Gardening – Tom's Blog on Life

May 28, 2026

Richard Joyner

The town of Conetoe, North Carolina barely exists on a map. Population, 300. Mostly poor.

The nearest grocery store sits 10 miles away. That’s what a food desert looks like – farmland stretching in every direction, and not a single fresh vegetable within easy reach.

1986. Conetoe, North Carolina.

Richard Joyner already knows this land. He grew up here – one of 13 children in a sharecropping family – and spent every summer bent over crops under the eastern North Carolina sun. The moment he turned 18, he joined the Army and left. He swore he would never come back.

But he came back.

He came back to lead Conetoe Chapel Missionary Baptist Church. And in a town this small, serving a congregation means standing at the graveside more than anyone should ever have to.

The deaths come early and often. Diabetes. High blood pressure. Obesity. Edgecombe County ranks 97th out of 100 North Carolina counties in health and economic well-being. These diseases don’t wait for old age here.

2005. One year. 30 funerals.

In a single 12-month stretch, Joyner buries 30 members of his congregation. Not elderly men and women at the end of long lives. These are people under the age of 32. Every single death is preventable.

“Diabetes, high blood pressure – when we first got started, we counted 30 funerals in one year,” he says. “I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I was spending more time at funerals than anywhere else.”

Here’s what makes it worse, the town is completely surrounded by farmland. Food grows in every direction. But none of it reaches the 300 people who live here. The nearest grocery is 10 miles down the road, most families have no reliable way to get there, and what’s cheap at the corner store is almost never fresh. So people eat what they can afford. And they keep dying young.

Joyner looks out at his congregation every Sunday and sees what is coming. People he loves. People 100 pounds overweight, moving slower each week, their bodies giving up piece by piece. He knows exactly what happens next if nothing changes.

“It just started to feel unconscionable,” he later says, “that you would see someone 100 pounds overweight on Sunday and not say anything about it.”

He decides to stop being quiet. And then he decides to do something.

2007. An empty church lawn. A completely different idea.

Joyner walks outside and starts to dig. He turns the grass around the church into a garden – rows of vegetables, herbs, and fruit. Then he makes a decision nobody sees coming, he goes looking for the kids.

Not the easy ones. He goes after the ones failing in school. The ones drifting toward trouble. The ones with nowhere safe to be after 3 p.m. He puts a shovel in their hands. He teaches them how soil works, how seeds grow, how a living thing needs tending every single day. He makes them responsible for something alive. Something that needs them.

One boy arrives – restless, struggling with attention, full of energy with nowhere to go. Joyner looks at him and says, “Get out in the field and have fun.”

The boy pauses. “Can I take my shoes off?”

Joyner grins. “Yeah, pull your shoes off.”

The boy sprints barefoot through the rows, crouching down to press his fingers into the dirt, tasting raw vegetables for the first time in his life. Over the months that follow, his teachers watch something change. His focus sharpens. His grades climb. His whole way of moving through the world shifts.

This is what the garden is actually growing.

Today. An oasis where there used to be only grief.

The Conetoe Family Life Center now manages more than 20 plots of land – including a 25-acre site. More than 80 young people help plan, plant, and harvest. They manage beehives, produce honey, and pollinate the crops themselves. Together they grow tens of thousands of pounds of fresh food every year – all of it given away, free, to families who need it most. Roughly 1,500 people are fed every single week.

In 2015, CNN named Richard Joyner one of its Top 10 Heroes of the year. The center has expanded to 21 locations across 4 counties – and it has united Baptists, Muslims, and Unitarians, all working side by side in the same dirt.

“We can grow more medicine through the plants than we can buy,” Joyner says. “And there are no side effects.”

He took the land his family was once forced to work as sharecroppers – land soaked in generations of injustice – and turned it into something new entirely. A place where children learn their own power. Where a community decides it will no longer eat badly and die young.

The funerals didn’t stop. But the preventable ones? That’s a very different story now.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that one person – with a shovel, a church lawn, and a heart that refuses to quit – can change the course of an entire community.

May 28, 2026

Tomato Triage

Most early-season tomato problems aren’t caused by the soil. They’re caused by misreading what the plant is telling you.
A purple leaf gets treated with phosphorus. A yellow leaf gets treated with nitrogen. But in both cases, the plant is often reacting to temperature or its own growth pattern — not a deficiency. Reaching for fertilizer before diagnosing the cause can make things worse.

Three signals that fool people every spring:
– Purple undersides on young leaves — almost always a temperature response, not a soil deficiency. When the soil is still cool in early spring, the roots can’t absorb phosphorus efficiently even when it’s there. Adding more fertilizer doesn’t help. Warming the soil does — black plastic mulch or a few more weeks of spring sun solves it on its own.
– Yellow lower leaves with green veins — the plant is often moving stored nutrients from its oldest leaves to feed new growth at the top. This is normal internal redistribution, not a nitrogen shortage. Adding nitrogen at this point pushes leaf growth at the expense of fruit set.
– A stem that turns brown or yellow at the base while the whole plant wilts — this one is different. Soil-borne fungal diseases like fusarium and verticillium can’t be treated once symptoms show. Remove the plant, don’t compost it, and avoid planting tomatoes in that spot next year.

Before you reach for anything:
– Check soil temperature first. If it’s still cool, most early-season leaf discoloration resolves on its own as the ground warms.
– Wait a week before adding any amendment. Many early symptoms are the plant adjusting, not the plant failing.
– If the problem is at the base of the stem and spreading upward, that’s when to act fast — remove the plant to protect the rest of the bed.
The best early-season intervention is usually patience. The plant is adjusting, not dying.

May 24, 2026

Protected By Blackberry Security

Protected By Blackberry Security Three men parked down on the road in front of our property a couple nights ago. They had bolt cutters and a plan to break into our shop. What they didn’t have was respect for brambles.

The first man hit the property line at a jog. He made it four steps. The canes took him like a cat takes a mouse — not quick, but certain. One barb in the jeans, then another in the jacket, then three in the scalp. He yelled. That was mistake one. Sound carries in a holler.

The second man tried to go around. Blackberries don’t “around.” They’d swallowed the old deer path in ’09. He pushed in with his forearm and came back with his sleeve in ribbons and blood running down to his elbow. The thorns are recurved, built to keep prey from backing out. Every time he pulled, they bit deeper.

The third was smarter. He had a machete. He swung once, twice. The canes sprang back. Blackberry is whippy, green wood. Cut one, three more slap you in the face. He got ten feet in and realized he couldn’t see the road anymore. Couldn’t see his feet. Couldn’t see anything but thorns and the dark. That’s when the yellowjackets came up from a nest he’d stepped on. They didn’t care who was trespassing.

Now, I didn’t call the sheriff until sunrise mind you and we all slept just fine. The dogs didn’t even bark — they knew the briars were working.

The Sheriff found them at 6:40 AM, picking their way out to the road looking like they’d lost a fight with fifty cats. One had to cut his own boot off to get his ankle free. The bolt cutters were still in the thicket somewhere. Nobody was going back for them.

The Sheriff walked the edge with me, looked at the scratches on those men, looked at the wall of green and purple.

“You do this on purpose?” the Sheriff asked as

he popped a berry in his mouth. July-sweet, still warm from the night.

“No sir,” I said. “I just quit mowing. The mountain did the rest.”

I offered the Sheriff a hatful to take to the station. He took it. Evidence, he said.

Folks in town started saying those folks up on Big Dog Reserve had the best security system in Smyth County. No wires, no batteries, no subscription. Just pays you back in cobbler.

And if you ask me about it, I’ll tell you the same thing my Dad said: “A fence tells a man he’s not wanted. A blackberry patch convinces him.”

That’s security.

May 21, 2026

Five Garden Myths

Some garden advice gets repeated so often it stops being questioned. Five pieces that sound right — and aren’t .

Gravel in the bottom of pots doesn’t improve drainage:
– A layer of gravel actually raises the wet zone into the root area instead of below it. A continuous column of potting mix with perlite mixed throughout drains better than a layered pot. Skip the gravel. Drill more holes.

Watering in midday sun doesn’t burn leaves:
– Water droplets on smooth leaves don’t focus enough light to scorch tissue. This has been tested. There ARE good reasons to water in the morning — less water lost to evaporation, and foliage dries before evening when fungal infections are most likely. Water early for those reasons, not because of sunburn.

Eggshells don’t add calcium quickly:
– Eggshells are one of the slowest-decomposing organic materials in soil. Crushed by hand and tossed in the garden, they take years to release anything a plant can use. If you want them to break down in one season, grind them to a fine powder first. Coarse pieces are still sitting in the soil when the next season starts.

Used coffee grounds don’t acidify soil:
– Brewing extracts most of the acid. Used grounds test nearly neutral. They’re a fine addition to compost as a nitrogen source, but they won’t lower pH for blueberries or azaleas the way most people assume. And don’t spread them thick as a surface mulch — they form a water-repellent crust. Mix them into compost instead.

Marigolds don’t repel most pests:
– French marigold roots release a compound that suppresses a specific type of soil-dwelling nematode. That’s real, but it’s underground and it’s specific. Marigolds planted among tomatoes don’t repel aphids, beetles, caterpillars, or anything above ground. The strongest effect comes from growing marigolds as a cover crop and turning them into the soil at the end of the season — not from tucking a few plants between your vegetables.

Five corrections. Same garden. Better decisions.

May 18, 2026

One In 40 Million

May 17, 2026

Plants That Grow From A Leaf

A single leaf pulled from a houseplant is not damage — it is a blueprint for an entire new plant. Some species pack enough genetic code into one leaf to rebuild themselves from scratch in nothing but a glass of water.

– African violet — set the leaf with its stem into water so just the bottom half-inch is submerged, baby plantlets cluster at the base in four to six weeks

– Rex begonia — cut a healthy leaf into wedge-shaped sections, each with a vein, set the cut edge in shallow water, tiny plants form at each vein in six to eight weeks

– Snake plant — cut a leaf into three-inch sections, mark which end was closest to the soil, stand that end in water, roots form in six to eight weeks

– Peperomia — snap off a leaf with its stem attached, place the stem in water, a new miniature rosette forms at the base in four to six weeks

– Christmas cactus — twist off a two-segment piece, let the cut end dry overnight, then stand the base in shallow water, roots appear in three to four weeks

ZZ plant leaflets, jade leaves, kalanchoe, and streptocarpus all regenerate the same way — one leaf, one glass, patience measured in weeks instead of trips to the nursery.

The smallest piece of a plant already carries the whole thing inside it.

May 17, 2026

Tomato Harvest Boost

Tomato stems do something most plants can’t — any part of the stem buried underground grows roots. When you plant a tall seedling straight up, only the bottom few inches are in the soil making roots. When you lay it sideways in a shallow trench, the entire buried length roots along its full span.

More roots means more water uptake, more nutrients, and a stronger plant that handles dry stretches without folding. The leggiest seedling in the flat often becomes the strongest plant in the bed.

How to trench-plant a leggy tomato:
– Pinch off the lower leaves, leaving just the top cluster.
– Dig a shallow trench instead of a deep hole — long and horizontal, a few inches deep.
– Lay the stem flat in the trench with the leafy top sticking up at one end.
– Wait a couple of days for the top of the plant to start growing up towards the sun.
– Cover the bare stem with soil.
– Water deeply at planting and the buried stem starts rooting along its length within a week or two.

One thing to watch for:
– If you bought a grafted tomato, keep the graft point above the soil line. Burying it defeats the purpose — the top variety roots on its own and bypasses the rootstock you paid for. This only applies to grafted plants, which are usually labeled.

The leggiest seedling in the tray isn’t the weakest one. It’s the one with the most stem to bury.

May 15, 2026

7 Layer Food Forest

A food forest is a garden designed to work like a forest. Seven layers of food production stacked vertically, mimicking natural ecosystems.

CANOPY – Large nut and fruit trees (walnut, pecan, chestnut). The ceiling of the system.

UNDERSTORY – Smaller fruit trees (apple, pear, plum). Thrive in dappled shade beneath the canopy.

SHRUB – Berry bushes (blueberry, currant, gooseberry). Fill the gaps between trees.

HERBACEOUS – Perennial herbs and vegetables (comfrey, sorrel, rhubarb). The medicine and salad layer.

GROUND COVER – Creeping plants (strawberry, clover, mint). Protect the soil and suppress weeds.

VINE – Climbers (grape, kiwi, hops). Use the trees as natural trellises.

ROOT – Underground crops (Jerusalem artichoke, groundnut, garlic). The hidden harvest.

Once established, a food forest requires no tilling, no fertilizer, no irrigation, and no replanting. It feeds itself. It builds soil. It gets more productive every year.

Forests have operated this way for 400 million years. We just finally stopped to notice.

May 12, 2026

Marie Cromer

She was sitting at the back of the room.

December 1909. A teachers’ conference in Columbia, South Carolina. A government official at the front was describing a new federal program — young farm boys across the South were being given seed, land, and instruction in modern agriculture. They were producing harvests two and three times larger than their own fathers. It was, by any measure, a success.

The woman at the back was twenty-seven years old. Her name was Marie Cromer. She taught at a one-room schoolhouse in Aiken County — the only teacher, the only principal.

She raised her hand.

But what are we doing for the farm girls?

That question is recorded in the meeting notes. And it may be the most consequential sentence ever spoken at a teachers’ conference in American history.

Marie had watched her female students — girls aged nine to twenty — drop out of school every spring because their families needed their labor in the fields. They had no shoes in summer. They were expected to marry by sixteen, bear children every two years, and own nothing the law allowed a husband to own instead. Their brothers would one day inherit what little land the family had. They would not.

She came home and built something.

On her own initiative, she organized the Aiken County Girls’ Tomato Club — the first organization of its kind in the United States. Each girl who joined received a packet of tomato seeds, a one-tenth-acre plot on her family’s farm, and something more radical than either: instruction in keeping a financial ledger, and the right to keep every single cent she earned.

In the spring of 1910, forty-seven girls enrolled.

They planted. They watered. They weeded. They harvested. They canned. They sold.

And they kept the money.

The prize that first season was a scholarship to Winthrop College. Marie didn’t have the $140 to fund it herself, so she wrote to a wealthy polo enthusiast from New York who wintered in Aiken County. He funded it.

By late summer, a girl named Katie Gunter had canned 512 jars of tomatoes from her tenth of an acre and cleared a $40 profit. The scholarship was hers.

Within a few years, the best-performing girls were clearing $70 and $80 from that same tenth of an acre — more than many of their fathers earned sharecropping cotton for an entire year.

The clubs spread. Virginia. Alabama. Georgia. Mississippi. Tennessee. By 1913, over twenty thousand girls were enrolled across fifteen Southern states.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture appointed Marie one of the first women ever assigned to agricultural field work in the federal civil service.

A girl wrote about the experience in 1915:

“The work was long and sometimes tiresome. But I now have a bank account of sixty dollars.”

In 1915. In rural South Carolina. A teenage girl. A bank account. In her own name.

The Nineteenth Amendment — giving women the right to vote — would not arrive for another five years.

In 1914, the federal Smith-Lever Act folded the tomato clubs, the corn clubs, and related programs into a single national cooperative extension service. That combined program was given a name in 1924.

You know it as 4-H.

Marie Cromer went on to establish the first home economics curriculum in Aiken County. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally recognized her at the National 4-H Camp in Washington, D.C., as one of the founders of the organization.

She died on June 14, 1964, at home in Eureka, South Carolina. She was eighty-one years old.

There is a small historical marker on Highway 191.

Today, approximately six million American children are enrolled in 4-H. It is the largest youth-development organization in the United States.

Marie Cromer never gave a speech.

She raised her hand at the back of a conference room.

She asked one question.

And the country spent the next hundred and fifteen years answering it.

May 11, 2026

Bay Leaves and Tomatoes

You know that bay leaf you fish out of your pasta sauce before serving? The one that seems to do nothing except sit there looking noble? That leaf is speaking a language your garden desperately needs you to learn.

When you crush a bay laurel leaf between your fingers, you release compounds called terpenes and eucalyptol. These aren’t just pleasant aromas for humans. They’re chemical sentences in an ancient conversation between plants and insects, and what they’re saying is surprisingly aggressive.

Here’s what most people miss. Insects don’t see plants the way we do. They navigate by scent molecules that drift through the air like invisible road signs. An aphid finds your tomato plant because that tomato is broadcasting a specific chemical signature, a scent fingerprint that says “juicy stem cells, come feed here.” The aphid’s antennae are tuned to receive exactly that signal.

Bay leaves jam the frequency.

When you scatter crushed bay leaves around the base of vulnerable plants, you’re not creating a barrier. You’re creating confusion. The oils from those leaves mingle with the air currents, overlaying the tomato’s invitation with a completely different message. To an aphid or whitefly, it’s like trying to find your house when someone keeps moving the street signs. The chemical signature they’re searching for gets buried under eucalyptol and cineole, compounds that most pest insects associate with plants they don’t want to eat.

This isn’t about toxicity. Bay leaves won’t kill anything. They simply make your vegetable garden illegible to the insects trying to read it. A thrip lands on a leaf, tastes something that doesn’t match the scent promise, and moves on. A moth circling at dusk can’t lock onto the pepper plant she’s looking for because the air is thick with wrong information.

I keep a bay laurel in a pot near my kitchen door, and when I’m harvesting basil or checking on young seedlings, I’ll grab a handful of older bay leaves and crush them right there in the garden. You’ll see me tucking them into the mulch around eggplants, laying them across the soil near young cucumber starts. They dry out over a few weeks, but while they’re fresh, they’re broadcasting static into the insect communication network.

The Indigenous peoples of the Mediterranean figured this out centuries before we had words like “volatile organic compounds.” They planted bay laurel near food storage areas, wove branches into grain baskets, tucked leaves into flour sacks. They weren’t just repelling weevils. They were speaking the language of chemical ecology without needing to name it.

Your bay leaf isn’t flavoring the soup through some mystical essence. It’s releasing the same defense compounds the tree uses to protect itself in the wild, and you can borrow that protection for the plants that need it most. The tree paid the cost to manufacture those oils. You’re just putting them to work in a new location.

That quiet leaf sitting in your spice drawer is a translator, a scrambler, a shield. It’s been protecting plants from the wrong kind of attention since before humans learned to cook. Maybe it’s time we let it do that work again, not just in our food, but in the soil where our food is trying to grow.