines wither you will get your share of Moby Bakers.

It doesn’t matter whether you use seed potatoes from a garden center or elderly specimens from the Bi-Lo, and it doesn’t matter how small you cut them, and it doesn’t matter if you are a good gardener or a bad gardener.  As I repeat every year until begged to stop, I have grown baking-sized spuds by accident, from peelings.

And that, Dear Reader, is what I call cool.

END

       Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

The Gospel of St. Spud

They’re Red!  They’re White!  They’re Brown!  The Gospel of St. Spud

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Brothers and sisters, there is no patron saint of potatoes.

I tried to find one for today’s sermon.  I wanted a cheerful, outdoorsy kind of saint, not one of your haloed martyrs but somebody in a cassock the color of dirt, a guy who likes his vittles and drinks whiskey out of a flask.  Or a female saint would have suited me fine as long as she wasn’t too dainty, just some great rollicking fat girl waving beer cans around as she crashes through the fields.

The Church doesn’t canonize people like that.

Personally, I always plant potatoes on St. Patrick’s Day, but I looked him up and he doesn’t fit the bill at all.  He ministered unto Ireland about a thousand years before potatoes got there, and the historical record says absolutely nothing about whiskey.

So I went through the roster looking for somebody who might fill in for potatoes in a pinch – St. Bernard, the patron saint of flasks?  St. Rotunda, the patron saint of fat girls?  But it doesn’t do to play fast and loose with a subject as serious as hagiography, lest future generations get their saints mixed up as has been the case with St. Elmo, now thought to be the patron saint of tickling when more properly he should be referred to as St. Elmer, the patron saint of glue.

So with no saint to help me, I come before you naked and alone to preach the gospel of the potato. 

Well, you know, not naked.  We gardeners don’t go in much for that kind of thing owing to insects and sunburn.  But the word “naked” prompts me to lighten my sermon somewhat by sharing with you a little story about my neighbor Jim.

            One morning, the doorbell awakened Jim and he rocketed out of bed, flung open the door, and bellowed:  “WHAT?”

            “My goodness,” said the two Jehovah’s Witnesses who were waiting primly on the doorstep, clasping their little pamphlets.  “Did we wake you?”

            “WHAT DO YOU THINK?” said Jim.  He had by then realized, but was too irritated to mind, what had been apparent to the Jehovah’s Witnesses all along, which is that he wasn’t wearing a stitch.  He is a large man and at that point he was an angry man, and in situations like that some people are nakeder than others.

            “Tee-hee,” said the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

            My point is that evangelizing is not for the faint of heart.  We proselytizers are sometimes ignored and sometimes ridiculed; sometimes, as in the case of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, we are met with naked rage. 

Nevertheless, we keep rapping at your door, we keep handing you our pamphlets, we keep hoping that just this once you will open up your ears, open up your hearts, open up your closet and put on your clothes, and hear our message, which, in this case, is:

Grow potatoes.

Yea, I say unto you, as I do every year at this time, that there is nothing you can grow in your home garden that is more sustaining than a potato.  Nutritionists tell us we could safely live off a diet of potatoes and milk if we had to.  Potatoes have fed South America for 5000 years and after Columbus they began feeding Europe.  2008 was dedicated as the Year of the Potato to recognize the spud’s role in alleviating world hunger.

Furthermore, nothing is as easy or pleasant to grow.  Sowing potatoes is a happy roll in the dirt at this time of year, when it is too early to plant much else though every bone in our body yearns for the mud.  Harvesting them is like an Easter egg hunt for grownups.

Potatoes keep well without refrigeration and are just as good simply baked or boiled as they are in snooty French concoctions.  Deep-frying makes them delicious, as it does everything up to and including tennis shoes, but is, alas, not a wise choice for those of us represented by St. Rotunda.

But the nicest thing about potatoes is how cheaply and effortlessly they are propagated.  Take a seed potato from a garden center, or a grocery store potato that is getting long in the tooth – I prowl the gourmet markets to get different colors – and cut it up so there is an eye in every section.  The number of plants you can get from one spud is a miracle along the lines of the loaves and the fishes.

Then lay your sections about six inches apart in a fairly deep furrow, or cover them with a foot of hay as I’ve described so often in this space.  Plants emerge in a few weeks.  If they are nipped by frost, the sections obligingly send up new ones.  Harvest tiny tubers any time after the plants flower, or leave them until the vines wither if you want bakers.

And that, brethren and cistern, is the shining truth about potatoes.  Eating them will fill your bellies; growing them will gladden your hearts.  Let us now raise our voices in the potato hymn by songwriter Cheryl Wheeler, to the tune of “The Mexican Hat Dance”:

They're red, they're white, they're brown!

They get that way underground!

There can't be much to do

So now they have blue ones too!

For the chorus you just sing potato, potato, potato until people beg you to stop. 

Let me conclude my yearly sermon with these wise words:  Give a man a potato and he will eat for a day.  Give a gardener a potato and she’ll roll around in the dirt and drink beer, so happy it’s embarrassing.

END

     Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Christmas at the Acre: Bah! Humbug

Christmas at the Acre:  Some Bahs and Humbugs from The Drummer Boy Basher

By Robin Ford Wallace

What would Christmas be without its time-honored traditions?  The candy canes?  The carols?  Santa and Rudolph and that sick little JD with his rampageous drum, parumpumpumming you purple until you want to take out the PA system with your Uzi? 

“Come, they told me, parum …”

Bang bang bang bang!

Yes, it’s me again.  That Santa-bashin’, bah-humbuggin’, drummer-boy-hatin’ Scrooge who appears every year about this time to rob you of any residual pleasure you might still take in the Yuletide, pointing sententiously to your credit card balance and reminding you of the fat grams in your eggnog.  Which anyway has always tasted to me like vanilla-flavored phlegm.  Did I say?

          I’m getting to be a kind of Christmas tradition myself, aren’t I?  Adeste Fideles, sleigh bells in the

snow, and a voice crying in the wilderness about the evils of materialism, or raving on about that kid with the drum until you start looking longingly around for an Uzi of your own. 

I can’t help it!  There’s just something about the season that drives me slobbering mad.  Is it the drummer boy, or the hypocrisy?

Hypocrisy is one of my earliest memories of Christmas, that and the time I vomited all over my angel costume while singing “Silver Bells” in the grade school recital.  You wonder what teachers were thinking, stuffing kids with chocolate, then sticking them under stage lights dressed in heat-intensifying tinfoil wings and white bedsheets they should have realized would highlight the results like reindeer poop in the snow.

I still hate “Silver Bells.”  Even now, despite the long-ago humiliation of standing on the risers trying to look angelic while spewing like Vesuvius, and despite the dignity of my advanced age, every time I hear the chorus I am helplessly impelled to raise my hands and shake invisible bells twice.

Silver Bells!

(Shake, shake)

Silver Bells!

(Shake, shake)

It’s Christmas time in the city!

(Barf)     

            But I was talking about hypocrisy. 

            The Christmas I want to tell you about, we were mega-poor.  My father was a schoolteacher and this was before they were paid enough to live on, and he and my mother had four small children. 

Probably something had happened to make us even poorer than usual, because they sat us down and explained there wasn’t going to be much of a Christmas this year.  They said we had better pick out which present we wanted most because we could only have one.

We were all fairly good kids, even (at that point) my brother Frank, and we bore the sacrifice bravely though of course focusing an unusual amount of greed on choosing that one present.  I wish I could tell you that the gift I requested was peace on earth or “Only a rose, dear Papa!”  But really I think it was some worthless piece of crap like a Chatty Cathy doll, or possibly a Tressie.

Cut now to the department store where Santa Claus then as now sat in front of a photo-friendly white backdrop meant to look like snow, asking us children what we wanted him to bring us that year.

“A Chatty Cathy, please,” I asked when it was my turn.  (Or possibly:  “A Tressie.”)

“And what else?” said Santa.  “That can’t be all.”

“We can only have one toy this year,” I explained earnestly.  “It’s all we can afford.”

At which point my mother rushed up, waving her arms like a windmill.  “Don’t tell him that!” she shrieked.  “She’s making it up!” she told Santa.  “The kid tells lies!”

            Much later, of course, I realized I had embarrassed her.  People can be touchy about poverty.  But one way or the other it was my first taste of the doubletalk that is the sine qua non of “the most wonderful time of the year.”

And I still don’t get it!  On every talk show you hear constipated-looking businessmen saying grimly, “We can’t spend our way out of this recession.”  But then you read in the newspaper, “Holiday sales are stronger this year, leading to cautious optimism in the constipated-looking business community.”

That’s good news?  It’s wrong for governments to spend money they don’t have, but essential that slobs like us do?  If people are losing their jobs and their homes, do we really want them blowing their last few bucks on bud vases and cheese food?

But they do.  Every year, people talk sincerely about the “true meaning of Christmas,” then go out and empty department stores.  They talk about the “reason for the season” then max out their credit cards on decorative soaps.

Why?  I think at heart we know things are supposed to be different, but somehow we’ve let those constipated-looking businessmen take over the world to the point the only way we know how to participate in it is as consumers.  Love your wife?  Consume a diamond.  Love your kid?  Consume the Chatty Cathy and the Tressie.  Love mankind?  Buy!  Buy!  Buy!

So what I’m here for in my hair shirt is to remind you it’s all nonsense!  Like that Christmas we were so broke?  I forget now if I really only got one toy, or if it really was Chatty Cathy.  I had probably forgotten by the next Tuesday!  It was all just plastic stuff that ended up in landfills.    

I’m sorry I shamed my mother before Santa, but she shouldn’t have cared.  He was just some perve the store hired to make people buy more toys.  Anyway, Christmas was meant as a religious observance, not a merchandising opportunity!  And the reason those businessmen look so constipated is they are full of –

But we are out of room, Gentle Reader, and thus must end that sentence with:

Merry Christmas!

END

A Farewell to Okra

A Farewell to Okra

By Robin Ford Wallace

            December!  And here we are, stuck inside, brooding about the big issues:  Life.  Death.  Okra.

T.S. Eliot said that April was the cruelest month but what did he know?  He always struck me as a mouth breather.  An American who moved to England so he could live under a monarchy – hello?  One wonders how he felt about disco, or hemorrhoids.  Politics these days send me skittering back to bed to dive fetally under the quilts but at least in America we don’t take orders from hereditary inbred halfwits.  We elect our inbred halfwits, thank you very much.

Anyway, for cruelty April’s not a patch on this time of year.  The  horror starts around Halloween.  There you are trying to get used to the shorter days and longer nights when the end of Daylight Savings pulls the plug and the world turns into a Russian novel.   One minute you’re cheerfully swilling beer among the sun-drenched petunias, the next you’re sentenced to Siberia for plotting to overthrow the tsar.  

But weren’t we talking about okra? 

I have always found okra a frustrating vegetable.  When I first took up gardening my father recommended it as a reliable cash crop.  I expect it was just something he’d read somewhere but it struck me as an odd thing to say.  I’d never had any delusions about gardening as a paying proposition.  Or anything else I did, for that matter – frankly, you don’t go into writing if you’re after the big bucks. 

But anyway, what did my old man know nothing about crops?  Much less cash!  He had a solid middle-class income but he spent it all on whiskey and trashy women, and when he died it was in a rented house moments away from eviction, amid envelopes marked Final Notice and salvos of collection calls. 

My father ignored the collectors and passed serenely into death leaving them all unsatisfied, thereby proving the corollary to you-can’t-take-it-with-you, which is that they can’t get it out of you, either.  I spent the days after his death writing not thank-you notes for condolences but Go Fish letters to his creditors, or calling to ask if they wanted stuff back. 

             Mostly they didn’t.  It may interest you to know that banks may repo a house or a car but that nobody wants the refrigerator you haven’t paid for.  Little of what we ruin ourselves to get retains much value, apparently, once we get it home, so in the long run you might as well squander your money on whiskey as anything else.    

Ahem:  Okra.

Okra is delicious fried, but what isn’t?  Dredge a pencil eraser in seasoned flour, fry it in oil and it will probably taste good enough for company.  (This might even work with sweet potatoes though I guarantee nothing.)

But once at a restaurant I tried ordering unfried okra, stewed with tomatoes, and when the waitress served it up it looked as if she had disemboweled somebody in the kitchen and brought me his quivering guts.  Okra has this mega-mucus inside that commences coagulating all matter around it the minute you slit the pod.  The only antidote is to drop it in boiling oil. 

Me personally, I don’t drop anything in boiling oil.  I have a highly developed sense of sin and I’m pretty sure if I fried anything I’d be struck dead right there at the stove by Rotunda, the patron saint of fat girls.

So I never grew okra, and ate it only at restaurants, shiftily, until a few years back I learned how good it was pickled.  Preserved in vinegar, okra is crisp not slimy, crunchy without the fat grams.  What’s not to like?  So for the first time I planted some – only to be frustrated again.

You can’t pick the pods off the plants!  You have to cut them off, which means you must either remember to take a knife with you to the garden or keep one there and remember not to carry it back.    What earthly human could accomplish that?  Not I – or at least not until the okra pods had grown to the size and texture of baseball bats. 

           Thus I gave it up in disgust and so matters stood until Trenton started its farmers market this year. 
One Saturday when I popped in there wasn’t much left but okra so I bought some to support the home team.  Anyway, I was curious about a recipe where you baked okra in the oven so it would taste like fried but without increasing a person’s specific gravity.

            But you had to cut it up first, and there’s the rub!  Remember that mega-mucus?  With each slice the knife released new reservoirs of it and my fingers trailed ropes of snot as I cut.  It was like cooking up a mess of slugs.

            At my father’s memorial service a friend of his who had given him a nice eulogy, talking about the fun they’d had together over the decades, told me, “Of course I knew your brothers but I had known your father many years before I realized he had daughters.”

            I’ve been thinking about it ever since and it’s made me a bit more sympathetic to those institutions foolish enough to extend the old scoundrel credit.  Perhaps he died without coughing up something I wanted from him, too.

            I won’t get it now. 

            It’s closure of a kind.  The bitterness of the past doesn’t matter anymore, any more than the refrigerator he didn’t pay for or the fact I’m never going to make much money.  This fleeting life!  Who knows what it means? 

But one thing is certain:  I’ll waste no more of it on okra.  In pace requiescat!  

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.



Oops! Gardening Mistakes

   This is an oldie, written when I was still worried people would take me seriously as a gardening writer.  As a basically honest person, I felt the need to head them off at the pass.

OOPS!

By Robin Ford Wallace

            This spring, a young tree in my front yard for the first time festooned itself with lovely purple blossoms.  When I planted it, the tree was no more than a stick, spindly bare roots dangling like frayed threads from a garment it was high time to throw away.  Now it’s as tall as I am.  Every day, as I watch it raise its graceful new branches bravely toward the sun, I say to myself:

            “You moron.  What were you thinking?”

That tree is one of my many gardening mistakes, and looking at it is a daily caution against the deadly sin of pride.  Every time I walk past it, I am reminded that  I am a half-wit and should not be allowed out alone, much less given access to credit cards and telephones at the same time.

The tree was advertised as The Amazing Fruit Cocktail Tree.  It is supposed to bear five different kinds of fruit.  For a time, all the mail order catalogs were hawking them and I was foolishly intrigued by the idea.  Still, I managed to resist until, finally, a cut-rate catalog offered the tree for cheap.  I bit.

You gets what you pays for, and what I got was a dead twig, which, naively, I planted and hovered maternally over for months.  Any minute now, I thought, it would go “pop!” and start throwing mixed fruit at me.  But it just sat there and rotted, and finally I took issue with the company. 

After more than a year, two replacements,  and a letter to the Better Business Bureau, the company sent me a living twig.  But by this time I hated the tree, the company, and myself for my execrable taste in buying into the monstrous idea in the first place. 

What kind of idiot would believe in a fruit cocktail tree?  Isn’t it the same sort of concept as the cigarette trees in the old song, or the money tree my parents used to refer to so sarcastically whenever I wanted some trifling little thing like a Suzy Homemaker Easy-Bake Oven or a trip to Europe?

In fact, most mail order is probably a gardening mistake.  The nurseries snare us by sending us those glossy catalogs crammed with full-color pictures of flowers in January, when we are holed up in our greasy kitchens, oppressed by the cold and the dark, feeling that, through some terrible mistake, we have been snatched from real life and set down inside a Russian novel. 

So we pore over those splashy pages like lifers in solitary looking at  girlie mags.  “Nonstop blossoms until frost!” the copy tells us.   “This enchanting bush will make you the envy of all your neighbors!”

When spring comes, so does sobriety, and we realize that if we want our neighbors to envy us we are going to have to win the lottery.  Perhaps we could get a rise out of them by stealing their husbands, but a shrubbery is not going to do the job.  Meanwhile, though, we have ordered plants that won’t grow in our climate or seeds that we could get at the hardware store for half the price.  Or, in the worst case, an Amazing Fruit Cocktail Tree.

Another gardening mistake I will share, lest you make it too, is four o’clocks.  They are so named because the flowers are supposed to open in the afternoon, though, at least where I live, they should really be called seven o’clocks.  I was initially smitten by them.  They grow easily to shrub size and have beautiful flowers that perfume the evening air.   

But they have ruined my life.  They make me feel exactly like France in 1940 --  invaded and occupied.  They are sold as annuals; no one tells you that they form huge woody roots that go all the way to China, and everywhere there’s a root you get a lush new forest of four o’clocks.  I have broken shovels digging them up, or trying to.  They also drop seeds everywhere, which with amazing speed form new plants which in turn send new roots to the Far East.  Last year they choked out several of my rose bushes.

Which brings me to another mistake:   Roses.  Roses have throughout the ages been a symbol for beauty.  It was only shortly after man learned to cultivate wheat that he started fooling around with roses, too.  So a weakness for roses is probably wired into our DNA and we can’t help ourselves.

But my roses often strike me as an expensive smorgasbord that I have thoughtfully provided for Japanese beetles.  Since I’ve had roses, I’ve spent every summer at war with these pests, a bitter, losing battle that has corrupted me from my organic preferences as I grasp at increasingly toxic straws to defend my flowers.  Sooner or later, I am either going to have to kiss those roses goodbye or stop shilly-shallying around and bomb Tokyo.

Yet another mistake I’ve made is planting vegetables that make me feel sorry for myself.  On Mayberry RFD, you see neighbors sitting on the porch shelling peas while they gossip happily and Andy strums his guitar on the swing.  At my house, when I am fortunate enough to have visitors on my porch, they have generally come to soak up the country air and my champagne, not to be pressed into KP.  So the only pea sheller is your narrator, and there is no guitar music, just the gentle sound of me whining about how I thought Mr. Lincoln done freed the slaves.

I’ve often worried that readers will be tempted, since I have the nerve to write a gardening column,  to take my advice.  I offer the above testimony in an effort to avert such a tragedy.  So next time you’re inclined to take me seriously, just shut your eyes and say, “The Amazing Fruit Cocktail Tree,” and soon you’ll be restored to full mental health.

END

     Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.