How I Became A Child of Light

How I Became a Child of Light, and Dangerously Insane

By Robin Ford Wallace

A few years ago I’d never even heard the word “meme,” and the spellchecker on my old-fashioned version of Microsoft Word still doesn’t like it.  Yet by the numbers, memes are now the chief beacons of morality, spiritual enlightenment and social change in the troubled seas of daily life.  

Memes feature a picture, like maybe of the Dalai Lama sitting there wisely in his little draperies, or Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King or the Buddha, or a sunset or a flower or a fluffy little dog or dead movie star; and underneath there’s a quote telling you things like Choose Love, Because Hate is Too Great a Burden, or Don’t Feed the Wolf of Hate, Feed the Wolf of Love, or Be a Child of Light.

These memes are not such to strike anybody to her knees, weeping and promising God to change, or in fact calling unto the Almighty at all, except for maybe a muttered “Oh Jesus Christ” here and there.  I ask you:  Wolf of Love?

But throw enough of them at a girl and they eventually start chipping away at her.  Or they did at me.  I don’t know when it happened precisely but sooner or later I caught myself thinking:  Well, of course I want to be a Child of Light, who the hell wouldn’t?

Historically, I’ve tended to be more of a Kid of Black Hole.  I think if you’re going to be any kind of writer, you’ve got to accept a certain level of negativity.  Organizing a thoughtful piece on practically anything means thinking the subject all the way through, and given the human condition – we are talking your sentient mortal biomass in your infinite and incomprehensible universe here – thinking too hard always ends in staring gloomily out at the night through a yellow cloud of  Schmertz and cigarette smoke.  

Then too, just by the nature of the work, you’ve got to be a loner, and unless you’re very very lucky you’re also going to be poor.  Throw in underdeveloped social skills and incidences of divorce, suicide and substance abuse I am guessing to be way above the national average and you will agree it’s not precisely a Child of Light formula. 

But then came the memes.  I’d duck out of Word and into FB in a fit of work avoidance and come back thinking:  Am I Seeing In The World What I Carry In My Heart?  I’d be depressed by something and I’d think, But I’m Like A Ship, And All The Worries I’m Floating In Can’t Sink Me If I Don’t Let Them Inside.  Or I’d be mad at someone and realize anger was generating lines in my face.  So:  Maybe Hate was indeed Too Great a Burden?  Maybe I really had better start feeding that Wolf of Love?

But the meme that really got me was the Child of Light.  It was dead winter and outside my window, not to mention inside my black little soul, all was dark and cold.  But the meme featured sunshine, summer, flowers, I forget what all, maybe even some fairies and shit.  I thought:  Bob Want.  How Get?

How indeed?  I made a rule:  Whenever I had a negative or hateful thought I had to jump up and sing a song about sunshine.  It would surprise you how many there are.

“Sunlight – on my shoulder – makes me happ –eeeee” –

“Good Day, Sunshine!”

“You are the sunshine of my life …”

So I began to be a lot more cheerful but a lot less, not to put too fine a point on it, sane.  I’d be typing along or reading the newspaper quietly when a tiny frown would crease my brow, evidence of some dark thought therein; then the reading lamp would crash over and the water glass smash as I leapt to my feet bellowing, “I’m in love and it’s a sunny day!”  

            All this was bad enough but then, as it happened, I got Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent from Netflix.  This is a modern spinoff from the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, based on the tenet that the evil queen wasn’t all that evil, just embittered by having been betrayed in love at an early age.  It was all kind of fluffy, and if the original story had happened within the time frame of the spinoff they’d have had to call it Napping Beauty, or maybe Take Five. 

            But I loved it!  Angelina looked seriously good in the horned headdress, I want one, and moreover the message of forgiveness and healing at the end was just what my Child of Light campaign needed. 

See, before Maleficent becomes Evil, she’s a good fairy with magnificent wings who flies around in the morning sunshine exchanging pleasantries with all the little animals.  So now, when my renditions of “Let the Sunshine In” are not enough to chase away unhappy thoughts, I imagine my jowly middle-aged self underneath those big beautiful wings, flitting around with a little basket over my arm, saying things like:

“Good morning, Mrs. Bee.  Making lots of honey today?”

And:

“Ah, Lady Bug!  And how are the children?”

Those lucky enough to be near me always know when I'm having one of my Happy Fairy moments because I extend my arms and go flap flap flap.  And that’s in addition, I mean, to shrieking, “Keep on the sunny side!  Always on the sunny side!”

So what I’m trying to become is a Child of Light and what I seem to be becoming instead is a traffic hazard; and sometimes when people stare I ask myself:  What If the Journey is Not About Becoming Anything, But About Unbecoming What I’m Not Supposed to Be? 

But then I think to myself, The Older I Get, The Less I Care What Others Think Of Me, And The More I Enjoy Life.

And I keep flapping.

END

Bob Goes On A Diet: An Explanation of "Short Versions"

 Since I’ve been that sorriest specimen of humanity, the out-of-work writer, I’ve tried various cornered-rat survival tactics.  The next seven “short-version” blog entries represent one such.  They are vintage Bob’s Little Acres put on a crash diet, because I was trying to whore up to the syndicates, which want a maximum column length of 600 words.

Repeat readers know it takes me 600 words to say good morning and how’s them hemorrhoids, Mabel?  There have been times I introduced my subject around paragraph 7!

Sadly, though, brevity seems to be not just the soul of wit but the wave of the future.  Such work as I have managed to scare up recently included a 500-word feature (Yes, I said, “500 … word … FEATURE”) and a request to cut a 1200-word piece down to 700.  The whole exercise reminds me of the old rule of composition:

            Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em; tell ‘em; then tell ‘em what you told ‘em. 

            Nowadays you get the added instruction:  “Choose one of the above.”  You don’t need to be Horace Greeley to figure out which one wins out every time.

            So the old rule was you needed a beginning, a middle and an end.  Now you get the middle if you’re very very lucky.  This is good for me, I reckon, because I used to take forever coming up with just the right intro and I was even crazier about how to say goodbye.  Now?  For my 1200-to-700 miracle, I turned the whole piece into an alphabetical list.

            I haven’t heard yet about that one, and the syndicates are also still playing a little hard to get.  In the meantime, though, I thought I’d post these short-version Bobs on the blog for anybody who wanted to read them.

            It may interest you that I have now taken 318 words to explain to you why I shortened things down!

Introduction to Bob's Little Acre: The Short Version

Welcome to Bob’s Little Acre!  Sit Down.  Not There

By Robin Ford Wallace

There is a saying that nowhere is one closer to God than in a garden. 

Duh.

For those of us whose idea of heaven is rolling in the dirt with a trowel in our hand, it is a statement of the obvious.  Indeed, to stumble across a perennial blooming in the spring, a year after we’d forgotten planting it, convinces us there is something in the universe bigger than we are, that drinks less beer.

But we have not been introduced.  How do you do? 

My name is Robin but the family always called me Bob.  They also called the patch of dirt I gardened Bob’s Little Acre, from my name and from the Erskine Caldwell novel.  It was a literary sort of family and I became a literary sort of gardener, who can squeeze a Shakespeare quote out of a turnip. 

I began gardening as a small, dirty child to whom happiness was in direct and dependant proportion to level of filth, and horticulture a natural progression from mudpies; and in the fullness of time I expect to become the kind of old woman who stumps through the garden in rubber boots and housecoat, booming out such pronouncements as:

“There is nothing like llama excrement for the cultivation of really superior asparagus.”

But where are my manners?  Please sit down.  Not there.  That is in fact the asparagus row, which I have just amended with a generous application of –

Well, never mind.  The llama is, I believe, herbivorous, and as such the ultimate product of its rather complicated digestive system is of no particular olfactory unpleasantness.

But back to Bob’s Little Acre, my garden and by extension this feature, which is a gardening column.  Sort of.

I write it after some years of experience, not yet having reached the rubber-boot and housedress stage, perhaps, but grown far too canny to swallow the happy horse patootie routinely dealt out as gardening wisdom.  That is why I write it.  The world is a wide and wicked place but nowhere is the truth more outraged than in the garden.

“Plant corn on Good Friday,” say old men at hardware stores, whose only agricultural qualification is the possession of overalls.  “You will need the following implements, available on aisle 2.” 

“Prune roses by St. Valentine’s Day to stimulate spring growth,” say gardening magazines on page 7.  “Remember, roses bloom on new wood.”  But turn to p. 41 and you will learn that roses only bloom on old wood, and you had better wait for St. Pat.

“Add lime yearly to correct pH,” write county extension agents.  That trumps every time, because no one has the faintest idea what it means.

You will not find that kind of ruminant excreta in Bob’s Little Acre.  At the heart of the column is the tenet that most of what we know about gardening, much less the universe, is lies, advertising or male answer syndrome.  Without outraging the confines of modesty, I may say that Bob’s Little Acre has become to the county extension agent what Woodward was to Nixon.

The other core precept here is that, though your narrator is as helpless to resist luridly illustrated seed catalogs as the next gardener – a girl must get through the winter somehow – gardening is not commercial.  It is something one does, not something one buys.    

So.  Spring approaches, and with it the siren call of dirt.  I invite you to return to Bob’s Little Acre each issue and roll with me.  

Only do stop brushing at your clothes.  I expect it will wash out. 

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

Hay Gardening: The Short Version

Hay There!  Ruth Stout, Deep Mulching, Beer, Pizza and You

By Robin Ford Wallace

When is the best time to start your garden?  NOW! 

Forgive me if I sound like one of those prim financial pundits who urge you to begin your child’s college fund before you finish developing your own secondary sex characteristics; but if you wish to use the deep-mulch method, as I do, the best time to start is last fall.  Lacking that, you had better get down to the garden this minute. 

I would help but I am afraid my pizza has just arrived.  I will instruct you from the porch, if you will first be kind enough to fetch me a cold beer.

Thank you.  Now, start by marking out your garden.  Next: take hay – old, spoiled hay is fine, and can usually be had for cheap or free – over the plot one foot deep.  It is not necessary to till first, or even to dig up the grass. 

Hmm.  I thought I told them green olives, not black.  Is it youthful inattention, or centuries of inbreeding?

But back to the hay:  Yes, I said not to till, and no, I have not partaken of enough beer to impair my faculties.  This is the famous deep-mulch method Ruth Stout, grandmother of organic gardening, described in her No-Work Gardening Book.  Ruth was the sister of Rex Stout, author of the Nero Wolfe mysteries, and wrote just as entertainingly as her brother. 

Her idea was simple:  Instead of tilling, ones uses a thick layer of hay to smother grass and weeds.  This perfect mulch, via its constant composting process, also adds nutrients to the soil, improves friability and fosters earthworms. 

            I started using the Stout method in 2001, when, for reasons I no longer remember, I bought this house.  The home site had been made by bulldozing a flat place on the side of a mountain, incidentally scraping it bare of trees, undergrowth and any vestige of topsoil.  It was a sun-baked little acre of red clay, covered by patchy tufts of pasture grass, except where it wasn’t.  The last earthworm had died of loneliness. 

That October, I buried the garden area in 12 inches of hay.

            Mulching in the fall gives the hay a head start.  In the beginning it is high and fluffy, with weeds underneath.  By April, the weeds are gone and the hay has compacted and composted.  Underneath is a moist black layer you might call dirty hay, or hayey dirt.

            To start transplants such as tomatoes or peppers, you simply part the hay and stick your plant in, drawing the hay back around it.  It keeps the ground moist so you need not water, chokes out other growth so you need not weed, and nourishes the garden so you need not fertilize.

            To put in seed crops such as corn, squash, okra or beans, you just mark out rows, then push the seed down through the mulch with your finger.  The big seedlings push up  through the hay without breaking a sweat, and so do root crops like potatoes and asparagus.

            If you do not start until spring, the hay will still work as long as you give it three or four weeks its miracles to perform.  I frequently make new flowerbeds this way. 

            Does the hay method work?  It has worked so well for me that I not only have rich black dirt where the red clay used to be, earthworms enough to start a bait store, and bumper crops of vegetables, I also have the leisure, while others sweat behind their hoes, to sit here on the porch swilling beer.

And no hurry, but I am ready for another.

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

Asparagus I: The Short Version

Asparagus Unveiled:  Demystifying Les Points D’Amour (Part I)

By Robin Ford Wallace

Reader, I have come to tell you the secrets of Nature.

No, Reader, not that secret of Nature.  Though since we are on the subject I may as well tell you what my niece Katy asked when her mother explained to her, at age 10, the monthly magic of womanhood:  “This is a joke, right?”

She had a point.  This business of existence as self-aware biomass is a serious thigh-slapper, is it not?  The entertainment we derive from the digestive tract alone!  Throw in the reproductive system and it is a wonder anybody gets any work done at all. 

But were we not discussing asparagus? 

Yes, Reader, asparagus is the mystery to which I refer.  When I began gardening, I had no idea what part of the plant were the toothsome green spears that we eat.  They were not fruits like tomatoes, roots like turnips, nor leaves like lettuce.  So what is asparagus, and what does it look like in the garden?

Answer 1, I soon learned, is that the edible part of asparagus is the shoot that rockets up from the roots as the plant’s first growth; but it does so with such disconcerting rapidity that there is no Answer 2.  One does not see asparagus growing, though one is sometimes tempted to stay up all night with a flashlight, and try.

Rather, one leaves the asparagus row an undisturbed expanse of dirt, then returns next morning to find six-inch spears looming above the earth.  One cuts the spears at ground level, leaving the row again vacant – until, next night, the miracle recurs.  It is possible a fairy is involved.

Another element that adds to the asparagus mystique is its price, prohibitive enough to keep it off family tables.  The seasonal spears are historically rich-people food, served to Roman emperors and French aristocrats who called them points d’amour, or “love points.”  But fear not:  give it time and a permanent garden spot and you can have asparagus for almost nothing.

Asparagus grows well everywhere except the swampiest tropics – it requires at least a brief winter dormancy – and it prefers full sun and light, well-drained soil.  For the home gardener, though, the most important consideration is not whether your site is sandy but whether it can withstand the sands of time.  Once planted, asparagus stays put, rewarding you for decades to come with delicious green harvests, but making it a mite awkward to till the rest of the garden each spring if situated in an inside row.  (Do not ask how I know.)

Plant asparagus any time after the soil has warmed; you will not harvest it this year in any case.  You may start from seed but that lengthens the wait until first harvest, so most gardeners begin with first-year crowns – hairy, tarantula-looking root balls from year-old plants, available in most garden centers.

Place the crowns 15 inches apart in a furrow six inches deep.  One can go cross-eyed deliberating which end is up; in fact, they will send forth their tentacles either way.

One can also develop strabismus choosing what variety to grow, what with plant catalogs hyping “new vigorous all-male hybrids,” as opposed to the time-honored but patently female heirloom, Mary Washington. 

Here I must confess to a degree of horticultural gender confusion.  It is true that one might associate “male vigor” with the precipitate skyward thrust of asparagus’s growth habit; but in turning over crowns during the which-way-up dilemma, I cannot say I discerned any clue as to boy- or girlhood.  Thus plant sexuality is one secret of Nature we must leave intact, at least until that nocturnal vigil with the flashlight. 

To be continued ...

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

Asparagus Part II: The Short Version

Asparagus Part II: Some Further Pointers on “Love Points”

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Part 1 of this article began with a discussion of the human condition as sentient biomass, pursuant to my niece Katy’s comment upon learning about the birds and the bees:  “This is a joke, right?”  It ended with horticultural gender confusion produced by nurserymen’s advertisements for “vigorous new all-male hybrids.”  Somewhere in the middle, we were talking about asparagus.

            We had gotten as far as planting asparagus crowns in a six-inch trench, which by the way, Reader, you should make as long as you have room for.  The rule of thumb for most vegetables is to plant one-eighth to one-quarter the minimum number of plants you think you need.  Asparagus is the exception to that rule.  Asparagus is like money not only in that the best time to have started growing it is 10 years ago, but also in that there is never enough of it to go around. 

            I have an 18-foot row and I find with that I can serve asparagus about twice a week during the season, sharing it grudgingly with guests but never freezing or giving any away.  (The greatest pleasure with most home-grown produce is showering it on your friends.  This is another rule to which asparagus is an exception.)

            Anyway.  After planting asparagus, what you must do is:  wait.  Depending on rainfall, soil temperature and how you hold your mouth, it may be two weeks to two months before you see any action. 

But wait long enough and your seeds will produce dainty, ferny-looking plants.  If you have planted crowns, though, they will send up such perfectly formed spears that my friend Joe once accused me of sneaking out in the night and deploying grocery-store asparagus in the dirt to fool him.

But it is not yet time to break out the butter and lemon and get down to business.  Leave the bed alone at least the first season – the second, too, if you can hold your horses that long.  (If starting from seed, add yet another year.)  The stalks will leaf out into tall, frondy plants which you must allow to stand unmolested as they establish root systems.  Nourish with compost; mulch thickly to prevent weed; otherwise, hands off!

But when it is – finally! – the year to begin harvesting, please do not make the common mistake of waiting to cut asparagus until there is “enough to eat.”  Rather, when the spears come shooting up in early spring, cut them at ground level as soon as they are eating size, generally the first or second morning.  Cutting the stalks stimulates the roots to send up more, and if you don’t, they will begin leafing out. 

Place harvested spears in a Zip-Loc in the refrigerator.  They may look lonely at first, but they will have company enough tomorrow.

How long to keep cutting?  Experts recommend limiting harvest to four weeks the first year, eight thereafter.  What I have found in my own garden is that the asparagus itself seems to “know” when it is time to stop.  The spears come up “looking ferny” and have an air of “wanting” to go into summer growth mode.  Though it is possible I am attributing more sentience to this particular biomass than it deserves, or am barking mad.

In conclusion, an asparagus bed takes time to establish but is otherwise little trouble.  Further, growing asparagus at home allows the gardener to look at the price asked for it at the grocery store and say:

“This is a joke, right?”

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

Compost: The Short Version

A Richer Dust:  The Poetry of a Good Compost

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Shakespeare wrote:  “Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

This is a gardening column and will not unduly burden itself in arguing whether people do, in fact, expire for love, though we are remembering a movie called Lady Caroline Lamb in which the last line was: “She died of a broken ‘eart!”  We were not unwilling, at that point, to bid adieu to Caroline, a mistress of Lord Byron, having never warmed to her somehow, and in any case having finished our popcorn.

No, what interests us is the worms.  When we submit our kitchen waste to the digestive processes of these invertebrates (which are, presumably, ravening about the garden in hope of amorous fatalities), it becomes compost, the crumbly black substance that is to the organic gardener what gold was to the alchemist.

Composting has always existed in nature.  Trees shed their leaves, which decay, creating beautiful black forest soil you would steal for your garden except for the certainty the rangers would nail you.  Little creatures die and enrich the mix with their tiny carcasses.  The World War I poet Rupert Brooke wrote patriotically (and prophetically) of his possible death abroad, “There shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed” – meaning Rupert, I’m afraid – “that is forever England.”

Again, this is a horticultural rather than poetical discussion; but if darling Rupert could write so romantically about becoming compost, surely we may be permitted to wax lyrical about its virtues in the garden.

Compost is superior to commercial plant foods in that it not only adds nutrients to the soil but improves the texture, costs nothing, and is an excellent use for elderly groceries evolving into new life forms in the crisper drawer.

There is little disagreement about what to put into the compost pile:  All foodstuffs except meats, which attract rodents.  So:  Coffee grounds, the turnips purchased last January, the bread growing festive blue spots, that unfortunate lentil loaf.

It should, however, be noted that some materials take longer to compost than others.  Eggshells are so durable, one wonders how chickens get born.  And nutshells?  To expand upon our poetical theme:  “Intimations of Immortality.”

There is also consensus that covering kitchen waste with mulch aids the decomposition process and keeps the compost pile attractive.  So:  Grass clippings, hay, leaves.  Toss on a pile of autumn foliage and forget that that sweet potato casserole with miniature marshmallows ever happened.

The only real disagreement about compost is how, precisely, to make it.

Nurserymen advertise innumerable devices to manufacture “black gold”:  wooden crates, metal towers, hay-bale bins.  One commercial composter consists of a ventilated barrel suspended between two poles, with a crank.  One puts one’s biodegradables in the barrel and spins it every day with the crank, looking smug and scientific.

In our youth, we wanted one of these so bad we could taste it.  Unable to afford one, we home-made a facsimile, punching holes in a metal trashcan with our pocketknife, filling it with rotting food and rolling it around our yard, looking half-witted and vaguely inbred. 

Result?  Well, we don’t imagine the expensive kind worked, either.

In fact, what we conclude after 20 years’ subsequent experience is that the best composters are Mr. Shakespeare’s worms.  Dump kitchen waste in a chosen spot close to the garden, cover with hay, repeat.  You’ll have crumbly black compost sooner or later. 

You may water your compost and turn it from time to time, but when you find yourself buying it toys, it may be time for another hobby – say, poetry.

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

Bob's Little Advice Column: The Short Version

Bob’s Little Advice Column:  Don’t Bite Anything We Wouldn’t.

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Bob’s Little Acre is not an advice column.  In fact, sometimes we wonder if even advice columns are really advice columns.
            Consider first how elegantly the advice-seekers lay out their dilemmas.  “My mother has fangs and drinks blood,” writes “Trudy In Transylvania.”  “She sleeps in a coffin and keeps trying to bite my neck, though so far I have held her off with a crucifix.
            “Abby, what on earth is the matter with Mama?”  

            Real people do not write so clearly.  They write:  “How is you cold still lots of  mucs?”

            People muddled by rage and self-pity are even less prone to concision.  A real-life Trudy would write:  “My mother is weird!  Cindy has hickeys but if I had a car like hers I’d have a boyfriend, too.  Does garlic help?  Cindy’s dad is rich and last summer they went to Spain.” 

            Next, consider the advice columnists themselves.  Is anyone really so wise, so compassionate?  If they are anything like other journalists, most are hard-bitten divorcees whose children refuse to speak to them, even at Christmas, and who belt down whiskey from bottles in their desk drawers.
           Yet they respond so confidently:  “Dear Trudy:  Your mom may be anemic and should seek counseling for her problems respecting your space.”  (Advice columnists always recommend counseling, even in cases clearly calling for divorce, 911 or a stake through the heart.)  “Write back and tell me how you are.  I care.”
           Then, we imagine, they stagger home to their littered apartments and have knife fights with the neighbors.
           Most gardening columns dole out advice just as freely.  We do not!

           This is partially because our chief joy is belittling the advice of others.  The newspaper will tell us one week that we must water solely in the morning; the next that evening is the only possible time; the third that in the afternoon, when the hot sun has wilted them, is the time our plants need a drink.  We just lie on the floor and laugh until we vomit.

            Another reason we avoid giving advice is:  insanity.  While we are satisfied with our reasons for starting some crops from seed and others from transplants, or for planting potatoes only on days it is feasible to drink beer, or for not growing eggplant at all because of a moussaka we were served once with eggplant wedges that resembled 40 slugs wagging their heads derisively from the spatula, we hesitate to impose our rationale on others, at least on days we are taking our meds.   

            However, journalism is a competitive racket and sometimes we must make like a real garden columnist or risk getting plutoed to obits.  So here is the one horticultural precept we have found unimpeachable: 

Keep it small.

            In planning your garden, decide which plants you want, how many and how much room each needs.  Calculate the total area on a piece of scrap paper.  Then use the paper to wrap fish and make your garden one-quarter that size.
            A small garden all our own makes us feel like gentlemen farmers.  When the garden becomes a plantation, though, the gardener becomes a field hand.  And despite those merry jump-down-turn-around ditties, field-handing is so little fun that August finds us lying in a ditch sullenly drinking beer while the weeds grow up around us.       

            Further, we have found that even the smallest gardens yield more vegetables than we can eat, preserve or force upon unwilling strangers.

            So our advice is not to bite off more than you can chew.

            And do not bite anybody’s neck who is holding a crucifix, or anything resembling a slug.

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

Dirt: The Short Version

America Is Made of Dirt

By Robin Ford Wallace

Dirt don’t get no respect.

Forgive our grammar.  This is a subject on which we feel strongly. 

Dirt is literally the basis of horticulture, of the terrestrial food chain, one might say of life itself.  Potatoes grow under it and tomatoes grow above it but everything grows out it.  Gardening is all about:

Dirt.

But do people appreciate it?  No.  They “treat it like dirt.”

Consider the language:  Unscrupulous behavior is referred to as “playing dirty,” and if you engage in it you will “soil” your reputation, causing people to say you have “feet of clay.”  

How did it come about that dirt got “dragged through the mud?”  Perhaps it is because it is plentiful – “as common as dirt.”

So people already walk all over dirt; but the worst slap in dirt’s face comes when, having become enamored of the now-trendy subject of organic gardening, they rush out and pay serious money for sacks of:

Guess what?

A man we know bought $300 of bagged topsoil, poured it into a raised bed built for that purpose, and into it placed his tomato plants – nine inches apart.  When advised they might fare better out in his yard, where they had sufficient room, he said, incredulously:  “But that’s just dirt!”  

“Just dirt,” indeed!  Dirt is a miracle that takes millennia to make.   

Dirt starts when wind and water slowly chip away at rock, breaking it down into smaller particles.  Then air mixes minerals into it.  Plants and animals die and decay in it.   Microbes ferment it.  Worms eat it and excrete it for countless generations.

Finally, ready to support life, does dirt just lie there, waiting to be insulted?  No indeed.  Dirt is on the go.  If dirt is carried and deposited by water, it is called alluvium; if by glaciers, till; if by wind, loess. 

One way or the other – do not rule out taxis – dirt travels from afar to present itself perkily in your yard, eager to grow food.  When you ignore it in favor of a sack-of-something from Walmart, it is like rubbing its nose in the –

Well.  The point here is not that there is anything wrong with bagged topsoil, which in fact tends to be beautiful dirt, but that probably there is nothing wrong with the dirt in your back yard, either – and there is more of it. 

As a consumer society, we perceive things that cost money as intrinsically more valuable than those that do not.  Quite often, the opposite is true.  Consider mother’s milk, which has now been proven exponentially more nourishing than the factory-produced baby formula that had almost entirely replaced it by the 1960s.  Compare friendship to salesmanship.  Compare true love to –

But back to dirt:  If yours is not perfect, work it.  Mulch it.  Amend it with compost.  Dig it and double-dig it.  Gardening is something one does, not something one buys.

In the gardening section one Saturday, our local newspaper featured Mexican immigrants who grew beautiful vegetable gardens.  Rather than relying on fertilizers or mechanization, the article marveled, these paisanos simply worked the soil with their hand tools until it “felt right.”

The next Saturday, the newspaper interviewed the owner of a local garden center about growing tomatoes.  His advice about dirt?  “Buy it from me.”

How ironic, that dirt in America should be best understood by those whose right to walk it is so bitterly contested.

Fellow gardeners, take a lesson from the immigrants.  The United States may be a lot of things – a beautiful idea, a noble experiment – but intrinsically, at its very foundations, it is also:

Dirt. 

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