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.

The Gospel of St. Spud

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

By Robin Ford Wallace

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

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

The Church doesn’t canonize people like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grow potatoes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They get that way underground!

There can't be much to do

So now they have blue ones too!

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

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

END

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

THE MARKET, THE RECESSION AND A LITTLE DOUBLETALK ABOUT TULIPS

THE MARKET, THE RECESSION AND A LITTLE DOUBLETALK ABOUT TULIPS

By Robin Ford Wallace

Today we will talk about tulips.

            Actually, today we will talk about the economy.  The fiscal situation is grave.  World depression looms.

            Nope.  Tulips.

            We insist.  In these troubled times, it would be an obscene waste of such access to the public ear as we are fortunate enough to retain to froth on about horticulture while soup lines – 

 Tulips!  Tulips!  Tulips!

            Hmm.  We seem to be of two minds.  Unfortunate, but perhaps our little problem may in any case elucidate to the reader our rationale for referring to ourself in the pleural.

 Suppose, then, that we talk about the economy within the subtext of floriculture, and make everybody happy. 

            Tulips, though we think of them in connection with Holland, are not native there.  Introduced from the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s, though, they took the place by storm, immediately becoming coveted status symbols to the flower-mad Dutch. 

            By the early 1600s, the most highly prized tulips – those in which a mosaic virus had caused colors to variegate and stripe – were in such hot demand that, according to records of the time, one bulb could be traded for 1000 pounds of cheese, a dozen fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine or 12 acres of land.  There was money in tulips, and speculators moved hungrily in. 

            Tulips bloomed in April, and the bulbs could only be dug up and sold from June to September.  So for the rest of the year, traders signed contracts for tulip futures.  Contracts were then bought up en masse and traded as a larger commodity, a process called bundling.

            Holland was by now exporting tulips, and prices soared until a bulb might fetch 16 times the annual wages of a skilled worker.  Everybody from rich merchants to kitchen maids began investing.  It was the original speculative bubble.

            And, in February 1637, it burst.  There came a point at which somebody finally said, “A dozen sheep for that?  Hello?  It’s, like, a flower.  How many hogsheads of wine have you been drinking?”

So the market collapsed, fortunes were lost, and ruined businessmen jumped to their deaths (from windmills, we presume, skyscrapers being rare at the time).  When, that spring, a professor saw a tulip blooming during his daily constitutional, he beat it to a pulp with his walking stick.

            Or so the story goes.  Some economists believe it, and use tulipmania as a paradigm for modern conditions.  Others say it’s propaganda, that markets fluctuate but correct themselves with godlike wisdom.  And some blame the Dutch government, which legislated changes to tulip contracts when things started to look really scary.

            But inevitably, it reminds us of our current economic downturn, in which some blame the government for not regulating the market while others blame it for regulating too much.  Also blamed are unscrupulous businessmen, greedy labor unions, Republicans, Democrats, the rich, and even the poor, on the grounds that they started the whole thing by buying homes they could not pay for.  That, by the way, is our favorite argument, not because it’s true but because it makes us feel included. 

As for what really caused the crash, who knows?  At Bob’s Little Acre, we do not dole out wisdom about the stock market, mostly because we do not, technically, know what it is.  From the name, we imagine it as a place inhabited by cows, oxen and possibly ducks, because when we listen to the financial news it always sounds like, “The Dow-Jones Industrial quack quack quack.”

But unschooled as we are, even we notice the contradictions.  A year ago we read pious little editorials about the evils of overconsumption.  The whole problem, we were told, was that Americans spent money we didn’t have on things we didn’t need.

            Now we are told that the recession happened because we didn’t consume enough.  The only way to save ourselves, we read, is to start shopping again, or remodel the upstairs bathroom. 

How?  For most of us, going shopping would mean losing our place in the breadline, and we don’t actually have an upstairs bathroom, having resided in a refrigerator box since we lost our job.  Which was shipped overseas by a company that considered American workers too expensive, and subsequently went belly-up because unemployed Americans could no longer afford its products.  

            Such counsel makes us glad to be a gardener.  Gardeners, more than other Americans, know that most advice we are given, whether by magazines, extension agents or our neighbor Jim, is contradictory, insane and an utter lie. 

Yes, though we gardeners are in the same grim economic boat as everybody else – we grow our own potatoes but still need somewhere to buy our beer – from long years of wallowing in the mud we are possibly a bit closer to the ground. 

And what we say is, if it was all a house of cards, why rebuild it?  Our system may not have been built on tulips, but if it was built on bling and designer coffee what’s the difference? 

Every December we listen to sanctimonious lectures on the true meaning of Christmas from the same people who then stampede the malls.   Maybe it’s time for a new model, where less really is more, where people would never dream of building a house with more bathrooms than residents to pee in them, where we trade our hogsheads of wine for neither tulip bulbs nor Rolexes but cheerfully swill them on the lawn while we watch our gardens grow..

Now we must leave because we really do have tulips to plant.  Keeping up with the Joneses is anathema to our cozy little utopia, of course; but if our flowers are not prettier than the neighbors’ come spring we will shrivel up like salted slugs.

Does that sound odd?  Well, if we have gathered nothing else from the great economic minds of our nation, we have, anyway, learned to talk out of both sides of our mouth.

END

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

    

The Great Lies of Gardening

THE GREAT LIES OF GARDENING

BY ROBIN FORD WALLACE

       There is a saying that nowhere are you closer to God than in a garden.  For those of us whose idea of heaven is rolling in the dirt with a trowel in our hand, the adage is a statement of the obvious.  To stumble across a perennial blooming in the spring, a year after we’d forgotten we planted it, convinces us there is something in the universe bigger than we are, that drinks less beer.

But there, I have noticed, the parallel between religion and gardening does not end.  For all gardeners have their dogmas and their creeds, and they will look you straight in the eye and tell you theirs is the only way – despite the fact that each is saying exactly the opposite as the one before.  If you got together a group of gardeners to discuss how to grow asparagus, you would probably hear more contradictions than you would at a scripture interpretation forum attended by Baptists and Muslims.  

At a rose pruning seminar, I learned that you must prune your climbing roses only after the first flowering, because roses bloom on old wood.  Then we split into groups to watch the individual experts prune.  The expert I was watching stressed the importance of pruning climbing roses in early March so that they would have time to grow strong new wood for the flowers to bloom on.   When I got home to my own roses, I stood there with my clippers like a surgeon wondering which organ to remove. 

In the end, though, I remembered noticing that no matter what they said, all the experts seemed to prune by the general rule:  Take no prisoners.  Given a pair of secateurs, every one of them turned into Lawrence of Arabia during the second half of the movie, the part where you wish it was in black and white.  If their roses could survive that, I imagined mine wouldn’t mind a few timid snips here and there.  

I’ve learned by now to ignore most of the experts’ advice and there’s nothing wrong with my roses, either.  All my friends admire them extravagantly, at least the ones who are Japanese beetles. 

So I’ve become the gardening equivalent of an agnostic, mostly because of the direct contradictions that I hear from different gardeners, some of them married to each other, and read in gardening articles, some of them in the same magazine.  I call them The Great Lies of Gardening, and I will share a few here:

q       You must water only in the morning.

q       You must water only in the evening.

q       You must water (you idiot) in the afternoon.

Morning proponents say if you water in the evening you are exposing your plants to fungal infection and disease.  Evening waterers say if you water in the morning it will just evaporate during the day and do your plants no good.  Both agree that you must never, even if someone is threatening you with a gun, water in the afternoon.  It is perfectly natural, they say, for plants to conserve moisture in the hot sun by letting their leaves wilt. 

Meanwhile, afternoon waterers say what are you, stupid?  The time to water your plants is when they need water, in the hot afternoon when they’re drooping from thirst.

Now, on to some lies of tomatoes:

q       You must plant two to a cage.

q       You must plant one to a cage.

q       You must remove all suckers.

Now, here I will say that one doctrine that even I, the gardening agnostic, adhere to is that the best way to grow tomatoes is in cages.  Not the ones you buy at gardening centers, those are always too small, but big ones that you make from concrete reinforcement fencing. 

But as for spacing, I think the reason some people tell you to plant two to a cage is that they start too many tomato plants and they don’t know where else to put them.  And I think the reason others say to plant only one per cage is that they have supreme contempt for those who lack the self-control to start a sensible number of plants.    I have been in both camps, and I can tell you I don’t see much difference in one versus two, unless you plant a red variety in with a golden, in which case you’ll spend the summer hopelessly confused as to which ones are ripe.  Trust me.

Whether you plant one or two, the tomato vines grow to fill all available space – unless, I presume, you remove the suckers.  I have been growing tomatoes for 25 years and my crops are famous.  I supply my neighbors, I give them to people I don’t even like, I give them to people who beg me to stop.  And what I have to say about removing suckers is:  What are suckers?

I never have figured it out.   “Sucker” sounds bad, like a tumor or something, but whenever I ask people what it means, they say, “like, a branch,” and I end up scratching my head.  Aren’t plants supposed to have, like, branches?  

There are many more lies than I have space to tell.  Broadly, the rule is that any definite statement about how to grow anything is bound to be untrue, even if your grandfather said it.  This year, with garden phlox, I triumphantly disproved a Germinate In Total Darkness lie I read on the back of the seed packet .  They came up fine in full sunlight.

It is only fair to say, though, that the seeds also came up in total darkness – just as the old-wood and new-wood rosarians both grow lovely roses, just as morning, afternoon and evening waterers all manage to save their gardens from drought, just as other gardeners manage to grow a few tomatoes in between nervously policing their plants for suckers. 

So perhaps the Great Lies of Gardening are really not lies.  Perhaps the only lie is: This is the only way.

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