Bob's Little Acre 101: An Intro to Bob

    This is a column I wrote as an "Intro to Bob" for the Chattanoogan.com, which began carrying BLA in March.  Anyone familiar with Bob is apt to recognize quite a few of the bits I Frankensteined it together from.

Welcome to Bob’s Little Acre!  Come On Down.  Have a Seat.  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 we planted it, convinces us there is something in the universe bigger than we are, that drinks less beer.

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

My name is Robin.  In my family, they call me Bob.  This patch of dirt is my garden, which my sister Laura named Bob’s Little Acre, from the nickname and from the Erskine Caldwell title “God’s Little Acre,” a novel about sin and suffering in the disgustin’ decayin’ South, which I do not suppose anyone reads these days but the name has stuck.   

So my garden has a literary name and as it happens I am a literary type of gardener.  One does not like to brag but it is a simple statement of fact that I can squeeze a Shakespeare quote out of a turnip. 

I frequently do.    

But  where are my manners?  Please sit down.  Not there.  That is the asparagus row, upon which I have just applied a generous truckload of –

Well, never mind.  I expect it will wash out. 

Of course the garden does not look like much now.  It has been winter, after all, my least favorite season.  One tries to embrace the now, as they say; but some nows are cuddlier than others and there is no point denying that in the Mystery Date lineup of seasons winter is not the Dreamboat type but perhaps his disappointing younger brother, the little runty one who breathes through his mouth and picks his nose at the dinner table.

Some people like winter but they tend to be the ones who also like shopping, and Christmas.  I’d rather be shot.  To us outdoorsy types, malls are sinister at the best of times.  Throw in holiday crowds, bell-ringers in Santa drag, and the Little Drummer Boy over the PA system and we find ourselves flopping on the tiles like salted slugs, our small, frightened eyes searching frantically for an exit sign.  Give us spring any day, and the kind of holiday that involves beer and sunshine. 

But I digress.  I was telling you about Bob’s Little Acre, my garden and by extension this feature, which is a gardening column.  Sort of.

I have always had a garden and I always will.  When I was a small, untidy child I doted excessively on dirt, my levels of happiness and filth in direct and dependent  proportion; and in the fullness of time I expect to be the kind of old woman who stumps through the garden in hip boots and housedress, booming out pronouncements like:

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

(Yes, Gentle Reader, that, I fear, is the soil amendment in which you are currently nestled; but the llama as I understand it is a herbivore and as such the ultimate product of its rather complicated digestive system is of no particular olfactory unpleasantness.)        

As I was saying, I am no longer a dirty urchin nor yet a muddy crone, but rather somewhere in the middle, not old enough to cram my wisdom down the throats of the young, perhaps, but grown far too canny, thank you very much, to swallow the happy horse – er, the llama excrement routinely dealt out as accepted wisdom in the gardening world.

“Plant corn after all danger of frost is past, wearing a blue shirt,” say salesmen at hardware stores, whose only claim to horticultural expertise is the possession of overalls.

 “Young plants benefit greatly from a side-dressing of well-rotted sturgeon, which will correct any latent Ph imbalance,” write county extension agents, and get paid for it.

Ph, indeed!  Note how shiftily they throw the term out, when they are stuck for a topic, or caught in a lie.  Ph trumps every time because no one has the faintest idea what it may mean.

In fact, exposing the untruths so glibly perpetuated in conventional garden writing has become the abiding mission of Bob’s Little Acre.  The column does dispense useful horticultural information – sometimes – but at its ardently pulsing heart is the tenet that most of what we know about gardening, much less the universe, is lies and male answer syndrome.  Without outraging the confines of modesty I believe I may say that Bob’s Little Acre has become to the county extension agent what Woodward was to Nixon.

The other basic tenet of BLA is:  dirt.  People have accused the column of leaning this way or the other way or being for this or against that.  The truth of the matter is that BLA doesn’t lean one way or the other so much as it flops down and rolls, and if it has an agenda it is dirt every time.  Bob’s Little Acre is to dirt what Princess Grace was to breast-feeding.   

So.  Spring approaches, and with it the siren call of dirt.  I invite you to return to Bob’s Little Acre each week and roll with me.  I am happy for the company.  Only do stop brushing at your clothes.  As the old saying goes, stay out of the garden if you can’t stand the –

      On second thoughts, perhaps that is not the way the old saying goes at all.

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

Red, Red Robin: A Commie in the Cabbage Patch

     My newspaper would probably deny this, and perhaps I'm being too sensitive; but I have found it to be true that the only letters-to-the-editor about your narrator that make it into print are the ones pointing out errors I've made.  I know there actually have been over the years a few "We Like BLA" letters, because the staff used to forward them to me for my private delectation.  (They don't anymore.)

     The letter that this column was written in response to was a funny combination of praise and condemnation.  It said something like:  Bob sure is funny, too bad she's a Commie.  So naturally the Sentinel printed it!

     I'm not going to go into the gradations of politics where I live, but trust me, out here you are not so much left, right or center as right, further right, or out there circlin' Jupiter.  It's why I don't talk politics!  I talk gardening!  But I guess I just don't look like a Republican and that's what the letter-writer was talking about.

     Anyway, I seized gleefully on the occasion to explain about the endnotes to the column, the bit about playing quietly in the dirt.  I lifted it from a guy named Voltaire and it encapsulated what I was trying to do politically when I first starting writing Bob, which was:  stay out of politics.

    And in any case, it gave me a chance to tell the fesse story.  I love the fesse story! 

A COMMIE IN THE CABBAGE PATCH:  BOB’S LITTLE MANIFESTO

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Choosing vegetables for one’s garden in the winter months provides the gardener a pleasurable and fat-free way to pass the long hibernal evenings, the opportunity to plan for maximum nutrition and efficiency, and the leisure to root out any potentially subversive influences that might transform the innocent seedbed into a hotbed of un-American activity.

            As I flipped through the Stokes catalog this morning, a patriotic smile curved my lips as I added to my list:  Corn.  America is built on corn.  Everything from breakfast cereal to face powder is made of corn in our mighty nation.  Words like “sweet,” “robust” and “traditional” are used in the ad copy. 

But as my eyes drifted through the glossy pictures, a worried frown creased my brow.  What was this variety, “Strawberry Popcorn?”  Oh, popcorn is all very well.  What could be more American than shoveling the fluffy salted puffs into one’s maw while sprawled on the carpet on a Saturday night, watching an old John Wayne movie?  But Strawberry?

Not to mince words, my dear, it was as red as Chairman Mao.

Give me vegetables that are green, I thought, the color of spring and U.S. dollars.  Green beans, spinach, bell peppers.  I paused, racked by a nagging doubt.  Peppers turn red when mature.  Well, lettuce then.  Lettuce is reliably green.

But wait a minute:  Is green not the color of the foam-mouthed environmentalist crazies who are destroying the very foundations of American life, according to the a.m. pundits?  Good lord, what vegetable was safe?

Cauliflower, I supposed; white is associated with purity.  But also with anemia, and pus.  I have never been attracted to the big pale globes like bumpy bleached brains.

Flipping disconsolately, I found myself on the beet page.  A sea of scarlet!  I was flooded by visions of Bolsheviks brandishing their spoons menacingly above bowls of blood-red borscht as they chanted, “We will bury you.”

I fainted.

All right.  I’m joking.  Historically, flowers may have stood for one movement or another but vegetables do not generally get into anything more political than, say, soup.  My point is, neither does your narrator.

I am reacting, with gentle hurt sarcasm, to a letter from a reader, published in the Sentinel last week, that, though praising Bob’s Little Acre, made reference to its narrator’s leftist leanings.

Let me make it clear that I am tickled pink by any mail at all, and that life has so humbled me that I am used to any compliments aimed in my direction being of the for-a-fat-girl-you-don’t-sweat-much variety.  My favorite was from another reader who observed how fortunate it was that I was such a failure as to write for a small newspaper, that I might be enjoyed locally.

And to be fair, the accusation of political bias was leveled not at my horticultural maunderings but my news coverage.  But this I find equally perplexing.  How much leftist propaganda can feasibly be worked into a story about new hours for the county dump?  Within the context of local politics, leaning left, right or center usually means you have fallen asleep, and are fixin’ to fall out of your chair.

I think if I have an agenda at all, it comes from Voltaire’s masterpiece, Candide, which I read in 10^th-grade French class.

In the story, the young Candide and his friends set out in the world with a certain ism – in this case, optimism, the view that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.  But immediately they are caught up in a series of catastrophes including plagues, wars, shipwrecks, the great earthquake of Lisbon and auto da fe hangings.

One character is an old lady who was once a beautiful princess (before being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery, of course).  When the other characters ask her to sit down and tell her story, she replies, “I will sit, but only on one fesse.”

In French, a fesse is the half of one’s derriere on one side or the other of its great dividing line.  It is just like the French to have a word for this.  It is just like the English not to.

But the old lady’s recounting of her tale is interrupted by the latest disaster.  “Quick!” say the others.  “We must escape.  Can you ride a horse?”

“Yes,” she replies, “though only on one fesse.”

As they trot away, she finishes telling her adventures, one of which involves being holed up with an army surrounded by Cossacks.  During the long winter siege, cannibalism provided the only nourishment, and her left fesse became dinner for the troops.

After many more such vicissitudes, the characters find themselves content to take shelter from the great conflicts of the world on a little farm where they grow vegetables.  The secret of life, they discover, is to abandon isms and to cultivate one’s own garden.

I took the phrase for my own.  Personally, I translate it:  “to play quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.”   

And it is my only agenda, whether rolling in the dirt or dishing it out.  Yes, I’m a little green – we gardeners can’t help it, it starts in the thumb and works its way up.  But red?  I may have borrowed Che’s cigar once or twice (though usually only as an afterthought, when I needed his machinegun), but I do not shelter from the sun under a little green hat with a star on it.  I prefer the Aunt Loweezy style of chapeau, thank you, with roses and grapes and a pinecone spray-painted gold. 

Well, I’ll get back to it, shall I?  Gardening-wise, I will continue to tell fantastically boring stories about tomatoes and my brother Frank; news-wise, what I try for is complete sentences, and keeping the reader awake.

And if, in either capacity, I seem to lean left or right, please be assured it’s nothing more significant than a temporary imbalance caused by one missing fesse.

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