GARDENING: A LOVE STORY

Jim Payne checked his okra plants after recent heavy rains and found them faring better than his tomatoes.

Jim Payne isn't a farmer, but people drive for miles to his front porch to buy tomatoes.

Charging 79 cents a pound, the same price he's asked for more than 20 years, clearly Payne isn't in the vegetable business for the money.

"I don't get a lot out of it. Most years I just break even," Payne said.

Sweating in the humid Southeast Missouri summer, he whacks at weeds, drives stakes, ties up and generally rescues his storm-battered tomato plants.

Despite suffering a light heart attack three years ago, Payne still tackles the garden chores daily.

"As long as I'm able to get out there with that tiller, I'll do it," he said.

Payne said he's always loved watching things grow.

When he was a child, his uncle had a farm in Kennett. "Jimmie" used to enjoy working on the farm with his cousin.

Much later he spent 10 years working in the produce department in Cape Girardeau's Kroger store until that store closed. Now he works part time at Dollar General Store in the Plaza.

This garden, the one with the "best tomatoes in the world" (according to loyal friends), was planted nearly two decades ago when Payne married a woman named Martha and moved into a little house on the corner of Bertling and Burcher Streets.

"I was cooking chili at a dance for the American Legion (He's a Korean War veteran) when she and a couple of other gals came in," Payne said.

"My friends and I decided to go over and ask them to dance. I asked her and I've been with her ever since."

The couple will celebrate 22 years in January.

Payne cleared a large plot of land behind the house for the garden. Trees, vines, wild roses and a lot of weeds were evicted.

"He'd come in looking like he had a fight with a cat," Martha said.

Underneath was "the richest, most mature soil. Boy it was nice," Payne said.

In addition to tomatoes, he planted okra ("I don't like it but she does"), bell peppers, zucchini and yellow squash.

Nearby, iris, roses and other flowers bloom. Payne often cuts flowers to bring inside to Martha.

"He's always busy," she said.

"This is my relaxation," Payne says. "It's hard work, but I love it."

And he has a loyal group of customers who love the fruit (OK, vegetable) of his labors: tomatoes.

"They sell almost faster than they grow" Payne said.

Payne paused in his gardening recently to talk with a reporter. As he talked, he busily re-strung his weed whacker.

Nearby, baby wrens chattered from a birdhouse Payne hung for them and loudly demanded food.

Payne can probably sympathize with the busy wren mother.

Tomato-hungry hordes buy his produce in every stage of ripeness.

"I get calls early in the summer asking when the tomatoes will be ready," he said.

"I'm not trying to boast or anything, but they know they're going to get a good tomato," Payne said.

Not to mention a good deal.

He and Martha always put an extra tomato on the stack.

For the most part, customers appreciate the couple's kindness, returning year after year.

Sometimes they insist on paying more.

Some, familiar with the routine, weigh their own and leave money behind if neither Jim nor Martha is home.

"I've found money on my back porch or in my mailbox when people have helped themselves," he said.

Every so often customers will go through major inconvenience to get fresh tomatoes to their kitchens.

One woman took 40 pounds of tomatoes home on a plane with her. "She wrote and said they got there fine," Payne said.

He's had one family from Texas who regularly makes a trip north stop by four years in a row.

Another regular customer mails a few pounds to friends for their birthday each year.

The rain has been hard on the garden this year, but Payne has seen worse.

"Last year it rained for almost a whole month. The ground was so saturated you could see the mold growing," he said.

Currently, he's perplexed by an apparent hybrid that has taken up residence on a couple of his tomato vines.

Simply put, it looks like a pepper, tastes like a tomato, and grows on a tomato vine.

"I've never seen anything like it," he said. He said he's shown the vegetable to other experts, the produce men at Shnucks and IGA as well as a friend who works at Sunny Hill Gardens and Florist, and all agree it's a strange development.

The weed whacker is restrung and the interview is over, so Payne heads back into his garden.