The Gardener as Guerilla: They'll Never Take Me Alive!

       This is a "classic" Bob in the modern sense of the word, which if you haven't noticed now means "old as God."  But it's one of my faves and it was with surprise I noticed it wasn't on this blog.  It's a propos because this year, even though it's spring and I'm ravenin' for the dirt, between saving the world for democracy and financial stuff I'm having a hard time finding time to garden, much less write about it.  So some mornings I find myself simply aching for some time off, or an automatic weapon.  Anyway, I decided to post this old Bob on here as opposed to, say, writing a new one ...  

THEY’LL NEVER TAKE US ALIVE!

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Spring, and we are hunkered down at Bob’s Little Acre, trowel in one hand, machinegun in the other, cigar clenched between our gritted teeth not because we like it but because we woke up in one of those Che Guevara moods you get sometimes when the Feds are after you.

            We are under siege.

            As we write, this place is surrounded by armed goons from the Health Department who are trying to shut us down, and IRS hitmen lurk by our mailbox.  A pity, because we had hoped to plant clematis down there, but that can wait.  Our hands are already pretty full what with setting out our tomatoes and starting our petunia border, to say nothing of the machinegun.

Which we wave defiantly at the T-men as, eyes squinting through cigar smoke, we determinedly pat a Purple Pirouette into place.  The Feds can wait, too, along with all the other creditors whose unopened bills clog our desk.  So can the piles of laundry that choke the house, clean and dirty becoming indistinguishable as passing cats use them for bedding, or worse. 

Not to mention the greasy dishes, the ominous black mold that threatens to engulf the bathroom, and the hungry-eyed man who keeps bleating about supper every time we go into the kitchen for another beer.  

And especially, with a cherry on top and twice on Sunday, the people who annoy us with phone calls whining about when we plan to show up at work.

            It is April!  The sun shines.  The birds sing.  The air is like wine.  The earth calls and we must obey its primordial summons.  We must plant.  We must hoe.  We must get down in the dirt and roll!

Spring is clearly a time meant for gardeners to garden.  We wait all winter for it, we dream of it through the frozen nights, and when it finally comes it hits us so hard that we lie on the ground and twitch.  Then up we get, trowel in hand, madness in our eyes, and head for the mud.  It is unnatural, nay, obscene, that we should do anything else. 

Yet the cruel world makes its nasty little demands of us just as if it were still winter.  Pay your bills!  Do your job!  File your tax return!  This place is a dump!  Aren’t we ever going to eat?

 Si, Senor, we say from behind our cigar.  As soon as you pry this trowel from our cold, dead fingers.

            The guerilla war that has us juggling seed peas and automatic weapons is caused by modern America’s sad failure to grasp the exigencies of the natural world on those of us who remain connected to it.  Spring screams to the gardener:  Carpe diem!  Seize the day and suck the juice out of it before it slips away! 

But to normal, virtuous Americans, Nature is the 30 seconds spent between house and car, car and office, and their only response to its wild siren call is to say something like, “Nice day.”

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, says virtuous America primly, whereas we gardeners are happiest caked with filth.  Render unto Caesar, we are told, when to go inside and fill out a form would kill us.  But at this time of year, the American virtue that makes us bite most savagely into our cigar is the Protestant work ethic.

We believe in the dignity of labor.  Oh, from time to time we may have made our little joke about work being the curse of the drinking classes.  We may have observed that, with spring for planting, summer so hot, fall for canning and winter taken up by seasonal adjustment disorder, the only time we have work is a couple of rainy Tuesdays in February.

However, we are not under the delusion that the world owes us a living and we are painfully aware that no one saw fit to set us up a trust fund.  We have resigned ourselves to toiling for our bread like the rest of virtuous America, though without visible enthusiasm.

But this is spring.

As our blood responds wildly to the rising sap, as the diems become exponentially more carpable, we are increasingly inclined to tell virtuous America, and our boss, where to stick it.

Taxes are for the little people, we shriek.  Cleanliness is for the stupid!  Work is for those with no hobbies!  If you’re hungry, open a can of soup!

Anyway, we are not talking full-frontal, X-rated diem-carping here.  We are talking about getting the lettuce in before it turns off hot.  So why can’t everybody just leave us alone?  We are decent, law-abiding, conscientious.  We will clean our house, pay our taxes, feed our family.  We will even go to work, sullenly, for a couple of hours.

The next time it rains.

These arguments, clear as they are, have never cut any ice with employers or the government, and we are still expected to meet work requirements, tax deadlines, and basic standards of cleanliness, whatever the season. 

That’s why those of us who are serious about horticulture must learn to accept the machinegun as a necessary and useful gardening implement, though frankly we are getting a little sick of the cigar.

END

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

Resolution For 2011: The Purse Theory of the Universe

Resolution For 2011:  How I Hope to Heal Galactic Disharmony and Locate My Car Keys

By Robin Ford Wallace

My sister Laura has a theory that if you find the perfect purse, the rest of  your life will fall into order behind it.  Of course, it’s purely hypothetical because no one has ever done it.

If you have a small purse, you find yourself in denial about it, trying to cram in things like books and pizzas.  If you have a big one, you can fit all those necessities in there but with the caveat you’ll never see them again.  And if you get one with six zillion separate compartments cleverly cordoned off with flaps and zippers and outside pouches, you will almost certainly end up slobbering mad on a rooftop with an Uzi, firing into an innocent crowd while you shriek, “Where – are – my – Breathsavers?”

But why are we talking about purses in this, a feature that usually maintains a least a thin veneer of horticulture?

One word:  January.   January is not a month that offers much by way of horticulture, but it is one that traditionally affords humanity an opportunity for self-improvement as it slouches into the new year appalled by what a loser it’s been in the old one.  For my resolution this year, I thought I’d try the purse theory.    

Some people don’t believe in these self-improvement resolutions.  That’s fine for them, but as for those of us whose personality is best described not as Type A or Type B but Type TW (“Train Wreck”), we have to believe.  It is our only hope! 

It’s not just that we have a million faults.  It’s also that we’re so aware of them, our insecurity is fault no. 1,000,001.  Here, for example, is an actual conversation one of us, to name no names, had with her husband after hosting a dinner:

HER:  Honey?  Do you think I’m an OK cook?

HIM (drowsily):  You’re an excellent cook.  Everything was delicious.

HER:  Well.  Thanks.  But my writing –

HIM:  There’s nothing wrong with your writing.  Go to sleep.

(Pause.)

HER:  What about my hair?

Disgusted, he left her for a Waffle House waitress. 

Not really, but you see the problem:  For those of us with low-to-no self-esteem, if we don’t have at least the hope of improvement we don’t know how much longer we can stand us.

Besides, though I admit each year’s diet and budget may leave me just as fat and poor by Christmas as I was the year before, there really are some resolutions I have kept.  In 2009, I kept one to stop smoking, and in 2010 (squeaking by in month 12 by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin) I kept another, overcoming my Internet ignorance enough to plunge boldly into cyberspace.  Bob’s Little Acre is now a blog you may read at www.bobslittleacre.blogspot.com.

Now, for 2011, it seems logical to give the purse theory a try because my handbag has always seemed such an apt metaphor for my life.  Which is to say:  a train wreck.

I’m the large purse type, myself.  I’m always saying in this space that things don’t matter, things are nothing, and I really believe that.  Nonetheless, insofar as I own things, I don’t leave home without them.

My purse must house the accoutrements of my trade – notebook, voice recorder, camera – as well as books and crosswords to keep me company at lunch, in case my car breaks down, or in the event I’m thrown in jail. 

Then there are cosmetics.  A girl has to have lipstick, not so much from vanity as from the fact a girl’s lips start drying out once a girl hits menopause or so.  And the mirror compact is not for primping but to check whether, as indicated from the looks I get from interviewees sometimes, I really have a booger hanging from my nose, or have recently turned into a cockroach.

As for the rest of it – well, heck, you never know when you’re going to need a corkscrew, or want to toss a salad.  It may seem like a lot to carry around, but when someone needs something out of the ordinary like a jump rope or a shoehorn, we big-purse types can look smug, pick up our bag and –

Claw helplessly through it until we are reduced to tears.  We can never find anything in those murky depths!  Objects in a big purse do not obey ordinary laws of physics.  They move through time rather than space – there, not there, then there again with no intervening human agency. 

Purse contents not only move mysteriously through the fabric of reality, sometimes they even multiply.  This happened once with my favorite pen.  I liked it so much I always kept mining in there until I found it.  Then one day my hand came out of the dark miasma clasping two of them.  It was a shocker, like learning you are married to twins.        

            Of course, the duplicate pen soon returned to its alternate universe, and so did the original eventually, never to return.  It’s when that happens, says Laura, that action is required.  “When your space-time continuum goes south,” she says, “it’s time for a new purse.”

            It’s time for a new purse.  Maybe this time it really will be the perfect one, and then, who knows?  Maybe Laura’s theory will work.  Maybe I’ll stop fumbling frenziedly for my cell phone until a ringing from my butt alerts me it’s in my back pocket.  And maybe from there I’ll become calm and organized and quietly self-confident. 

And maybe from there reality will continue to reshape itself until the clashing universes achieve harmony.  Maybe all the people of the world will live together in peace and love each other like brothers.

Now.  What about my hair?      

END

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

Sharecropper

This is another Bob from way back, when I was still flailing around deciding what I wanted to do in the space.  I suppose I still am.  But back then I was doing it, you know, worse. 

Sometimes, especially in the beginning (as you’ll see if you read down to the next entry), Bob’s Little Acre was – take a deep breath – actually trying to impart useful horticultural information.  Latterly, with the economy collapsing and Americans waddling around consuming equal amounts of Fritos and insulin, BLA puffed out its chest and started giving some lip to the consumer ethos and Big Food.

But more typically, Bob would just give up and tell long, fantastically boring stories about beer, life and  its brother Frank.  This is a story column, but it did anyway make a feeble effort to relate to horticulture.

SHARECROPPER

By Robin Ford Wallace

Sharecropper.

            The word makes you think of a thin, miserable man who lives in a tumbledown shack on an estate owned by a rich man with a big belly and a cruel laugh.  The thin man toils and the fat man reaps the benefit of his labor.

            I have never been, precisely, thin; yet, for one summer I was certainly a sharecropper.

            It happened like this.  I was young and newly married and I lived in a downtown Atlanta neighborhood.  Our yard was so tiny that it would fit into your downstairs bathroom, but I used every square inch.  I had petunia borders along the sidewalk, and on the side of the house I had a postage stamp garden precisely big enough for four tomato plants and two peppers.

            Across the street, in a house divided into apartments, dwelled my friend Mary Hart.  Mary Hart had a degree in the agricultural sciences and the story of how she came to live in downtown Atlanta, which we don’t have time for here, would make a good country song because it involves wind whistlin’ over lonely prairies and good lovin’ gone bad.  Anyway, she had her own postage stamp garden but she was jealous of mine.  Once I came home to find shovel holes in my plot.  It turned out Mary Hart thought my dirt was better than hers and had decided to take it by force.

            So there we were, two frustrated farmers going crazy with our itty-bitty gardens to the point of stealing each other’s dirt.  I remember we were constantly putting things in Mason jars that had no business to be there, and using the word “harvest” to mean “these three tomatoes.”  Something had to be done.

            It was Mary Hart who found the ad in one of those government farm publications.   The ad had been placed by a sweet couple in their 80s who lived on what had been one of the last dairy farms in the Atlanta city limits.  Now the husband was dying of cancer and the wife was taking care of him, but they missed having fresh vegetables in the summer.  The deal was, they would supply the land, we would come after work and garden, and we would share the vegetables.  We shook on it and were happy, except for two things.

            Thing one was the garden plot.  It was as big as five or six football fields, and there were no trees around to shed leaves for mulch.  It was just a huge red dry patch baking in the sun, and it might have been manageable with, say, a tractor and a crew of migrant workers.  We had hoes.

            Thing two was something that you would never imagine a couple in their 80s would inflict on two young, female sharecroppers:  a teenage son.

            Jimmy was not really a teenager, of course; he was 65 if he was a day.  But he was one of those boys who marry early and often and ricochet home to Mama after each divorce.  So as we tackled the Dust Bowl with our little hoes, Jimmy was always underfoot, trying to boss us around and look down our fronts. 

Why, might one ask, had the elderly couple not just asked their live-in son if they wanted a garden?  For the same reason the parents of real teenagers have to hire landscaping services to mow their lawns.  Teenagers are worthless. 

            Worthless as he was, Jimmy had plenty of opinions.  Once we managed to get a load of horse manure from a riding stable, and Jimmy explained to us why it was useless.  When weeds were choking out our crops, Jimmy would explain it was too wet to work the land.   When we planted tomatoes, he would explain why they were the wrong variety.

            As we worked, he would crouch beside us, smoking cigarettes and talking endlessly.  One story was about how one of his ex-wives had died on I-285 when hit by a semi.  “They found a little piece of her in the left-hand lane and a little piece of her in the center lane and a little piece of her northbound, and then southbound …”   Do you know how many lanes I-285 has?

            We usually let him drone on, but I do remember once saying, when we were planting peppers, “No, Jimmy, we do not want to know why they call them Peter peppers.”

            Jimmy never helped us with anything else but he was intensely interested in our cornfield and he did participate in that.  I remember particularly the planting process.  Mary Hart and I walked down the furrows dropping seed corn as we went.  Jimmy followed behind us, solemnly covering the kernels with fertilizer.  I thought then, if I think too hard about this it will turn into a symbol and I’ll vomit.

            Jimmy always called the corn “our corn” or “Mama and Diddy’s corn.”  But then he would call us at home and say, “Get over here quick!  The squirrels is eating your corn!”

             When we finally harvested, though, it turned back into his corn.  He actually accused us of taking more than our share.  It was finally more than we could bear and we did the worst thing we could think of:  We told his mother.

            Well, this has somehow turned into a story about what a jerk Jimmy was, but it wasn’t really a case of oppressive landowners.  Jimmy we could ignore, and the parents were lovely.  What really oppressed us was that huge, unmanageable field.  I remember “weeding” once with a lawnmower.  Even the harvest overwhelmed us.  We had plenty of stuff to put in Mason jars, but often by the time we got time to do it, the produce would be crawling with maggots.

            So we reached the end of our summer of sharecropping and never looked back.  Mary Hart got married and began raising children, not corn.  We never saw Mama and Diddy again, but I hope if they wanted a garden the next year, they hired migrant workers and kept old Jimmy out of their hair.

            As for me, I moved to the country where I still garden happily, and if anybody offers me helpful opinions on how to do it I chase them away with my hoe.  It is the great advantage of having one’s own little acre.

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

A Sweet Potato Stole My Bible

     Under my kitchen counter, one entire cabinet is full of sweet potatoes.  We had a bumper crop this year.  We have had them mashed, baked, roasted and in salads and stews.  As I write it is early January and it looks as if our supply will carry us well into the summer.  Sweet potatoes are a nutritious and durable food and in many countries worldwide the chief staple of life.  The only problem with them is, in fact:
     I hate them. 
     This is a column I wrote last year, the first year I tried sweet potatoes.  After a lifetime of enmity between me and the Orange One, we had a brief rapprochement when I tasted some grown by my neighbor Jim.  I didn't precisely like them but I was impressed with how easily they grew.  So:  I grew some.  
     Will somebody please tell me what I'm supposed to do with them now?  
     I mean, imagine if there was somebody you absolutely couldn't stand your entire life, then you decided to give that person a chance so you invited him or her over to your house, and then he or she took over an entire cabinet under your kitchen counter and didn't leave for 10 or 11 months.  
     I foresee another Bob's Little Acre about sweet potatoes later this year.  Meanwhile here is the old one.  If you get tired of it plain try it mashed, baked, roasted or in salads and stews.

A SWEET POTATO STOLE MY BIBLE

By Robin Ford Wallace

            This year, I will grow sweet potatoes in my garden.

            What?  No lightning bolt?  No gasps of astonishment and disbelief?  This is banner-headline, stop-the-presses stuff, the horticultural equivalent of PEACE BREAKS OUT IN MIDDLE EAST or GOVERNOR PERDUE DECLARES INTENTION TO LIVE REST OF LIFE AS WOMAN.

            Sweet potatoes, you see, are my ancestral enemy.  They have persecuted my people through countless millennia.  In the Old Country, sweet potatoes hunted us with dogs and burned our villages.  Finally my ancestors fled Europe, clutching their grandmothers’ silver candlesticks, mere steps ahead of marauding sweet potato armies.  That is how we ended up in America. 

            Where we found the woods stiff with yet more sweet potatoes, and these were even deadlier.  These came with miniature marshmallows.

            My ancestors and sweet potatoes fought on different sides of the Civil War, and there is a story in my family that my great-great-grandmother, chancing to encounter General Meade on the way to the beer store, suggested, “Why don’t you burn out that nest of sweet potatoes at Gettysburg?”

            The feud persisted into modernity.  Sweet potatoes used to beat me up in junior high school, and one of them murdered my uncle, shot my dog and stole my Bible.

            All right, all right.  I’ve gotten carried away.  Actually, though it seems like longer, my war with sweet potatoes started in 1963, when my brother Frank was 4.   

Institutions did the most remarkable things to children in those pre-lawsuit days.  Then, as now, people simpered piously about children being special, magical, and the future; but just below the syrupy surface lay a lingering spare-the-rod ethos that would leap out at you like a barracuda if you made it mad.  Our generation was paddled routinely for sass, for forgotten homework, for daydreaming.  I got it once for staring out the doorway at the spring.  If that remained an infraction into adulthood I would be a hardened con by now, with tattoos and a girlfriend named Butch.

In any case, baby Frank wouldn’t eat the sweet potato casserole served at his nursery school, so some sweet-looking old lady of the spare-the-rod persuasion held him down and crammed it down his throat.  His gorge rose up at this tyranny, and so did the sweet potatoes.  Which would have been fine if he’d aimed at the perpetrator but my brother’s timing was always a little off – in later life he would cheat on his prospective rich wife before she’d married him, earning him the boot instead of a fat divorce settlement.  In this instance his reaction was delayed rather than premature, and he waited to spew until he was in the back seat of our car, beside your narrator.

Vomit is bad enough.  But this was orange vomit, with marshmallows.

So I grew up with a hatred of sweet potatoes, an antipathy heightened by the truly obscene preparation traditional for this vegetable in American cookery.  Nobody puts chocolate syrup on broccoli.  Nobody smothers turnips in whipped cream.  Why, then, goo up the sweet potato with brown sugar, nuts and marshmallows, as if in some grotesque pretense it is a hot fudge sundae, only orange?  It is not just unappetizing, it is pornographic.  To vomit it is redundant.

Among my own family, avoiding sweet potatoes was never difficult – it wasn’t just me in the back seat of that Dodge – but Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws was more problematic.  The big-haired Baptist ladies who presided at these functions never could take no thank you for an answer, so that sometimes the only way to escape the table marshmallow-free was to set somebody on fire.

I did what I had to do.  Better jail time than sweet potatoes.  Better death.

            That all changed last year.  A neighbor grew sweet potatoes and somehow four of them made their way over here, possibly through the pet door.  They were always sneaky.  I watched them suspiciously for several weeks as they lay, vaguely malevolent, on the counter; then, not in any spirit of truce, but as a result of intense pressure from a segment of the domestic population to whom big-haired Baptists bearing marshmallows bore no terrors, I baked them. 

After that, it seemed cowardly not to taste them, so, fork trembling, knuckles white, I cut into one, lifted the steaming orange pulp of my ancient enemy to my bloodless lips, and found to my astonishment that, without the marshmallows, minus the sugary pools of gop, the sweet potato is –

Largely inoffensive.

            What, after decades of enmity you were expecting maybe love songs?  But I am prepared to admit they are vaguely edible.  Hey, it’s a start.

Anyway, last year my horticultural efforts were focused mostly on flowers.  Other years my gardens have centered around hot peppers or herbs.  This year, the theme I have chosen is:  subsistence.  These are hard times, and sometimes I worry we’ll all end up crawling around looking under rocks for grubs.  So I’m planting stick-to-your-ribs food crops to forestall the evil day.

And sweet potatoes, I have read, feed most of the world.  Grown in the Americas for 5000 years, ipomoea batatas quickly spread to Asia, Africa and the Pacific, where they are now staples.  They are reliable and easy to grow, with vining foliage that chokes out weeds.  They are filling and chock-full of vitamins, and internationally they are prepared in any number of fascinating ways, none of which involves miniature marshmallows.

So I’ll give sweet potatoes a few square feet of garden space this year.  They can’t taste any worse than grubs, right?  I’ve made peace with my ancient enemy at last!  

And if they don’t work out, what the heck, I can always torch their huts, shoot their headsmen, and enslave their children.   

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.

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

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.