A Garden is Like a River

 

                         

All right.  I decided to post this one not because of its shining brilliance but because my husband dug me up a picture of the River O’ Petunias and I’ve been gloating over it during this interminable blizzard like a lifer over a Hustler mag.

The photo shows the River O’ in perhaps its second year, not its most spectacular, which was certainly the first, when I wrote this Bob’s Little Acre about it.  Like the man says, you can’t step in the same River O’ twice.

A GARDEN IS LIKE A RIVER.  SORT OF.

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Old joke:  A wise man says to his disciple, “Life is like a river.”

            “Life is like a river,” the disciple, deeply impressed, tells a second disciple, and the second disciple passes the wisdom on to a third, who passes it to a fourth, and so on until perhaps the twentieth disciple asks the nineteenth.  “Wait a minute.  How is life like a river?”

            “I don’t know,” admits the nineteenth, and asks the eighteenth, who asks the seventeenth, and so on until the question makes its way back to the wise man.

            Who shrugs.  “So,” he says.  “Maybe life isn’t like a river.”

            Still, people are always comparing life to one thing or another, and bodies of water and horticulture figure prominently.  I can’t count the times I’ve read, “The river of life,” or “Life is like a garden.” 

Nowhere, however, have I read, “A garden is like a river,” so I’m not altogether sure where I got the idea for the mighty Petunia River that now dominates my front yard and life.  All I know is:  This thing is bigger than I am. 

I don’t say that merely because it takes two garden hoses to water it.  What I mean is, I think it’s Art.

The Petunia River is to the ordinary flowerbed what the Pyramids are to the Quonset hut.  It is Everest.  It is the Sistine Chapel.  It is an epic, cast-of-thousands Cecil B. De Mille flood in living color that meanders, cascades and undulates down the length of this little acre, finally to empty into a plunge basin of impatiens around a willow tree at the bottom of the hill. 

It is my chef d’oeuvre, my opus.  It is the crowning achievement of a life spent rolling in the dirt. 

It is also the reason for the weeds in the pea patch and the fact that the squash swells to the size of your average Wal-Mart shopper before I get around to picking it.  What is food next to Art? 

The idea of the River might have sprung from the variety of petunia I planted, Wave, a name that suggests aquatic motion.  Or it may have its genesis in the geography of this place, which is so vertical that things are always losing their moorings and rolling merrily down toward the road, including topsoil, mulch, beer cans, and, more than once, your narrator.

Or I may just be barking mad.

People tell me I am and I used to worry about it, but it has long since ceased to bother me.  In my experience, when people tell you you’re crazy it usually just means you’re driving them that way, which is regrettable but hardly the same thing.

            Besides, if you read the news you’ll notice that people who really are nuts never suspect a thing.  They just go on their way rejoicing, believing that it is perfectly normal to communicate by letter bomb or keep UPS deliverymen cut up and parceled out in freezer bags.  So worrying about your sanity is a pretty good sign that you’re sane, or so I tell myself as I twitch and slobber.

            But I will admit the River represents a possibly psychotic departure from my usual gardening style.  I’m not big on design.  Like everyone else, I admire the glossy pictures in gardening mags, but always with a certain contemptuous realism  -- nice, but it ain’t gonna happen here, I work. 

I’m more the slash-and-burn type.  I don’t plant flowers in the place they’d look best, I plant them in a bare spot left where the dog’s wading pool has killed the grass.

I do, though, have a thing about rivers.

Throughout time (which Thomas Wolfe compared to a river), poems, novels and silly testosterone-laden movies about fishing have attested to the magic and mystery of rivers.  From the Styx to the Jordan, they figure in the world’s religions, and from the Nile to the Rubicon they figure in the world’s history.  Songs have been sung about them by everyone from Homer to Otis Redding.  Rivers are important to our culture.

Some of the best times of my life have been at rivers, though I don’t mind admitting they involved less of culture than of beer and inner tubes.  Still, isn’t there a kind of poetry in happy memories, whether or not you were drunk at the time?

In any case, I feel a certain mystic reverence for rivers and am always stunned by their beauty.  So perhaps that’s why the one Grand Design of my gardening life has been the Petunia River. 

I don’t think so, though.  I think I just looked at the hill and saw a mighty confluence of pink and purply blue petunias rolling organically down its slope, precisely as Michelangelo looked at a slab of marble and saw his David prance nakedly forth. I can’t explain it any better than that.  To understand the process, you’d have to be a great artist like Michelangelo and me.

Just joking.  This has been my only brush with Art and it is seriously starting to get on my nerves.  My lettuce bolted before I even noticed it was ready to pick, and as my husband points out we can’t eat petunias.

Still, I’m not unhappy I did it.  Yard work has so commandeered my life that if somebody asked me what I’d been doing for the last 30 years I’d have to admit, “Mostly mowing grass.”  Now I can anyway say, “What?  You never heard of the Petunia River?”

Well, I will stop trying to explain Art.  You either get it or you don’t.  I will merely shrug, look wise, and say:

“So.  Why shouldn’t a garden be like a river?”

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.

Truth, Justice and Chocolate Chip Cookies: Part 1

            Once I was shopping at the Bi-Lo in Trenton, Ga., when I was assaulted by the odor of freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies.  Green light began shooting from my eyes, and slobber dripped from my newly emergent fangs.  Helplessly, I was drawn by the aroma as a moth to flame, and I made my way over to the bakery counter trampling fellow shoppers and overturning display counters in my haste.

            “May I buy just one of those chocolate chip cookies?” I asked the pleasant-looking woman behind the counter.

            “No, hon, I’m not allowed to sell you one cookie,” she said.  “So I reckon I’ll just have to give it to you.”

            It was the kind of moment a fat girl remembers for the rest of her life.  The cookie was perfect, the chocolate chips still liquid, and furthermore it was washed down with the milk of human kindness.

            Now.  Fast-forward four or five years.  Bi-Lo had by then gotten in the habit of putting a dispenser of free cookies on that same bakery counter, which ruined my diet some days and some days did not.  I am helpless before melty chocolate but cold and superior when confronted by those flinty sugar cookies with multicolored sprinkles.  But whether I ate one or not, the cookies made me feel warm and loved, reminding me of my summum bonum cookie moment.

            Then, one terrible day, a sign sprang up beside the cookie jar:  “Free cookies for children 12 and under.”

            I was embittered.  If nothing spells lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven, I had to face the grim reality that Bi-Lo no longer loved me.  I was too OLD.  Geriatrics like me were good enough to write checks at the register, but could we have a cookie?  No!  Cookies were for the young and cute.

            And that, Gentle Reader, is how I became a crusading journalist.  It became an obsession with me to get that sign taken down, and that’s why I veered off the garden path in Bob’s Little Acre to detour down the cookie aisle.  One column didn’t do it, so a couple of weeks later I had another shot.  Here they are, in order.

            Alas!  Bi-Lo never reversed its ageist cookie policy.  It just started putting the cookies somewhere safe, under the more cheerful message:  “Kids!  Ask our friendly bakers for a free cookie!”

            So I lost, but at least they took down the obnoxious sign, huh?  I really was on the verge of writing column no. 3 under the screaming headline:

           
TEAR DOWN THIS SIGN, MR. COOKIE CHEF!  

Why You Should Grow A Garden (With Some Peripheral Comments on Cookies)

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Do you know how to get rid of a tapeworm?  You can do it in just three days.

            On day one, eat a nice dinner, balanced, plenty of vegetables; and then eat a cookie for dessert.

            On day two, eat another nutritious, home-cooked meal; and then have a delicious cookie to finish up.

            On day three, have yourself yet another cozy little supper, only this time:  No cookie.  When the tapeworm pops his head out of your mouth to demand, “WHERE’S MY COOKIE?” you grab him and pull him out hand over hand.

            But this is not a column about tapeworms.  I just thought a little joke would be a pleasant way to lead into this week’s subject, which is:

            Why You Should Grow A Garden.

            A lot of times when people say “you” what they really mean is “I.”  They say, “You know how great you feel when your hard work at last pays off and you’re finally awarded that promotion, or the Nobel Prize?”  When of course you have no idea how that feels!  Nothing like that ever happens to you; you are in fact lying in a ditch sullenly drinking whiskey and taking boozily inaccurate potshots at the repo men who are carrying off your washing machine.

            Well, for heaven’s sake, there I go, doing it myself! 

But when I say “why you should grow a garden,” I really do mean you.  There’s no question about me.  When the year turns to spring and gentle breezes carry floral perfumes to my hungrily snuffling nostrils, I can no more resist the siren call of dirt than you could walk by a plate of free cookies at the grocery store without reaching out and –

All right.  So this time maybe I do mean me when I say “you.”  For all I know you could walk right past that plate of cookies as flintily indifferent as one of those white-lipped medieval saints carved from cold and unfeeling marble, your hands folded primly on your grocery cart, your eyes trained dead ahead at the lettuce leaves in the produce section, your sanctimonious little brain thinking primly about something you recently read in the Bible. 

Aren’t you special?

Anyway, I’ll try to stop mixing me up with you, but I’m warning you right now that we’ll never get through with this gardening column if you can’t stop obsessing about chocolate chip cookies.  So let’s not say one more word about right-from-the-oven cookies so hot that the chocolate chips are an oozing glossy-brown liquid that sticks to your fingers and melts on your tongue like –

 Well.  This is not a column about cookies.  The reason you should grow a garden is:  it’s time to declare war on grocery stores.  

Why?  It’s a matter of maintaining the integrity of the food supply.  The outside aisles of a grocery store contain real food:  the dairy section has milk, cheese and butter; the meat counter, beef, fish, pork and chicken; the produce aisle,  fresh fruits and vegetables; the bakery counter, bread and just-baked chocolate chip –

Ahem.  But that’s just the outside.  The interior of the grocery store is a vast wasteland of chemical-packed, ultra-processed, dehydrated, reconstituted, ascorbic-acid-added-to-retain-color, boxed, canned and plastic-wrapped corn and soy byproducts that don’t even look like food. 

I was reading a newspaper article the other day about the new scientifically engineered cheeseburger Dorito.  Teams of scientists have worked tirelessly to time-release the flavors so that you don’t taste the onion until a second or two after the pickle hits your tongue. 

Gentle Reader, THAT’S – NOT – FOOD!  That’s chemistry!      

            All right already (you might reply impatiently)!  Everyone by now knows processed food is bad for you but nobody forces anybody to eat it!  

Anyway (you might add accusingly), who are you to rant about Doritos when you can’t seem to write a full paragraph without mentioning chocolate chip cookies? 

Also (you might conclude relentlessly), you can’t declare war on grocery stores!  Didn’t you write in this very space in October 2007:    

“I love the grocery store.  Every summer I threaten to move in.  Their air conditioning is better than mine, there’s food all around, and sometimes they give you cookies.”

            All right!  I confess! 

This is, too, a column about cookies.

            To wit:  A grocery store in town used to have a plate of cookies on offer at the bakery counter.  I tend to be always on a diet or off  it, so sometimes I’d take a cookie and sometimes I wouldn’t.  No big deal.

            But then the plate of cookies sprouted a sign:  “Free cookies for children 12 and under.”

            Which may have sounded OK to whoever thought of it – they’re providing a treat for tykes, right? – but every time I walked by it, it hurt my feelings again, because in my way-way-way-over-12 case it translated to: 

“DON’T TOUCH THESE COOKIES, LARDBUTT!”

            At first it just made me a little sniffy – “FYI,” I’d sniff, “very few children 12 and under have checkbooks and make the family’s food-buying decisions.”

Then I became morally indignant: “This is ageism!  I’ll sue!”

But taking it to court would make it sound like I really had a chip on my shoulder, and I didn’t think the judge would take me any more seriously because it happened to be chocolate. 

So instead, I began brooding malevolently, decided to declare war on grocery stores, and seem to have killed an entire garden column carrying on about it.

Well, it is spring, and time to roll in the dirt.  Next time I promise to be more on-task. 

But there’s such a thing as social justice, and sometimes even garden writers must put down the trowel and ask the hard questions, such as:

“WHERE’S MY COOKIE?”

END

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

Why You Should Grow A Garden (With Practically No Mention of Cookies)

By Robin Ford Wallace

           

            This crusadin’ journalism biz gets to be a habit.  You get so used to exposing corruption and righting wrongs, you find yourself doing it while you brush your teeth.  Like the other day I got to delvin’ around and before I knew what hit me I had unearthed three bank frauds, two crooked politicians and a mistress in Argentina, when all I’d been looking for was some horseradish for my chicken sandwich..

            So it was that in the last Bob’s Little Acre I sat down to write an earnest little treatise on Why You Should Grow a Garden and instead found myself passionately protestin’ discriminatory cookie policies at the Bi-Lo.  So here I am back again to take another stab.  Here goes.

Why You Should Grow a Garden: 

            Last summer I overheard a man talking about what nice tomatoes you could buy at this time of year and I was stricken with pity.  Buy?  Tomatoes?  In the middle of summer, in the middle of the country?  I figured this was some poor slob nobody loved, not even his mother.

Then I started thinking about that – who would I get tomatoes from if I didn’t grow them myself?  I used to have a friend I’d trade off produce with, until one day she asked for something I didn’t want to give up.   So I said no, she took umbrage, then she took revenge.  Two years later I’m still reelin’ from the aftermath.

            So reason No. 1 to grow a garden is:  to avoid human contact.  It comes out cheaper in the long run to buy tomatoes than to fool around with friendship, but home-grown are better and anyway gardens are lovely places to be alone in.  If people do butt in it is the work of a moment to chase them away with your hoe, and persistent intruders, with only a bit more trouble, make excellent compost. 

            But seriously, the more important reason to grow a garden is:  to save America.

            A few weeks ago there was an article in the gardening section of our daily newspaper about Hispanic immigrants showing their neighbors how to grow food.  These hard-working Latinos didn’t spend a lot of money on bagged soil or chemical fertilizer, the writer marveled; they just worked the earth with their hand tools until it felt “ready.”

            Yes!  I thought.   Finally somebody who understood dirt.

            Then, the very next week, the very same gardening section of the very same newspaper ran an article on growing tomatoes.  All the advice was from a guy who ran a nursery in town, and his advice on tomato plants was: 

Buy them from me. 

            Far be it from Bob’s Little Acre to offer discouragin’ words to that gardening section as it struggles arduously upward toward elusive mediocrity, but what do you expect when, instead of charging your advertisers for space, you let them write your articles? 

Anyway, this was a nice nurseryman and as it happens I personally finance yachts for him every spring as I go barking mad in his wonderful garden center; so I could have forgiven everything except for his advice on the soil you need for growing tomatoes, which was:

            Buy it from me.

            Buy dirt?  Hadn’t anybody paid attention the week before, about working the earth until it was ready?  About gardeners being producers, not consumers? 

Excuse me.  I don’t mean to rant, but we’ve got a nation to save here.

            America is a lot of things – a beautiful idea, a noble experiment – but one thing it also is that we shouldn’t forget is:

            Dirt.

            Countries are made of the stuff.  The Irish affectionately call theirs “The Auld Sod,” and longtime readers of this space may remember my quoting Rupert Brooke’s beautiful, patriotic poem in my article on compost.  If he died fighting for his homeland, he wrote, some corner of a foreign field would “a richer dust conceal… that is forever England.”  Meaning, you see, Rupert, and I’m afraid that’s precisely what happened.  But what the poem points out is that England is made of dirt, and that Rupert is made of England. 

            Closer to home, another poetic image I have frothed on about through the years is the notion of Walt Whitman’s presence in blades of grass, a conceit that always makes me gaze pensively at the bottoms of my Reeboks as I sit sipping the post-mow adult beverage.  Dear Walt says “grass,” not “dirt,” but one assumes he got there through the root system.

Americans have come to think of dirt as coming in bags in just the same way they think of food coming in foil-wrapped geometrical squares you warm up in the toaster.  When in fact processed food is like those bundled financials that poisoned our economy; if there is anything real in there it is too balled up in toxins to do anybody much good. 

            What can we do about it?  Politicos carry on about getting back to “core values.”  Well, you don’t get any more core than dirt.  Real food comes from it, and gardening is all about rolling in it. 

Anyway, if America is dirt and we are America, are we really prepared to let the only people who understand dirt be immigrants whose right to be on it is argued bitterly in every election?

            So that is why you should grow a garden:  it is your patriotic duty.  I hope we’ve got that straight now.  But before we go:

I still want that cookie.

END

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

A History in Squash

     I wrote this in 2005, not that long after Bob's Little Acre began.  I believe it was my first attempt at branching into food writing, or raving on about my family.  I never stopped either, and I still make the squash casserole, too. 

A History in Squash

Vegetative Reminiscences by Robin Ford Wallace

            Recently, I returned after a three-week vacation to find –

            Well, you don’t want to know.  After three weeks of neglect, my garden could be more aptly characterized as Bob’s Little Rain Forest.  There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed by the more productive sounds of the lawn mower buzzing around in a business-like fashion, secateurs decapitating deadheads in a grim rhythm reminiscent of the French Revolution, and your narrator cussing muscularly as she dislodged weed after weed like Madame DeFarge dispatching aristocrats.

            My corn had either not come up or it had been subsumed into another time-space continuum, where, presumably, it is keeping the flowers out front company, because they aren’t there either.  So after having spent most of the winter planning a magazine-cover garden, I must now be content with a “WLHL” theme – Whatever Lowe’s Had Left..

The one pleasant surprise was that the tiny squash plants I’d left were now teeming with vegetables, some the size of Western states.  What else was there to do but to make Aunt Fanny’s Cabin Squash Casserole?

             If this were a normal gardening column, I would now give you a recipe for squash casserole.  It isn’t and I won’t; you must wait while I maunder on about Aunt Fanny’s Cabin and my brother Jack. 

            When I was growing up, Aunt Fanny’s Cabin was situated on Campbell Road in Smyrna, Ga., in between my house and my high school.  Today it would be so politically incorrect that if you went there you might actually fall over dead in mortification.  Back then it was just shocking.

            Outside, it was made to look like an old slave cabin.  On the sign, the N’s in Fanny were turned around the wrong way to show that Fanny was no Rhodes scholar.  Inside, the place was posh, with pictures on the walls of celebrities who had eaten there.

             The waitresses at Aunt Fanny’s were required to be black and enormously fat, and they were all dressed like Mammy in Gone With The Wind.  I remember 25 years ago thinking how degrading it was for them; now, 40-plus and spreading myself, I am wryly amused at the idea that there used to be a place you could make stripper-level tips when you weighed 280.

            After you sat down, a little black boy would come to you with a blackboard hung around his neck like a Saint Bernard.  This was the menu.  Really I suppose the little boy was the son or grandson of one of the waitresses but even 25 years ago I don’t know how they got away with it.  To say nothing of the chair-squirming indignity of it, weren’t there child labor laws? 

            The menu was simple and expensive.  You could have steak, fried chicken or perhaps catfish, and whatever you ordered you would get the vegetables, all of them cooked to death with masses of fat, in fact delicious in a myocardial-infarction-inducing kind of way.

            Aunt Fanny’s catered, surprise, surprise, to the tourist trade.  At the Cabin, diners could pay out the nose for a taste of what was being marketed, anyway, as The Old South.  But the prices were way too high for those of us in the working-class neighborhoods surrounding it, so despite the fact that I passed the place a couple of times a day on the school bus, I would probably never have crossed the threshold had it not been for my brother Jack,.

In high school, Jack got a job as a busboy there.  He was the kind of kid who always had his own money from the time he was 5, usually from ways that wouldn’t bear investigation.  Working at the Cabin, he made enough money to buy a car before he was old enough to drive it, so  he’d push it out of the driveway without turning on the motor, hoping no one would notice.  This worked except for the times he had an accident or got stopped by the police.  Then there would be hell to pay but Jack was used to it and took it as a matter of course.  He was dashing and corrupt and the girls were all mad for him.

So were the 280-pound waitresses and the customers, and whatever his faults Jack was a good worker.  He was promoted and after he graduated he became an assistant manager at Aunt Fanny’s.

So there Jack was, 20-something, making good money and living at home where there was free rent and laundry service, enjoying the careless, sinful life every boy dreams of, at last freed from the injurious strictures of the public education system.  The only thing he’d ever liked about school was the girls.

This fondness for high school girls endured far past Jack’s graduation, in fact, and was reciprocated generously.  One of them, a busgirl at Aunt Fanny’s, was so crazy about Jack that she used to climb in his window at my parents’ house at night, with the predictable result.

The predictable result is now attending college in South Carolina and is called Tess.  Jack and Lisa have a boy as well, though they got out of the restaurant biz and anyway Aunt Fanny’s shut down in the ‘90s, whether from financial trouble or embarrassment I don’t know. 

Now.  Wasn’t I saying something about squash casserole?

Take squash and stew or steam it with onions until it is almost mush.  Then drain, add cracker crumbs and an entire stick of butter and, with a fork or potato masher, reduce it the rest of the way to mush.  Salt and pepper it to taste, put it in an iron skillet and bake at 400 until the top is brown.  

You may vary the amounts depending on how much squash you’ve got.  The only secret is to add enough butter to make a doctor drop you as a patient.

THE END

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

Why You Need a Greenhouse, and Possibly an Easy-Bake Oven

WHY YOU NEED A GREENHOUSE, AND POSSIBLY AN EASY-BAKE OVEN

BY ROBIN FORD WALLACE AND HER INNER CHILD

            Do you need a greenhouse?

            With heat costs at record highs, food prices soaring and Christmas bills to pay, should you shell out the bucks to build and maintain a structure from which you will probably never realize any financial gain whatsoever?

            Well, probably.

            No!  Don’t listen!  That wasn’t me talking.  That was my inner child.  She’s been on the rampage lately.  Today she grabbed a chilidog sample at the grocery store and stuffed it into my mouth before I could pry it out of her grubby little fingers.  I would have explained it was going to be cold and nasty as well as choked with fat grams, but I couldn’t, my mouth was full of chilidog. 

She doesn’t understand things like nutrition.  That’s why she’s so fat.

            All right.  Now that the little dumpling is off pouting, let’s talk about greenhouses as fast as we can before she finishes her fudgesicle and comes butting back in.

            I won’t tell you how to build a greenhouse.  You can find plans in almost any gardening magazine.  You can order kits or get smaller ones delivered whole.  You can spend anywhere from a couple of hundred dollars to your credit card limit.

            Whatever you spend initially, though, over the years you’ll spend a lot more.  First, you need to heat your greenhouse.  Going in, many of us don’t grasp that.  We understand that light and heat are trapped by our greenhouse and we think that will suffice.  Then we peek in one January night when it’s 18 degrees outside and notice that inside our scientifically designed greenhouse it’s a toasty 21.

            Some optimists suggest warming your greenhouse with plastic garbage cans filled with water.  During the day, the water absorbs heat, and during the night, it radiates it.  I didn’t major in science but even I can figure out that if I used enough garbage cans in my tiny greenhouse to make any difference in the temperature, I wouldn’t have enough room for plants, or possibly even my butt.

            So you will need some kind of heater for your greenhouse, one with a thermostat.  The idea is to set it as low as possible so that it flips on automatically and runs just long enough to keep things from freezing.  You can get something like that for around $40 at any home store, but of course the electricity costs money, too.

            Whoops.  I forgot to tell you that you’d better get your greenhouse wired for electricity.  Heat-wise, you could always use LP, but you’ll need lights out there so you can continue playing after dark, and eventually you’ll begin making the case for a refrigerator.

            You’ll also need ventilation.  In the South, you’ll usually only need the heater at night.  Except in the frostiest weather, though, the greenhouse is so good at trapping sunlight that it gets way too hot during the day.  So you must trot out and open windows and doors, and an exhaust fan doesn’t hurt, either.

            Now.  Did I mention plumbing?  You’d better have a hose in your greenhouse or you’ll be schlepping buckets out there like Molly Pitcher, twice a day when it’s sunny.  And if you want to take a week’s vacation, you’d better hire somebody to greenhouse-sit, because otherwise you’re going to come home to find toast where your plants used to be.

            In conclusion, having a greenhouse entails not only expense but also considerable trouble.  That being said, why have one?

            Because of that odious inner child, that’s why.  She always wanted a playhouse and her parents were too poor to get her one, and the stupid girl has been sulking about it for decades.  She’s still mad about the Suzy Homemaker Easy-Bake Oven, too.

            Not that I believe in coddling the inner child.  She is nothing but trouble.  She grabs at cookies when I’m on a diet and whines about playing outside when I’m at work.  In tense situations, when I’m trying to be aloof and professional, she’ll get her pink feelings hurt and start either to cry or cuss.  You wouldn’t believe some of the words she knows. 

In fact, she’s gotten me into so much trouble that if I could get our hands on her, I’d beat her until DFAICS (Department of Family and Inner Children’s Services) came to take her away, and then I’d wave a beer can at them and tell them they could keep the little slut.

But I’m stuck with her, and I find the greenhouse keeps her from poisoning our system with moon pies or quitting our job in the winter, when she’s bored and subject to tantrums.  She thinks it’s cool because it’s just like a real house, only little, and she plays happily in the mud out there for hours.  The electric bill is a small price to pay.

Though I draw the line at the Easy-Bake Oven.

END

     Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where her inner child plays quietly in the dirt, smeared with chocolate around the mouth.

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 Treatise on Taters

     This “tater treatise”  was the first Bob’s Little Acre that was ever published, if not the first ever written.  (That was “The Great Lies of Gardening,” which really was the BLA manifesto.)  The then-editor of the Dade County Sentinel, Chris Conley, wanted a few columns in reserve before he printed any, and by the time he got around to printing me at all it was St. Patrick’s Day and he chose to start with this one.  So it was my inaugural piece, in March 2005. 

     There are as many ways to write about potatoes as there are to cook them, so somehow I started writing a new potato piece every year.  Here I have gathered them all together and posted them in – I believe – the correct chronological order.

   

A TREATISE ON TATERS

By Robin Ford Wallace

On Saint Patrick’s Day, Irish pubs across the nation serve green beer, without which lubrication no human could achieve the high parts of Danny Boy, the performance of which may yet be classified as an Olympic sport; and without whose mellowing influence nobody would want to.

No Irish pubs may be found here in the Rising Fawn, Ga., metro area.  Here the closest thing to a pub is the dirt road in front of my house, where discarded bottles and cans give evidence of our area’s secret drinkers,  whether of Irish extraction or otherwise.

So what , in our publess neck of the woods, do we do to honor St. Pat?  Personally, I plant potatoes.  March 17 is a reasonable date for root crops in our area, and I find it a fitting memorial to our Irish ancestors.  After their importation from America, potatoes became such an important food for the Irish poor that they began to replace bread as the staff of the life. 

Not everybody saw this as a good thing.  Aristocrats sniffed at the sight of peasants rooting in the earth for food like pigs, and even pro-labor economists, who you’d think would be in favor of feeding the hungry, had no higher opinion of the spud.  Growing potatoes meant that the Irish got, almost, enough to eat, which meant that they were able to marry and have children earlier, which meant that there were more workers glutting the labor market, which meant a lowering of the average wage. 

Chilling?   One feels impelled to say something about the boons of family planning, but then one remembers one is writing about gardening.

In any case, potatoes betrayed the Irish cruelly in 1845, when a fungal blight wiped out the nation’s crop and caused thousands to die by starvation and thousands more to come to America to avoid it, profoundly shaping the ethnic and cultural makeup of our country.  So potatoes, at least indirectly, are the reason that so many of us feel impelled to wear a bit o’ green on March 17, and that I know all the words to Danny Boy, though I never sing it until the end of a long social evening, when guests linger unattractively.  Danny Boy can clear a room faster than a SWAT team.

I read about the history of the potato, and you can too, in Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, a fascinating book if you love gardening.

Now, how to plant potatoes:  This is an easy way that I learned from Ruth Stout, creator of a famous deep-mulch method of gardening.  Ruth’s mantra was:  All you need is hay, and though some have argued with that, I can recommend hay as the hands-down simplest, most dazzlingly successful way to grow potatoes.

First of all, preparing the ground:  You don’t.  You lay your seed potatoes on grass, on weeds, on dirt, on whatever you’ve got, though perhaps removing anything larger than a Volkswagen from the garden area.

Then:  You dump hay on them.  You can use spoiled hay – hay which has lost its food value for animals, and which therefore you can get for cheap or free.  The idea is to mulch thick and heavy, covering the potatoes with at least a foot.

Then:  That’s all.  The potato plants come up right through the heavy layer of hay, which meanwhile kills grass and weeds underneath it, adds nutrients to the soil, keeps everything moist and attracts earthworms.  You don’t have to water, you don’t have to fertilize, you don’t have to hoe.

The one caveat is that you do have to keep adding hay to the plants as they grow.  The tubers grow close to the surface and if you don’t keep them sufficiently covered, they develop a nasty green color. 

A note on seed potatoes:  Some people insist you plant them whole, others recommend halving or quartering.  Personally, though, through my regrettably slip-shod approach to composting, I’ve learned it’s possible  to grow baking-size potatoes from peelings, by accident.  So ignore the experts, but perhaps one good eye per segment is a good rule.

            Tubers begin to form after the plants have flowered and they may be eaten at any stage thereafter, as tiny “new” potatoes early in the season, mighty bakers later on, or at any point in between.  With the deep-mulch method, you can pull back the hay and sneak a peek at the size of your spuds before deciding to harvest. 

And as for harvesting itself, gathering potatoes from under hay is easier than digging them out of dirt,  though it’s still not a squeaky-clean process.  The bottom hay is constantly composting as you add new hay on top, so that the potatoes grow in a substance you might call dirty hay or hayey dirt – beautiful stuff, in fact, so that after the potatoes are finished, you will probably be unable to stop yourself from planting something else in the plot, late peas or zinnias.

More about the deep-mulch method later!  I have overrun my space here and must be off, before somebody starts singing Danny Boy.

END

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