By Susannah MacNeil 

For the Salisbury Post

WINSTON-SALEM — Big Boy, German Johnson, grape, and cherry: home-grown tomatoes are a succulent bounty of steamy Carolina summers.  

And nobody knows tomatoes like James Cleo Jones. Born and raised on a farm in Cleveland, he now tends a patio bursting with container-grown tomatoes at Lutheran Services Carolinas’ Trinity Glen senior care community in Winston-Salem.

“It’s too hot right now and they’re getting blossom-end rot,” he said. “With containers, you need to water two times a day.”

Jones waters his plants around 10:30 a.m. and checks them again in the late afternoon. 

“Watering at mid-day keeps them cool and alive in this heat, but it doesn’t really nourish them,” he notes. For that, he relies on 10-10-10 fertilizer, followed by an infusion of Miracle-Gro two or three weeks later. 

This is Jones’s first summer growing tomatoes in pots, but he has decades of experience working the land. Growing up in Cleveland, his family raised almost all their own food — including beef, hogs, chicken, rabbits and vegetables. 

In 1966, after six years of military service, Jones moved to Mocksville and started work at Hoechst-Celanese in Salisbury. He took up home gardening a few years later. It proved a fulfilling pastime during his 30-plus-year career at the plant and as a self-employed landscaper. 

Only in 2010, after being hit by a car, did Jones stop gardening.

“It was just me at home, so I went to the farmer’s market instead,” he said.

Jones’s mobility declined further due to peripheral artery disease, and he has used a wheelchair for the past several years. In 2017, his right leg was amputated below the knee. In late 2023 he moved to Trinity Glen, and early this year he lost his left leg. Under the circumstances, he seems remarkably sanguine. 

“While I was in therapy here at Trinity Glen, I heard there was a garden. I assumed there was a team to do the gardening, but it turns out it was just me,” he said.  

At first, Jones worried he wouldn’t be able to maneuver his wheelchair to reach the plants from every angle. But the circular pots provide easy access. 

“The container garden has been a godsend. He loves being outside with the plants,” said his granddaughter ShaNicka Brown, Trinity Glen’s director of social services. 

Jones hopes to be walking again with prosthetic legs by next summer.

In the meantime, tomatoes of all shapes and sizes are already ripening on the vine, so long as “I can get to them before the ‘hawks,’” Jones said, jokingly referring to his neighbors. 

Most of the harvest will go to Trinity Glen’s kitchen for all the residents to enjoy.

“I’ll be happy if I can get one tomato sandwich,” Jones said.

Duke’s is his mayonnaise of choice, but now that he’s watching his diet, mustard will do just fine.

Susannah MacNeil serves as the communications manager for Lutheran Services Carolinas.