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.