James Brewer lives in a beautiful, two-story brick house on Mississippi 7 outside Greenwood, but he spends all day every day outside, mucking about in the mud and the dirt of his 7-acre vegetable farm.
On an early February afternoon, mud puddles from recent rains cover most of Brewer’s Vegetable Farm’s acreage, and the temperature is chilly.
It has been a cold winter, he says — too cold to get much done in the vegetable patch or the large hoop house he uses to start seedlings.
“I been out here sleepin’ this winter,” Brewer said.
At the beginning of winter, he disced the field, turning it over to lay out and freeze vines and weeds he battles constantly in his low-lying spread.
But hints of burgeoning spring have awakened some of those weeds and his desire to get outside and dig in the dirt.
In the back of the hoop house, brilliant green turnip greens stand crisp and ready to be picked.
Brewer, 62, started his retirement career as a vegetable farmer following 36 years working for the Mississippi Department of Corrections. When he graduated from Mississippi Valley State University in the late 1970s, he went to work at Parchman prison for what he thought would be just six months to figure out what he wanted to do with his life.
“I spent 36 years doing a job nobody wants,” Brewer said, digging at the dirt with the toe of his boot.
He turned down invitations from family members to join them in the North.
“It was too cold for me up in other cities,” he said.
So Brewer remained close to home and made a career in corrections, dreaming of the day when he would have some acreage and a place to grow the vegetables he watched his family grow as a child.
Born on a little bend between Berclair and Moorhead, Brewer helped tend a garden there and helped his family work in the fields growing soybeans and cotton.
It was hard work, he said, and so is the work he does now, but it keeps him outside and keeps him fit.
“I work until I’m tired, then I sit up under the shade tree and get a little rest, then get up and go back to work,” he said.
One of his fondest memories is of his aunts who lived up in the hills of Carroll County and their seemingly bottomless deep freezes, where they kept their summer bounty of peas, squash, greens and okra, turned to homemade feasts in the dead of winter.
Brewer wanted to grow vegetables that tasted like theirs, and now he does.
He sells tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, okra, purple hull peas, kale, mustard and turnip greens, and cabbage each year, straight out of the field at home and at the Downtown Greenwood Farmers Market each Saturday during months when the market is operating.
He also sells eggs from his 38 laying hens.
Peas and tomatoes are his biggest sellers, he said.
“Customers can smell the difference between a homegrown tomato and one that’s been bought at the store to resell,” he said.
Brewer said he has sold as many as 300 pounds of tomatoes at one Saturday market, with people buying them by the bushel for canning and freezing.
Same with the peas.
Brewer laughs as he remembers one customer from Carrollton dropping by the house to pick up some produce.
“He looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Brewer, those last peas I bought ...’ and I was sure there was something wrong with them. But he just smiled and told me, ‘Those are the best peas I ever had!’”
Brewer said he will probably get his peas, squash and okra in the ground by Good Friday. Tomato seedlings will get started around March 1, and he’ll be selling greens by April 1.
He usually has tomatoes to sell by mid-May and peas by June 15.
“People come by and pick ’em,” he said. “I sometimes sell eight to 10 bushels at a time.”
Except for harvest, Brewer does most of the work himself. He is currently fixing up a storage building on his property as a packing and cleaning place for peas and greens.
His wife, he said, doesn’t like him washing greens inside the house.
That’s OK with Brewer, who has found his peace and found his place outside in the vegetable garden.
“I used to hurry when I first got started,” he said, “but now I take my time.”
He gestures to the pond below the house and the chicken pen beyond.
“I can kill me a young chicken, catch me a fish, and cook vegetables from my garden,” he said. “I’ve got everything I need right here.”
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
