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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.

The longtime Mocksville resident tends a patio bursting with container-grown tomatoes at Lutheran Services Carolinas’ Trinity Glen, the Winston-Salem senior care community where he now lives.

“It’s too hot right now and they’re getting blossom-end rot,” he says. “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 said. 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. His family raised almost all their own food on their Cleveland, N.C. farm, 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.

He seems remarkably sanguine under the circumstances.

“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.”

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,” says 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 ripening on the vine – “if I can get to them before the ‘hawks,’” Jones jokes, meaning 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 says. Duke’s is his mayonnaise of choice, but now that he’s watching his diet, mustard will do just fine.

Lutheran Services Carolinas is a nonprofit health and human services organization providing skilled nursing care, rehabilitation, assisted living, adult day services, and retirement options to seniors in North Carolina; foster care, adoption, mental health services, refugee resettlement services, disaster response, and residential care for people with disabilities in both North Carolina and South Carolina; and recovery services in South Carolina.