Homegrown Flavor
At HalleluYah Gardens, Mart Mounger and Ashley Peebles are growing heirloom tomatoes,
seasonal vegetables, and the kind of food that tastes like it came from your own backyard.
Written by Lena Anderson | Photographed by Joe Worthem
A few miles south of Calhoun City, HalleluYah Gardens sits tucked into the countryside, where Mart Mounger and his fiancée, Ashley Peebles, have spent the past decade turning a humble backyard garden into more than 10 separate growing spaces across the property.
Mounger is careful to call them gardens rather than a farm. The distinction is intentional. Rather than fields planted in rows and worked by tractors, HalleluYah’s growing spaces were built more like large backyard gardens. They brought in soil and mulch, created each space individually, and they still do nearly everything by hand.
That includes weeding, mulching and day-to-day plant care, all handled by Mounger and Peebles themselves.
One of the secrets to their gardens is the soil. A nearby cotton gin produces a byproduct that eventually decomposes into rich, black soil. Mounger collects it and works it into the gardens.
It can bring plenty of weeds, but the mineral content makes a noticeable difference in what comes out of the ground.
“People always ask us, ‘Why does everything taste so much better?’” Mounger said. For him, the answer comes back to the living soil.
He sees a difference between a tomato grown in someone’s backyard, one grown in a field, and one bought at the grocery store. HalleluYah Gardens aims to replicate that backyard-grown flavor on a larger scale.
And in the South, there may be no better way to know your audience than by growing a really good tomato.
Tomatoes account for about 90 percent of HalleluYah’s production. This season, the gardens produced roughly 65 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, along with numerous types of cherry tomatoes.
Mounger calls tomatoes the “heart and soul” of HalleluYah Gardens.
Other crops they grow follow the seasons. Asparagus, blackberries and strawberries arrive in spring, while fall brings broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale, carrots, snap peas and collards.
That variety is part of what makes small-scale growing work. When one crop struggles, something else may be ready to take its place.
“You have to learn to pivot,” Mounger said.
It’s good advice for anyone trying to coax something from Mississippi soil. A stretch of heat can change the timing. An unprecedented ice storm can wipe out thousands of plants. Too much rain can alter a harvest, and a pest can show up overnight.
“All you do every day is go outside and solve problems,” Mounger said. “You have to accept a certain amount of loss because you can’t simply wait for perfect conditions. It’s about taking the chance.”
The work can be relentless, but it has also connected HalleluYah Gardens to the surrounding community. They supply tomatoes to many local restaurants and small grocers, including City Grocery, Snackbar, Saint Leo, Kingswood, SoLa and Chicory Market. But Mounger and
Peebles feel most at home at farmers markets, including the Oxford City Market on Tuesday afternoons.
“We would not be who we are today without that market,” Peebles said.
The markets have given them a place to build relationships with customers, restaurants and other local food producers. They also provide an outlet for the volume of produce the gardens generate.
Not wanting to waste anything they grow, they preserve as much as they can. When they have more produce than they can sell fresh, Peebles turns to pickling, canning, and saving it for later. They donate anything they can’t use, including through the Oxford Community Market’s food-access and food-pantry programs. It is another way the gardens stay connected to the community beyond the farmers market.
That same sense of purpose carries into the work itself. For all the physical demands of growing food, something about the call of the land keeps Mounger and Peebles outside and coming back each morning.
Mounger said he can’t imagine returning to a life of sitting in front of a computer all day, answering emails and sitting through Zoom calls.
“Even though this work is strenuous physically, it’s such a blessing, too,” he said.
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