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.