I haven't been writing Bob for a while, for reasons too numerous and riddled with self-pity, sloth and other undesirable character traits to name.  One of them, I am happy to report, is genuine horiticultural zeal.  My dear, you should see my River O' Flowers this year!  Maybe I'll post a pic.
     But I'm back up and running now, and in fact planning a new blog, this one for -- brace yourself -- real local news.  STAY TUNED FOR EXCITIN' DEVELOPMENTS!
    

Moah Coffeh?  How to Freeze Tomatoes, Save Time and Avoid Love Triangles

By Robin Ford Wallace

Here is a story a friend told me, that happened in the 1950s.

            A man she knew had decided to move to the country and spend his retirement raising tomatoes.  He had also decided his wife would can them.  Somehow he had gotten the idea that their return to Nature would transform the Little Woman into a full-scale farmwife complete with floury hands and bib apron.

            It did not.

            One evening the man approached his house from behind after a long, satisfying session in the vegetable patch.  From that vantage point he observed a stream of tomatoes sailing gracefully through the air from his back door and into the woods beyond. 

Just visible in the doorway was the dainty white hand, complete with diamond rings and long red fingernails, that was propelling Nature’s bounty back the hell to Nature where it belonged.  That’s what the Little Woman thought of farmwifery! 

I like the story because it shows that even before the advent of feminism women made their own choices.  A girl couldn’t become a doctor or an astronaut, maybe, but she still got to make up her own mind whether she was a glamour-puss or an earth mama. 

Me, personally, I was born late enough to run for senator but as it happens I am the perfect 1950s farmwife throwback.  I don’t own an apron but I adore that blood-red lipstick they wore then and by God I could can for the Olympics.  Nothing makes me happier than cooking from scratch and growing the scratch.     

One summer evening about 9:30, in fact, I was snuffling around in the hay for potatoes so I could start supper when it struck me I had carried the thing a bit far.  I had reverted beyond 1950s farmwife all the way back to hunter-gatherer.

That’s why it’s ironic about my lettuce this year.  I didn’t plant it.

How did it happen that someone who starts chili by planting jalapenos six months before dinnertime is too lazy to transplant a few lettuces?  For the answer we return, of course, to the 1950s.

 Specifically, to the old Bette Davis movie where she plays twins.  Remember that one?  One Bette is shy and outdoorsy, the other a flashy vamp.  Still, the sisters are close, so Shy Bette (the trusting fool!) takes her new boyfriend home to lunch with Vamp Bette. 

Vamp Bette of course goes into slut overdrive, fluttering her eyelashes and saying flirtatious little things like, “Moah coffeh?”

 Which the boyfriend (the stupid sap!) finds irresistible, so he dumps Shy Bette and marries Vamp Bette.  Then one afternoon the two sisters go sailing.  A nor’easter blows up and –

            Why am I telling you this? 

Oh, lettuce. 

Salad is a very big deal at Bob’s Little Acre.  Not only is it the daily Fat Girl Lunch Special, I’m so proud of my garlic vinaigrette that when we have dinner guests I push salad like Bette pushed that coffee.  (Only I don’t say, “Moah salad?”  I say, “Eat salad or I’ll kill you.”  Everybody has a different vamp style.)   

So I used to kill two hours every week washing lettuce.  Then this year, Ingle’s started selling Harvest Farms Certified Organic Triple-Washed Spring Mix lettuce blend, in fully recyclable plastic tubs, yet.  At first I thought it was too expensive, but before long higher math kicked in and I realized the time it saved more than made up for the money, even figuring my labor at well below minimum wage.  (Writers dream of minimum wage!) 

So I got spoiled, and this spring every time I tried transplanting my lettuce seedlings I remembered how much worse it was washing lettuce from the garden.  You have to pick out the grass blades, police each leaf for caterpillars or God forbid slugs, rinse with another suspicious scrutiny, spin dry – and that’s always supposing you manage to pick it before it bolts. 

            WHAT’S NEXT?  CHEWING DOESKIN TO MAKE OUR OWN CLOTHES?  WASHING THEM IN THE RIVER, AGAINST A ROCK?   

            That’s my evil twin.  She looks just like me except for the long red fingernails, but unlike me she is prefers to spend her leisure time not slaving in the kitchen but sipping drinks adorned with tiny umbrellas. Those lettuce seedlings drove her berserk and before I could stop her she had thrown them the hell into the compost where they belonged.

            Why am I telling you this?  Because, horticulturally, everybody’s twins.  The hoe may make your heart sing while the canner sends you screaming for the fingernail polish. 

So even the most militant from-scratchers should know a few shortcuts.  Here’s one for those tomatoes:  If you have room in the freezer, you can freeze them, whole and unprocessed, instead of canning.  Just put as many as will fit into plastic bags and seal.  When ready to cook, set the bag in tap water 10 minutes and the skins come off easily.

            All peppers can also be frozen raw, and my friend Mary, who showed me the tomato trick, also freezes chopped summer squash without blanching.  She says you just whack the bag against a counter to break some off to use in stir-fries.

            You can freeze chopped herbs instead of drying them, or – get this – don’t.  Pick them when you need them and otherwise leave them to live out their herby little lives unmolested.  Don’t think of it as waste, think of it as the Prime Directive. 

Above all, don’t plant any crop beyond your own breaking point.  If you grow something that requires the help of an unwilling spouse – as I learned with shell peas one year – you’re practically begging for trouble from your evil twin, and all I can say to you is:

              “Moah coffeh?”

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

     I've been having one of those unhappy discombobulating kind of days --  the newspaper deadline fell on the same date as the IRS deadline for cryin' out loud!  And believe me, that's the tip of the iceberg.  Anyway, somehow I haven't gotten around to finishing my latest piece, another diatribe on asparagus, capitalism and the joys of menstruation. 
     Or, anyway, about asparagus.  In any case it isn't done yet, and I was feeling awful for not having posted anything up here recently when I happened to realize I'd never put this classic Bob on the blog.  Or I don't think I did.  (I told you I was discombobulated.)  What I did to check was Google "Bob's Little Acre," "space aliens," and "crop circles," and nothing came up.  (Or nothing familiar did.  Try Googling it yourself sometime.  Who knows what you'll find?)
     Anyway after I read it I felt even more discombobulated.  It mentions my puppy then who is a 70-pound dog now and a friend then who hasn't spoken to me in over two  years now, but even six years older and uglier I still find the ways of the universe just as puzzling.  Hell, more so! 
     And furthermore, the column reminded me I haven't planted my beets ....
 

THE ACCIDENTAL GARDEN

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics, you will find that their minds rarely move in a line.”

            This is a line from a Brian Eno song that my husband is always quoting me, perhaps in an attempt to convince me he knows what “heuristics” means, or how to spell it.

             Or perhaps he means to express an artistic contempt for straight lines.  This puzzles me, as he

is always expressing similar contempt for the not-so-straight lines I make when laying out my garden

rows.

            Straight lines in the vegetable garden serve a purpose.  If you plant beets in a row in the garden, what comes up, if it’s in the row, is not guaranteed to be a beet but is more likely to be than anything that is not.  It’s not great odds but as good as you get in this racket.  Then you keep weeds to a minimum by a wholesale slaughter of everything in between the rows, on the principle that if it’s out of line it’s probably not a beet.

            But I’m not a straight-line kind of person.  I set out from point A with every intention to travel to point B, but somehow I always go wrong, the road turns to dirt, and I end up in Alabama. 

Thus it is no surprise that my life path has not led from the bottom straight to the top.  Instead, I have zigzagged, dipped and nose-dived like a tri-plane under fire, finally crash-landing to my considerable surprise onto a dirt road in Alabama, from whence I write you this garden column.  Sort of.

In any case, the straight lines in my garden tend to morph into something else, not only because of my imperfect grasp of geometry but because of my puppy, Roosevelt, the Holy Terrier, who enjoys nothing more than tumbling through the garden with a stake in her mouth, twine around her legs and evil in her heart.  So rows are constantly restaked and beets stray from the straight and narrow through no fault of their own.    

            Fortunately, straight rows are not the only options available to the gardener. You can grow plants in patches and raised beds or even use them to create crop circles to signal to aliens in outer space.  This is a free country. 

My friend Paula once had a garden shaped like a kayak.  Or two, rather.  She had a pair of kayaks in dry dock in her back yard.  They hadn’t moved for so long, their best chance for hitting the water again was global warming melting the polar caps and providing Marietta, Georgia, an outlet to the sea.

But Paula found that her lawn ornaments had a horticultural use:  They had killed the grass underneath them, so she moved them and planted peppers and tomatoes in her new, ready-made plots, repositioning the boats where she wanted more arable farmland.

            This accidental approach to garden design is one to which I am also addicted.  I use jellyrolls of spoiled hay for mulch, and when a bale is used up it leaves behind it a black circle of beautiful compost in which I can never resist planting something. 

This is why I have circles of plants everywhere, not necessarily positioned with aesthetics in mind but where the hay bale stopped rolling when it fell off the truck.  Thus I have a circle of breathtaking gladiolas at the bottom of the hill where it would take the FBI to find them. 

I’m not arguing in favor of circles.  They just happened, and if they mean something to aliens observing us from space I don’t know what it is but I hope it’s something along the lines of Send Cash or Bring Beer.  If I used square hay bales instead of round, my garden would look like a quilt and I suppose I’d be just as happy though I can’t speak for the aliens.

But somewhere I read that it is flowerbeds laid out by the Golden Mean, or Golden Ratio, that are most pleasing to the eye.  I looked the Golden Mean up and it is:  1.61803399.  In case you don’t know what that means, I also learned that the whole should be to the larger part as the larger part is to the smaller part. 

Do what?  I think it would be easier just to borrow one of Paula’s kayaks.

The Golden Mean must be something along the same lines as Feng Shui, another concept I have never grasped.  Paula’s big on it, though.

Paula adores buying furniture but she can’t bear to throw any away, so when she gets new things she just puts them in front of the old ones.  No one has seen her actual floor for seven years, though there are trails from room to room through stacks of books and magazines and other things in piles, so you can navigate if you know what you’re doing though I wouldn’t try it in the dark.

Anyway, in one corner of the dining room, where there was a molecule of clear space on a sideboard, Paula put a little indoor fountain, and she explained to me it gave the room Feng Shui.  Personally, the tinkling just stimulated my bladder.

So maybe I’m not an aesthetic concept kind of person any more than a straight-line person.  In fact, the more I work at it, the more random my garden seems to get.  A space alien observing Bob’s Little Acre with its patches and circles and eccentric rows would have to conclude it developed more through chance evolution than intelligent design.

Sometimes it puzzles me just as much as I’m sure it would the space alien.  Oh, not just how those gladiolas got to the bottom of the hill but how I came to be gardening this particular little acre on this particular dirt road in Alabama.  Not by a straight line, I can tell you. 

Maybe it’s just where I landed when I fell off the truck.

END

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

 

The Great Lies of Gardening

      Somebody asked me where to find this, the first Bob ever written, in spring 2005, and I couldn't find it -- but I'm sure I posted it some damn place.  Anyway, here it is again, with the caveat that the style has developed a bit since then.  This acts like it is for cripe's sake, a gardening column!

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.

END

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

Bob Reviews The Brother Gardener

The Brother Gardeners:  Before Spring, Let’s Curl Up With One Last Good Book

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York.”

Yep, me again, starting off with a Shakespeare quote in partial and tardy justification of all the money my parents squandered on my liberal arts education.

I put in the whole sentence to point out that Richard III does not actually begin Act I by whining about the weather.  What he is trying to get across is something like:  “Oy.  Am I tickled that my brother (York) is now king of England.”

Nobody remembers that, though, because the positive side of the quote is so pallid compared to the negative.  Next to “the winter of our discontent,” “glorious summer” is like saying, “So.  Nice weather we’re having."

Not that this has been a winter of discontent.  It’s hardly been any kind of winter at all and it’s fading as we speak.  But look out!  Here comes another quote:

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” –  Cicero.

That’s right.  Winter is a better time for reading about gardening than actually doing it.  So before this one bursts into glorious summer, let’s curl up with one last good book.  The Brother Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf, a wonderful, wonderful garden history writer – who knew there was such a thing? – is subtitled “Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession,” and it describes how American plants changed both the the English landscape and the character of the English people.

In the early 18^th century, Ms. Wulf tells us, English gardens were stiff, geometrical affairs featuring high hedges and topiary.  They weren’t very pretty and anyway they were only in the grand estates of the rich. 

Fast-forward to now, when sweet old ladies cheerfully slaughter each other for the best blooms at the London Flower Show and when, as the preface to an English plant dictionary put it:  “The English are all, more or less, gardeners.”

What happened in between?  Ms. Wulf thinks it had a lot to do with the quirky long-distance friendship of Peter Collinson, an English cloth merchant, and John Bartram, an American farmer just outside colonial Philadelphia.  It is the archaically spelled, weirdly capitalized correspondence between these two that is the backbone of  Ms. Wulf’s charming book.

Collinson, though he was what the English of the time would have considered “in trade” as opposed to upper class, had educated himself well enough to become a fellow of the Royal Society.  This was a group of “Scientifick Gentlemen” who would get together for dinner and refer to the fish they were eating as Pleuronectes platessa. 

Bartram, by contrast, was what Collinson called “a plain Country Man.”  Though he read voraciously, there was only so much science one could find in English in those days and, as he admitted, “Ye lattin pusels Mee.”   

But though Collinson and Bartram were by background as well as geography thousands of miles apart, they were “Brothers of the Spade” and the rest is history.

Collinson was always interested in acquiring “curious Plants,” reminding his friends when they traveled, “Forget not Mee & my Garden.”  He did business in the Colonies, but it was through his unpaid work as London agent for Benjamin Franklin’s subscription library that he heard of Bartram and his expertise in New World flora.

So Bartram began collecting for Collinson in America, and in January 1734, after a long sea journey, the first of what was to be many boxes of seeds and plants arrived in London.

Collinson was thrilled.  What in England was as beautiful as a magnolia?  Or a rhododendron?  Or his lifelong favorite, the ladyslipper?  Tenderly, he set out propagating these treasures in his garden, and through the centuries the reader can still hear his joy when they grew.  “I am Charm’d, nay, in Extasie,” he wrote to Bartram when several flower species bloomed at once.

Bartram rode cross-country, canoed down rivers and climbed trees collecting samples all over settled America and into the wild, Collinson urging him on by letter.  Bartram had described a Venus flytrap in one letter, and Collinson replied he was ready to “Burst with Desire.”  If Bartram couldn’t find one soon, he wrote, “never write Mee more for it is Cruel to tantalise Mee.”

At one point Collinson wrote to Bartram, “Pray go very Clean, neat & handsomely Dressed to Virginia.”  Collinson wanted samples from the governor and feared Bartram would disgrace him.

He could be a little patronizing even when he was nice, assuring Bartram his writing style was better than “what one might expect from a Man of thy Education.”  He paid Bartram partly in English seeds, partly in cash and partly in goods – one letter referred to a “Suite of Cloths.”  Once he sent Bartram his old hat which he said had years of mileage left but which Bartram said had holes in it:  “I thought some Sory Fellow had thrown it in,” Bartram wrote.

Bartram eventually complained he received only “one Sixth part” of what he gave.  Collinson replied stiffly he had “affairs of greater Consequence to Mind.”  But then he not only sent more money but also fixed Collinson up with other English enthusiasts, enabling him to make a better living from his collecting – and in the process American flora was spread all over England.

The two friends’ correspondence simply bursts with charm.  In a broader sense, though, it struck me as an eerily perfect metaphor for Anglo-American history of the time, down to the exchange of raw materials for manufactured goods, not to mention the eventual rebellion.  What was the American Revolution but a larger version of:  “You call this a hat?”

The Brother Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf, is published by Alfred A. Knopf.

END

 

    

Warts, Worms and Naked Emperors: The Jumping Frog of Bob's Little Acre

For out-of-towners, this one probably has a little too much back-story.  Suffice it to say there's a developer out there who is seriously mad at your humble narrator as a result of some articles she wrote.  He sent this awful, awful letter to the newspaper, copying everybody in the county government, accusing me of everything up to shooting his dog and stealing his Bible.  It hurt my pink feelings I suppose; but not enough that I won't point out the NEXT time I see somebody destroying the American banking system, bilking the county government, or obliterating civilization as we know it.  (Don't thank me.  It's just my job!)  The Sentinel hasn't printed the letter yet, perhaps because it is so LONG, but I felt impelled to respond anyway since the whole town seems to have read it.

Anyway I guess maybe I shouldn't have dragged front-page local issues into Bob's Little Acre; but I had this image of myself as a big damn frog hopping around my vegetable rows menacingly and zapping intruders with my tongue; and where do metaphors work like that but the Acre?

Warts, Worms and Naked Emperors:  The Jumping Frog of Bob’s Little Acre

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Thwppt.  Gotcha!

            Yeah, hey, it’s me, down here in the garden, catching insects with my long, sticky tongue.  Can I interest you in a fly?

I expect you’re wondering how I came to be insectivorous.  You know the real twist?  I actually came down here to eat worms.

Self-pity, don’t you know!  Somebody objected to my investigative journalism.  Well, somebody wrote a minor novel objecting to my investigative journalism, to be exact, and then they copied everybody in town on it, to the point that by now 9000 county officials plus lawyers, busboys, calico housecats and my Uncle Milroy in the spirit world have all heard the word:

ROBIN IS MEAN AND UGLY AND HAS WARTS!

Honestly, I haven’t felt so unpopular since my big sister Laura gave a piñata party for all our little friends with me as the piñata.   So, consumed with self-pity, down I slunk to the garden to eat worms. 

That’s the metaphor, I mean, but in fact once I’d settled into the mud I couldn’t see the point.  Do you know how hard I worked to build up my worm population?  I kept the garden under a foot of hay all that first winter, and spent good money at the bait store.

            But even if, from a horticultural as well as a gustatory standpoint, I decided against a literal ingestion of invertebrates, I was fully engaged in consuming them figuratively.  How had this happened? 

Making people mad is not what I ever set out to do!  I wanted to write about organic gardening.  Tomatoes!  Turnips!  Pretty flowers!  I am a gentle soul, and it was my ambition to play quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one. 

But as I brooded darkly, a fly buzzed by, and without looking up from my somber musings –

Thwppt! 

 – I shot out my tongue and nabbed it. 

            What had come over me? I wondered as I chewed thoughtfully.  It had been rather a while since lunch, certainly, and, as vermin goes, the fly had looked unusually toothsome; but as a rule I am less impulsive.

Then the explanation dawned on me:  I had been singing Kermit’s song, “It Isn’t Easy Bein’ Green.”  It’s my favorite poor-me song (though I also favor the Avenue Q spoof, “It Sucks To Be Me”).  Thus it was only fitting that the Metaphor Fairy had turned me into a frog.

Shocking?  Well, sure, at first.  I’ve known people who became frogs before but most of them were tadpoles. 

Shortly, though, things normalized.  A girl gets used to anything!  Even eating flies isn’t that funky after the crap they used to serve at my high school.  Every Thursday, lunch was this orange-colored chili that made vomiting redundant.  And is there really anything weirder than a Fig Newton?

Plus, it wasn’t long before it struck me that froghood is not that bad a metaphor for small-town journalism.  In the normal course of things, you paddle around your little pond ribbiting benevolently on about the new Methodist Women’s recipe book, or croaking out accounts of the local government’s latest budgetary crisis, deeply fulfilled when you score a dramatic quote like: 

“I am sick and TARD of having to BAIG for every LIGHT BUB.”

But then some hairy horsefly of an issue flits by – say some noisy citizen who rails against government more or less full time, but now wants it to build him an aqueduct; or a business that brags it is boosting your community’s tax base, but hasn’t itself paid taxes since they were more than metaphorically a matter of rendering unto Caesar  – and before you know you’re doing it:

Thwppt! 

It’s a job hazard!  You know perfectly well you’re not the New York Times, you’re just a hinterlands hack leaning on Old Betsy and spitting contemplatively from time to time as you report on this year’s hay crop. 

But a backwoods journalist is a journalist just the same, paid – though not much, not much – to keep eyes, ears and notebook open.  So should Napoleon Bonaparte prance across your line of vision in an advanced state of nature, what can you do but push your coonskin cap back on your forehead, point at His Imperial Majesty and shout:

LOOKY!  YONDER GOES A NEKKID EMPEROR!

Or, as we say in Frog:

Thwppt!   

Really, even in a garden column you kill a few flies if you’re halfway paying attention.  It’s all very well to talk about playing quietly in the dirt, but then you notice the Freep’s “Five Tips” gardening hints referring to petunias as something you deadhead, or dirt as something they sell at Holcomb’s, and  –

Thwppt!

 – there you go again.  Those who read the Bob blog know that BLA prides itself on being to the extension agent:

“WHAT WOODWARD WAS TO NIXON!”

So.  Anyway.  I try hard to report truthfully and fairly, and I hate it if in so doing I’ve made anybody mad.  I’d add, though, that if you come into a little pond like this and do it any kind of injury you cannot realistically expect big wet kisses from the local frog.

But enough of that!  Since I’m down here anyway, I thought I’d hop through the rows, maybe get a little actual garden writing done for a change.  It’s hard to grow anything with metaphors this thick on the ground but an extension service article last week said February is the perfect time to plant asparagus.

February is not, of course, the perfect time to do anything, and what the writer probably meant was that he’d be out of a job if he couldn’t find anything that could remotely go into the ground, but –

Oh, my God, I’ve done it again.

Thwppt!  

END

   

When Loved Ones Overrun Manchuria: Bob’s Little Human Relations Column

     This ain’t precisely about gardening.  It is, fah cryin’ out loud, January!  Anyway this is what’s been on my mind as we stride bravely into 2012.

When Loved Ones Overrun Manchuria:  Bob’s Little Human Relations Column

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Winter leaves the garden column in a hole.

At least, it leaves in a hole the kind of garden column that carries on much about gardening.  How fortunate that Bob’s Little Acre is less wedded to the genre than most.

BLA seems to have meandered off the horticultural high road somewhere around October (perhaps following a BOILED PEANUTS sign) and has yet to find its way back to the on ramp. 

Come spring, the column will consult its road map, or possibly a state trooper – tossing beer cans at them as they whiz past is, by the way, amazingly effective in attracting their attention – correct its route, and return to its peaceful agrarian existence.

But January is more suitable to hoarfrost than to horticulture, and BLA will thus postpone its rededication to dirt until the thaw.  Instead it will pull up to a cozy roadhouse, the kind where one sits before a gas log eating fats and carbohydrates delivered by waitresses with plump, comfortable names like Mabel, and spend the rest of the winter indoors as a human relations column.

Or at least that’s how it will spend this week.  What happened is, I read a piece by one of those inspirational columnists on the subject of leaving the bitterness of the past behind us as we stride determinedly into the future.  And I thought:  We might as well!  Since if we’re waiting for those who embittered us to apologize, we’d better ask Mabel to bring us more fries because we’re going to be here a while.    

With 2012 opening before me like a shining new city, there’s nothing I’d like more than to leave the baggage of strife at the train station of reconciliation and go tap-dancing into the streets of happily every after.  I’m feeling loving!  Hopeful!  In a mood to forgive everybody everything! 

But nobody’s asked me.

People by and large do not apologize.  Lately I’ve put a lot of thought into why, and I’ve concluded the chief reason is:  They’re not sorry.

Here is an obscure comedy snippet my husband is always quoting (and I’m probably misquoting):  “We was just sitting around one night drinking beer when we took a notion to form us a littley old Third Reich.  We didn’t mean nobody no harm.”

That beautifully illustrates Point A:  People never think they’ve done anything wrong, even the ones on trial for crimes against humanity.  Much less your sister!

Say your sister has done something awful, made off with your boyfriend or spread vicious gossip about you or rampaged across Europe breaking out shop windows, shooting university professors and rolling artillery into peace-loving democracies.

If it was me I’d say, “I’m sorry.  I was wrong.  I love you and honor you and in the future will be more careful about crushing Western civilization.”

But most people would rather die!  Confront them with wrongdoing and they’ll explain why it was right:

“I wasn’t stealing your boyfriend!  I just thought he looked cold over there.  Anyway I planned to bring him back in time for the wedding.”

Or they’ll tell you it wasn’t wrong, it’s just your sick mind:  

“Nobody else would mind their picture on Facebook naked on the toilet picking their nose!  You just enjoy feeling persecuted, don’t you?” 

Or they’ll say it’s so insignificant only a psycho like you would think it mattered.  “So, stupid, you think anybody else is going to miss Czechoslovakia, a tiny country with no really good restaurants?”

There are exceptions to every rule and to the apology rule the exception is:  Me.  Come to my house for dinner and I’ll apologize for the house, I’ll apologize for the dinner, then I’ll apologize for apologizing.  I have to stop myself from flagging down cops and apologizing for the Kennedy assassination.    

            Moving on though, another reason apologies are so hard to come by is (Point B):  People lie.

As a garden columnist, I’ve often pointed out that much of what we’re told about the universe is lies or male answer syndrome.  But I never realized until recently that this includes practically everything we hear on the interpersonal level – even from quite nice people such as, say, your sister – when it’s a matter of defending Point A.

“France?” your sister will say.  “Why would I want to go and invade France?  Never been there!  Nasty unpleasant place, no public restrooms.”

This, while you’re looking at a photograph of her goosestepping into Paris, the jackbooted B-word. 

Parenthetically, I never lie myself, not even when people ask, “Does this make me look fat?” or “How did you like the sweet potato casserole?”  Oddly, this honesty has done little to improve human relations in my neck of the woods.    

Yet another factor in the apology drought is (Point C):  People forget.

Say you’re finally back on speaking terms with your sister and she says, “I only invaded Poland because you borrowed my blue sweater.”

To which your astonished reply is, “What blue sweater?” 

And then: “Poland?” 

See, you’d caught her red-handed in France but Poland is fresh and new.  Point being, give people enough time and they forget not only what they did to ruin your life but what lies they told you about it later. 

Except me.  I never forget anything.  In arguments, I assert, “But that directly contradicts what you said on May 2, 1986.”  (Imagine what a human relations plus that is.)  (But it is also why people should give up and apologize.  I am right.)

            Well, people are imperfect and I suppose one solution is to forgive them whether they ask forgiveness or not. 

Another is to bomb them into the Stone Age.  While I make up my mind, how’s about another plate of them nachos, Mabel?

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

A Nandina Jolly Christmas: Deck the Halls, Damn the Bankers and Vive La Revolution!

Have a Nandina Jolly Christmas, and Vive La Revolution!  A Blue Christmas at Bob’s

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Why holly?

            Why should holly, a vicious shrub, one might say the pit bull of the plant world, reign unchallenged as the botanical symbol of Christmas?  Why not, say, nandina?

            Nandina, like holly, is green during the winter and, also like holly, sports attractive red berries during the Yuletide.  But, unlike holly, nandina is a nice plant, adorned not with holly’s glossy green daggers but with smooth, gracefully elongated leaves that never in the plant’s long and distinguished history have drawn blood or tears from a barefoot child.

            Clearly, the answer is that nandina, for all its virtues, rhymes with neither “jolly” nor “oh by gosh by golly.”  Here, we must conclude bitterly, is one more reason to dislike Christmas carols, in that they have elevated the murderous holly to stardom while dooming the better plant to horticultural obscurity. 

            Yes, Gentle Reader, one clearly woke up this morning in one of one’s more contemplative moods, didn’t one?  These cogitations have in the past yielded such epiphanies as that tutti frutti is not a made-up word but Italian for ‘all fruits”; and that the scene in The Flintstones where Fred shouts “Wilma!” while locked out of the house is an homage to Stanley shouting “Stella!” in the same predicament in A Streetcar Named Desire.

            Perhaps someday these cerebrations may turn up something of actual benefit to mankind; meanwhile, though, the question I was contemplating before I got sidetracked by holly was:

            Why five?

            Last week’s Bob’s Little Acre, which – alas! – became mired in doomsday predictions even before it meandered hopelessly into a morass of hot pink underwear, was originally meant to explore the lore of numbers. 

We know that 10 became the bedrock of mathematics because it is the number of fingers we have to count on; and that 12 likely owes its significance to the dozen complete lunar cycles in each year; but why should 13 be bad luck and seven good?

            The answers to those mysteries may be lost in antiquity, but it is only recently that five has emerged as a “hot number,” particularly in the world of nutrition.  Previously we had the Four Basic Food Groups and the Three Square Meals.  Now suddenly we saw cookbooks with “healthy recipes of five ingredients or fewer,” and cooking contests along the same theme.

Why five?  Out of the vasty deep of BLA archives emerged the answer, an anti-processed-food precept by Slow Food guru Michael Pollan quoted years ago in this very space.  Pollan said we should avoid products that contain more than five ingredients, or that contain high high-fructose corn syrup at all.

Ironically, my “healthy” five-ingredient cookbook calls for, as one of the five, “1 white cake mix.”  Thus your narrator killed serious grocery store time counting the ingredients in a cake mix, losing track at 19, most of them with bewildering chemical names of which we may be reasonably certain dear Michael would disapprove.

Worse, Big Food has now hijacked the five-ingredient rule as its own.  You can now buy any overprocessed Mcjunk, from canned soup to ice cream, under the proud slogan:  “Only five ingredients!”

But still the restless intellect quests on:  Is not this “five jive” also responsible for the Five Tips gardening feature with which our local daily newspaper has lately been tormenting me into slobbering madness each Saturday?

The Freep’s Five Gardening Tips are generally useless and sometimes they are not even five.  One week they were:  Five To Plant For Cut Flowers, consisting of (1) roses, (2) tulips, (3) daisies, (4) cosmos and (5) mixed flowers. 

Would not “mixed flowers” bring the number up to six or seven at the least (she shrieked in mathematical indignation)?  It is worse than the cake mix!

Most weeks, though, in keeping with the newspaper’s concept of the gardening section (throw-away space between ad spots), the Five Tips don’t fool around with horticulture but devote themselves to selling products.  Thus last week’s theme was:  Five Christmas Gifts For The Woman Gardener On Your List.

The reader can imagine this woman gardener’s contempt for the pricey designer garden swag recommended; if Bob’s Little Acre has one message (and honey, it does not have five), it is that gardening is something you do, not something you buy. 

Oddly, though, this is not where I go into my yearly diatribe against the crass materialism of Christmas.  I lack the heart, having been in deep mourning all weekend for a material possession I can’t have.

“This isn’t like you,” said my husband.  “Do you really think a house can make you happy?”

The answer was:  Yes.  Rabid antimaterialist though I am, I’m afraid I fall in love with houses as suddenly and violently as with, say, men (though fortunately with similar infrequency). 

Anyway our present house has never altogether suited me – I married it on the rebound – and now I’ve found the one of my dreams.  But our bank informed me Friday afternoon that we must sell house one before borrowing for house two.  Despite our excellent credit history, the bank does not trust people of our income level to pay back loans.

What embittered me was that I had spent Friday morning in my journalistic capacity chronicling the fortunes of a local development where banks had in fact trusted $26 million in loans on mountainside land, mostly without roads, electricity or running water, to investors who had never even intended to pay it back.

Our financial system has gone wrong!  It is like the five-ingredient rule, meant to warn against processed food and used instead to sell it.  It is like a holiday meant to celebrate generosity and resulting instead in fistfights over Xboxes.

And it is like holly.  Sometimes it hurts.

Anyway, merry Christmas!  I intend to spend the holiday delivering cookies to the charming young people at Occupy Chattanooga.  The world needs change.

END