A decade ago, Leslie Fox was facing mounting stress at work and encroaching development in the West Mobile neighborhood where she and her family had lived for years. So, one day, she and her husband, Danny, decided to “get out of the city. We just had to do something different,” Leslie says. Luckily, Danny (whom Leslie met in college and calls “a long, tall, skinny drink of sweet tea”) is “very handy” and always ready to take a leap.
Over the next 10 years, Leslie and Danny relocated and recalibrated their lives from the suburbs to a piece of land in Stockton, tucked so far into the woods that Leslie has to text me photos of landmarks along the dirt road so I can find my way, like breadcrumbs. “There is one wide puddle,” one text cautions, “but it isn’t deep.” I’m pretty sure I won’t find the place until suddenly, there it is.
Leslie and Danny gradually carved out a homestead in the woods, starting with a camper parked in a cleared patch, and blossoming into a cabin, barn, greenhouse, garden shed, chicken coop and run, duck pen, bee boxes and many garden plots. The whole place teems with flowers and vegetables and animals and sprouting seeds and leafy greens and birdsong. On the day I visit, a Friday morning, the sky is blue and puffed with perfect clouds. Guinea fowl speed in circles around us, roosters crow and barn cats couldn’t care less and make no appearance.
Leslie emanates that blend of earthiness and glamour common to Southern women. “I absolutely love getting my hands dirty,” she says. She drives a mud-caked Jeep and buys farm tools at Friday night auctions yet hung massive antique chandeliers in the barn and greenhouse. She recalls a bumper sticker she once spotted and admired that read “I make dirt look good.”
Leslie grows all kinds of things, including those you’d expect: heirloom tomatoes (her favorite “by far”), peppers, cabbage, kale, celery, onions, leeks, broccoli, cauliflower, corn, squash, turnip greens, mustard greens, dandelion, garlic, herbs. But also loquats, paw paws, pink lemons, avocados, figs, Seminole pumpkins and even pineapples in honor of her departed father, who loved them.
But most of all, she loves peas, which, in the South, can be a catch-all for peas and beans. For beans, Leslie grows Calypso, King of the Garden Lima, Cherokee Wax and Rattlesnake. For peas, she grows Pinkeye Purple Hull cowpeas, a popular Southern variety, and Purple Podded English peas, which happen to be ripe the day I visit.
When you eat them off the vine, popped straight from the pod, they’re refreshing, have a perfect amount of crunch, and they taste, well, green. “That does not taste like any Del Monte pea,” Leslie says. “It’s absolutely 100% different.” Truly, it doesn’t even taste like the same food. And sidenote, the purple pods themselves are gorgeous and striking.
Purple pod peas are “very, very easy to grow,” Leslie says. She plants them early, at the end of January, to avoid bugs. The peas ripen in April and early May; you can tell they’re ready when the pods plump up. Leslie often picks them in the morning, shells them over lunch, then washes, blanches and dries them. She keeps some to eat fresh, paired with carrots and seasoned with salt, pepper, butter and garlic, and bags the rest to freeze. “At the end of their cycle, I let ‘em go on the vine,” Leslie says. And she saves the seeds, to plant the following year.
Leslie didn’t grow up gardening, but was a self-proclaimed “city slicker” in West Monroe, Louisiana, raised “with Johnny’s pizza on Friday nights.” She got the country-living bug from her grandmother, who grew flowers and had a giant pecan tree, a pasture and a horse. In summer, she served watermelon and cranked homemade ice cream. But Leslie has magnified these rural memories into a full-blown agrarian life. This urge to cultivate and live on the land is “just my gift that God has given me,” Leslie says. “God has blessed us. I never in a million years thought that I would be able to grow and keep up with all this.”
Leslie is also blessed with mettle and perseverance. She’s not afraid to try new things, as evident in experiments that surround us at every turn, including electroculture and strawberry plants mixed among the onions to make the onions sweeter. Leslie is not only raising dozens of baby chicks but growing their mealworms. She’s tinkering with a solution to make cut flowers last longer and a method for bottling baby food. “There are so many places to learn,” she assures me, including through friends, YouTube and plain old trial and error.
Leslie is also not afraid to fail. “I’ve had chickens die,” she says. “And goats. We’ve lost bees. At one time, we had eight hives, and we now have three. You have to come into farming, especially if you have animals, knowing that some will die.” Like the time one of the cats turned the barn corner and scared a chicken to death. Literally. And the time a pair of country dogs decimated the meat chickens three days before harvest. “It was a massacre,” Leslie says. I ask how she handles such huge setbacks. “You just go back to the feed store, and you buy 20 more,” she says. You bury the dead, “and thank the Lord for giving them a good life.”
“You can’t beat yourself up,” Leslie says, and she tells me that you must approach farming as a learning process. So, when her fig tree died, Leslie planted a new one in a new spot, after a friend told her that fig trees “love mulch” and suggested planting it by the chicken coop. She did, and the new tree is thriving. On the flip side, “for the last two months I’ve been trying to learn how to make sourdough bread,” Leslie says, then gives me a gigantic thumbs down.
So, Leslie has learned to live in the mix of wins and losses. When we walk through the greenhouse, she notes a tomato plant gnawed to a stub, and in the next breath, a brand-new cauliflower, its sweet, round face framed by big green leaves like a baby in a bonnet. “Oh my gosh!” Leslie says upon discovering it. “Look, look, look!” There are “surprises every day,” she says. “Good surprises, bad surprises.” There are biting gnats and sneaky snakes, but also the calm of watching a storm roll in from the porch swing or the joy of gifting a jar of strawberry jam.
A few years ago, the stress of losing her mother and difficult business transitions caused Leslie’s blood pressure to spike, landing her in the hospital. She got serious about eating homegrown food and cutting out alcohol and saw major improvements in her physical and mental health, stress levels and sleep. She was able to cut back on medications, and now regularly drinks potlikker and bone broth to “give me a boost to go out and do what I need to do.”
Leslie and Danny, married nearly 40 years, now begin each day with coffee and prayer before he heads to work. Leslie feeds the chickens and gathers eggs, then starts on her list of farm tasks for the day. This afternoon, she’ll go to the feedstore in Bay Minette, stopping on the way to visit a friend and help her in her garden. “There’s so much freedom out here,” she says. She feels lucky to spend her days in work that is “productive and healthy.” And she’s looking forward to fall, when she’ll try another round of purple pod peas.
