Wilma Hanton
Wilma’s Garden
Hillsborough, NC

 

I was born into raising plants [laughs] and had my first garden mistake at two years old, and I learned some taxonomy pretty quick. – Wilma Hanton

Wilma is the senior member of the Carrboro Farmers’ Market.  She and her then-husband, Jack, were original members of the Market in 1978.  Wilma grew up in the Midwest, where she helped her family in growing nearly all of their own food.  She says she made her first gardening mistake when she was two, as she pulled up her mother’s pine tree plants instead of the ragweed.  After 21 years as a research analyst in the Biology Department at the University of North Carolina, Wilma gardens full time, living a hard-scrabble life north of Hillsborough, North Carolina.  She is full of folk-wisdom and has many interesting stories for her customers regarding the use and cultivation of plants.

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Wilma Hanton, Carrboro Farmer's Market - Carrboro, NC
Date: July 3, 2011
Location: Home of Wilma Hanton - Hillsborough, NC
Interviewer & Photographer: Kate Medley

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Kate Medley:  Okay. I’ll start this out by saying this is Kate Medley interviewing Wilma Hanton on July 3, 2011 at Wilma’s home near Hillsborough, North Carolina. And I’ll just get you to introduce yourself and tell us who you are and what you do.

Wilma Hanton:  I’m Wilma Hanton. I’ve been living on this farm since the earliest 1970s and I made my first gardening mistake when I was two years old in Northern Indiana. I got spanked for that one by my mother. [Laughs]            

I went to Indiana State Teachers College, Indiana State College and Indiana State University and got a Bachelors in Biology and Art; got a Masters in Biology, Botany, Zoology and Microbiology. Even though Microbiology wasn’t an approved major, I had enough hours and then I came to UNC Chapel Hill to get a PhD in Mycology in the Botany Department. But I didn't finish it quite. I did the research but it was one of those—ABDs.
           
Then we—my husband and I got married in 1967, bought the property I believe in about 1971, and moved out here in 19—December 1975. I had my first child in June 1976 and we started growing plants in pots. I had a little garden, which got tilled out by [Laughs] now my ex. But what year was it we started the Farmers Market—’79—1979, 1980, somewhere in there. And for three years we actually raised produce and sold it—four years actually—three years before the Farmers Market was organized and various places bouncing around Chapel Hill and East Gate Parking Lot across from the Ranch House where the present Crohn Building is at the Church of Reconciliation and down at St. Thomas Moore’s Church.  Wherever we could find a spot to set up our trucks. [Laughs] And then the Market got organized, more official, and with a little help from Carrboro, got a more permanent site, their first one being over on what’s the name of that street across from Tom Robinson’s Fish House and next to the Rescue Squad.

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Take us back to your growing up days and tell us about your first gardening mistake.

[Laughs] My mother had been wanting to grow some pine trees from seeds and she finally had some seed that germinated. And I heard her talking about it and I knew where they were and she was talking about weeding them. And so I thought I would help her and I went out to weed them, but I didn't know which were the weeds and which were the trees. And I pulled all the little pine seedlings.

And what did she do?

And she spanked me, as you know you would spank a two year-old. [Laughs] But we grew almost all of our own food, canned a lot of food. We even ground a lot of our own flour, cornmeal.  We raised buckwheat, ground our own buckwheat flour. Most mornings we had the pancakes for breakfast. We even made our own maple syrup a couple times. But there was seven of us kids and six of us in school for at least six years before my older brother graduated and my younger sister started.
           
So my mother would pack up these six lunchboxes every morning. We’d grab our pancakes and get ready to go to school and get back home in the evening and help weed the garden or pick vegetables. And in the summertime then of course we helped weed the garden and pick the produce and helped prepare it for canning. We made loose hay, which meant getting out there with a hay rake and the forks, the pitchforks. And I had two older brothers, so there was always competition to see who could lift the biggest forkful.

And where was this?

About 50 miles south of Chicago, southwest—about 20 miles southwest of South Bend—out in the middle of nowhere.

And at what point did you decide to start studying plants?

Well like I said I was born into raising plants [Laughs] and had my first garden mistake at two years old and I learned some taxonomy pretty quick. And I liked flowers and my mother gave us a little patch of garden. Mine was actually in the corner of the field next to the garden, a little triangular space where the tractor didn't like to go in that corner and that was my garden. One sister had one in the other corner of the garden and a couple other patches and my mother always planted flowers in the vegetable garden because it would draw the bees in to pollinate.
           
Each of us had a row across the garden of flowers, gladiolas or whatever we wanted to plant.

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And then bring us up to coming from Illinois to—

Indiana.

—from Indiana, excuse me—to North Carolina.

Well after I finished my Masters Degree and wanted to go to Graduate School I looked at various places. I had been accepted at Wisconsin and British Columbia I believe, but I decided to come to Chapel Hill because John Couch was a Mycologist and I had been working on the same group of organisms, actinomycetes for my Masters, and so I came here to work with him and published a couple papers, two species of that actinomycetes and one other fungus I discovered while I was working in the lab in aquatic Petri dishes under the microscope. And I went to NC State for about two years. And then I bought the farm and I decided I had to get a job and didn't know what to do with school. I never finished it. Even though I had all the research done and just didn't write up a dissertation and finish that.

And so you got a job doing what?

Working at UNC Biology Department teaching Electron Microscopy and Photography and doing research with various faculty and students. And then did that research on the side when I had saw it was interesting and had time for it.

And how long did that last and did you enjoy it?

I enjoyed it definitely. I’d still be doing it [Laughs] but I was there for 21 years, published approximately 20 papers.  Anywhere from like I said actinomycetes through tobacco hornworms and several other fungi and such, played around with tissue culture and even morels. They were easy to grow; the hyphae in the culture but a lot of people tried it and weren't able to get them to fruit until they found out you just flush away all the nutrients like a spring rain and they would fruit. [Laughs]

And how did you come to start gardening full-time?

Well we had a piece of land. And so after work when I got home I would go out and play in the garden and grew some vegetables and grew some flowers and it just grew from there.

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And when did you start selling at the Carrboro Market?

Well ’76 is when Tom was born, so 1976—somewhere in there when he was a baby and ’79 for sure because I had Philip at the Market on my back in a backpack. [Laughs]

Tell us more about those early days at the Market.

Well it was sort of like almost a family get-together every Saturday. We’d see the other families and some of them with their children. Both of our children would go and for a while they would roller skate and skateboard until they were banned. [Laughs] And then as my children got older, I hired a baby-sitter on Saturdays to take them out strawberry picking or do other things because they were starting to get bored with just being at the Market every day.

And what’s changed about the Market since then?

A lot more people, a lot more vendors, and many more customers, but it’s also changed in what people sell at the Market. We did have some baked goods then. We had one lady who did flower arranging. She’d buy the flowers from people—vendors at the Market as well as some that she would bring in, and then sold her flower arrangements. We had—actually this is—I think it’s very interesting and I think other people should think about it because I don’t think the townspeople know about it. We had a nuclear physicist who sold produce and a little woodworking. He worked over at Oak Ridge on the nuclear bomb.

And tell us about some of the other early vendors there.

Well, we had Sara Lou Ellen who was a retired schoolteacher. We had Pam Oakley’s grandmother, who did a lot of cut flowers and she did some plants and some produce and she was a character. She raised—I can't remember whether it was six or so—a number of children by herself because her husband I think had got killed in the War. And she’d tell you I did it all myself. [Laughs] And her daughter, Pam Oakley’s mother Marjorie, is still coming to Market and bringing some produce and helping with the plants. And Pam works full-time over in Durham, but does this on the side as well as some landscaping and keeps herself busy. She has her own sawmill. She’s building her own house. So it’s interesting in what other people do in their time besides just coming to Market on Market days.

Tell us about Market days. You were at the Market yesterday so tell us sort of what a Market day is like for you.

Well I get up at 3 o'clock in the morning. We pack the truck the night before because there’s no way of doing it in the morning. And drive to Market which is a 22-mile drive and get there and get parked and unload all the plants, set up the tables, and put the plants out and arrange it the way we think they ought to be if we can get a chance of doing it the way we want to, like put all the mints together and the yellow peppers together and the various other groups together and tall things on the floor.
           
And then go around and put labels on everything and wait on customers. A lot of customers early in the morning will go do their produce shopping first. So many times I get very few customers until maybe 9 o'clock or so because I have some early people who want to be sure they get—if I only have one or two of this kind of plant. And we have one lady who comes in at 7:00—6:30 in the morning to get some eggs every other week and she’s about the earliest person I know. And when other people start coming she says, "Yeah. It’s about time to go home now, too many people are here." [Laughs]

Tell us about the rest of your Market day.

Well sometimes like I said it’s just seeing and waiting; sometimes—a lot of the time I talk. People come and ask me questions about this plant or that plant or what’s the problem here or what can I put there, sun or shade, make me some suggestions.
           
One of the most frequently one asked recently is about cilantro. People will say do you have cilantro plants? I say no; they don’t do well in cell packs. They get six inches tall, bloom go to seed and die. I said go down to the Weaver Street or Whole Foods and buy bulk coriander seed and plant them where they only get morning sun so they stay on the cool side—as you can keep them and preferably in rich composty soil and I said plant the seeds every couple of weeks. And then what you plant late August or September grows all winter long and makes large Rosetta leaves because they’re a cool weather plant. They say, "Oh, good."

I found that out by accident because we grew cilantro in cell packs when I first started doing plants in cell packs and they got about six inches tall, bloomed, went to seed, and died. I had put some in the garden. So I think it’s in late August they germinated on their own, come up volunteer, and I said, "Oh, that’s how you need to grow?"

Sounds like a great tip. What's another frequent question you get at Market?

One of the things that a lot of people don’t understand seeds that the seed has to be mature. Like I said, a little girl is not going to have a baby until she’s old enough. I said the seeds are not going to grow until they become old enough. And I’ve tried to get people to grow their own pepper seeds. I say all you need is to wait until the pepper turns red and you break the seeds out. It’s just like breaking an egg yolk out of an egg and save it until next spring and plant it.
           
We even had one vendor several years back who [Laughs] harvested these heads of what he thought were seeds but they were totally green, no seeds, and he was trying to sell himself as a native grass garden landscaper and these were actually of Rudbeckia Maxima, which has like a four-inch flower—spike in the center of the daisy-like flower. And he had cut them off and put them in a jar and was trying to sell them as seed.
           
But it’s a really simple thing. If you let a seed like an old flower become dry on its own—you don’t cut it and dry it—you want until it matures on the plant and if you look carefully you can open it up and shell it out and look and see the seeds, if it’s mature. Marigolds have a long skinny seed about up to maybe a half an inch long sometimes depending on which variety it is. But very thin, almost like a little needle-like, but not real stiff, and that’s after the marigold fades and turns brown and the bottom part of what was the flower turns brown and then you can break that open and you can see these silvery black seeds in there.
           
So you have to realize what a mature seed is; it’s not just a flower that has become dry.

What is the most popular plant at Market today?

For me?

That you sell?

Well another week or two, people keep asking about my purple Tabasco peppers.

Tell us about those.

They’re a small pepper. It actually started out as a purple Thai pepper. It’s a little larger than the red Thai. And when the immature stage goes from green to purple and then from purple to red, and about three-quarters of an inch long at the most and about a half an inch across. And one year I crossed it with the Christmas pepper basket from the grocery store pepper, which was a—one of the commercial Tabasco varieties, not the Tabasco Sauce Tabasco; there are a couple different things called it. It has a very dense cluster of upright about two, two and a half inch peppers.
           
And I crossed them and I got larger purple Thai peppers, which I call purple Tabasco. And they’re very pretty because they go from green to purple—well actually sort of blackish green to purple—and then orange and then red. So all these different colors are on the same plant when they’re—the plant is maybe only six to eight inches tall.

The little red Thai which is in a pot, a three and a half inch pot only gets about four or five inches tall. In the ground in the garden for a full season it gets two and a half foot tall, so it bonsais nicely; it’s one of those pepper plants that you can put on the window sill for the wintertime and have your little peppers sitting there in your kitchen to pick a couple off and throw in your pot of soup.
           
And the other interesting thing that people don’t understand—hot peppers, you don’t need to eat hot. You just use them for flavor; you know throw a couple in a pot of soup for flavor but not for necessarily heat. You can adjust the amount of heat. If you want it hotter you put more in.

What does your purple Tabasco pepper taste like?

Mostly hot. [Laughs] There are other more flavorful peppers besides heat and one is a lemon pepper, which actually has a lemon flavor. I think the Scotch Bonnet has a much nicer spicy flavor than habanera, but some people think they’re the same pepper but they’re definitely not the same pepper. The Scotch Bonnet is actually a Jamaican favorite. Habaneras to me are just hot and have a strange—the first time I tasted it I said it tasted like it’s been dipped in kerosene. [Laughs]
           
Anyway, peppers do have different flavors. And for just a basic pepper cayenne is still you know for a hot peppery—pepper flavor it’s—it’s about as good as any just for that purpose.

What was your most popular plant that you were selling at Market back in the ‘80s or when you were first starting?

Hmm. One of the plants that we sold a lot of were impatiens back then and marigolds used to be popular but not anymore. The last time I grew marigolds I grew three flats and I sold one six-pack. But the last couple years, I’ve noticed a few people planting them in their garden again. They’re a nice bright color. But the impatiens, people wanted some color in the shade. And the other one that’s very similar is called vinca—actually Madagascar Periwinkle—for the sun but it has some of the same colors—that pinkish purple and pinks and now they have red ones and white ones with red eyes—the same color range almost as impatience but for sun and the impatience for shade.

So is a lot of your role at Market not only selling the plants but teaching people what to do with the plants?

Yes. I try to teach people to do the plants themselves because I’m not going to be doing this forever. I tell them how to make cuttings and root them. They don’t believe when I say just cut a little piece of it and stick it in some moist soil or put it in water. A lot of people don’t understand. They want a fresh tomato plant around the 4th of July. And I say do you have any tomato plants? Yes. Go cut about a ten-inch piece off, you know a sucker or whatever, put it in a couple inches of water in just a Mason jar or a drinking glass and it’ll root and then you can go plant it in a new spot. But they do root.

Things like squashes. People don’t know that there’s an insect that lays its eggs right at the base of the squash plant. And then the little larvae develops in there and eats it up. But if you take that squash vine a foot out and two-feet out and put a little soil over it I’ll make roots at that point and then if that original root part gets killed, the plant still can keep on growing and make squashes.

What’s your favorite thing about going to Market?

People. It’s sort of a social like I said. Originally even when I first started it was sort of like a family get-together every Saturday. I go around and say hi to people and see what kinds of things they have and then we sometimes myself or others have interesting produce that isn't normally available all the times of the year but just at certain seasons, like the juice from artichokes in the fall, and now some people have been starting to grow things like the so-called husk cherry which I grew up with as a wild plant in Northern Indiana. It’s a nice sweet fruit about a half an inch across. You just pop it.

And what’s your least favorite thing about going to the Carrboro Market?

Loading up and going home [Laughs]. Just the loading up because you’re getting sort of tired at that time of day, especially in the summertime when it’s very hot. And sometimes the plants are so dry that you have to water them before we put them back on the truck and go home even. So I get the little watering can out and—but mostly it’s just I think because you’re you know a little tired by that time of the morning, been up since 3 o'clock in the morning and here it is noon.

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So how is business for you at the Market compared to 20 years ago?

Not as good, just because of the competition from the major local stores. Even though I’ve noticed that people like Food Lion have quit carrying near as many plants as they did eight, ten years ago, but you still have Home Depot and Lowes and Wal-Mart to deal with.

But they got a lot of variety that I don’t carry anymore because there’s no sense in me growing them anymore. And Southern States is doing a good job and we know one of the people who grows for them and then they buy in from I don’t know how many different places. So they get a lot of variety. The one person that we know he’s done a lot of the perennials for them. He used to go just groundcovers, just wholesale; well he’s still wholesaling to them but he has a good variety. He has—I think he has one employee per greenhouse and he has about 20-some greenhouses. But I talked to him two years ago and he said he had to lay off some people just because of the economy. So gas prices are up and the weather is dry and people aren't planting as many plants as they used to. [Laughs]

Do you have competition within the Market? Are there other people selling plants?

Yes. Other people sell plants but we all sort of—well the majority of us—actually sell different groups of plants like Joe and Louise sell beautiful herb plants and because when I grew basil I water with a hose and they get black spots and don’t look—do nice. So I let people ask me for basil and I said go see Joe and Louise. I said I let them do that and parsley. But they don’t do flat Italian parsley which I did do and I should do it because other people aren't doing it. I don’t know why other people don’t do it. But I haven't done it.

And another—well two other people—one person sells miniature shrubs which actually with age will get to be large trees but they’re nice and bonsai-ed. Another lady does a lot of flowering shrubs. I do some flowering shrubs. But hers are totally different shrubs than mine most of the time. Then Pam Oakley grows various perennials also but most of them are different than the varieties I grow.

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What do you think the future of the Carrboro Farmers Market looks like?

Well it seems to be lately going to more and more prepared foods. But I’m not sure it should go too much further in that direction because there are people out there growing produce, but a lot of people like to come by and snack there in the morning because it’s a lot of good baked goods. And apparently people like the hotdogs [Laughs], which are made from locally produced meat.

To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.