Photos by Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Kris Peckman and Jack Ferguson harvest kale on Ferguson's farm. Ferguson had to cut back on farming and Peckman is his apprentice.

Kris Peckman and Jack Ferguson also raise Swiss chard and butternut squash. Their produce is available at Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op and Local Roots Cafe.

With Jack Ferguson coaching, Kris Peckman drives a tractor to the garden on Ferguson's farm. When her banking job was outsourced to India, she became an apprentice at his farm. She helps tend crops, makes deliveries and sells at the Roanoke City Market on Saturdays.

BOONES MILL -- This is a story of a box of Franklin County kale and the four hands that picked it.

The older hands belong to 87-year-old Jack Ferguson, who's been selling food on the Roanoke City Market since he was tall enough to gather eggs on his family's 90-acre farm.

The younger hands are sun-spotted and weather-worn. They belong to Kris Peckman, 64, who used to type for a living, programming computers for Wachovia Bank. In her off hours, she hiked and built trails and rode her bike downtown every Saturday morning so she could buy what in her estimation was the best crop of spinach in the world.

The spinach was of the Bloomsdale variety, and she found it faithfully in the market's southeast corner on farmer Jack's table. The two didn't talk much, but one week Jack tucked a bunch of kale into Kris' bag with the express purpose of creating another convert to the curly green, and a friendship was born.

Two years ago, Jack confided in Kris that he was about to hang up his tractor key for good. His wife, Nellie, had fallen ill, and he could no longer leave her alone in the house.

Within the year, the bank shipped Kris' job to India.

This is a story about what happened next -- and why Jack likes to say that Kris didn't just extend his ability to farm. She saved his life.

From seed to sale

On a recent morning, she drives her dented Subaru station wagon down a winding lane that ends at the Ferguson farm. It's 9:30, and the sun has yet to loosen the icy mud puddles or stiff Siberian kale.

Kris waits for Jack, who emerges in insulated coveralls and walking with his usual bounce. The goal this day is to fill one produce box for the Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op and another for Local Roots Cafe in Roanoke.

"You couldn't sell 'em on any turnips, could you?" he asks.

That's one role that Kris initiated -- the marketing and delivery of Jack's produce to younger, local-food proponents. She's also talked him into planting some trendier crops; Swiss chard, for instance, and butternut squash. (Turnips have yet to catch on among the gourmet groupies.)

The main thing she does as his apprentice -- her word, not his -- is tend the market stand on Saturdays for Jack so he can be home tending to Nellie, who's now wheelchair-bound. During the week, a hired home-care aide fills in.

The symbiotic partnership grew organically, not unlike the kale. With her severance package from the bank, Kris could afford to retire early -- and to get paid in produce for her part-time hours on the farm.

She'd long pined for more room to grow food than what was available in her suburban, Hollins-area yard. She can also get rapturous about her involvement in the local food chain, from seed to sale. Even about the turnips.

"They taste great roasted!" she says.

Life extension

Back when he was a young man in his early 80s, Jack told his doctor he intended to farm until he was 90. Working with Kris now, he wants to up the ante by 10 years.

A 100-year-old farmer? You wouldn't scoff if you watched him climb a hill or hoe a row. "Before Kris, I was about to take to the rocking chair," he says. "She's extended my life already by three years. I don't know why I was so lucky to have her come along."

For 60 years, Nellie was Jack's main helper, killing and plucking the chickens they sold on the market, back before tighter health-department regulations led them toward eggs and vegetables instead. She hoed the garden, drove the tractor, baled hay and raised two sons, one of whom lives next door. ("I worked him so hard as a kid, he wanted to get as far away from it as he could," Jack says of his son, Jerry Ferguson.)

Now, the old farmer teaches the not-so-old apprentice to drive the tractor down the steep, rutted hill, brushing by the dried-up Joe Pye Weed and past a trio of beech trees.

He stands behind her Duct-taped seat and coaches her, all the while balancing on a 3-inch-wide trailer hitch and holding on to a flimsy pair of reflectors.

Near the garden, Jack stops to show a visitor the spring where five generations of his family have sated a thirst. Then he scales the hill directly above it, using saplings and greenbrier vines as handholds.

He's aiming for the north side of one particular beech, whereupon his cousin Moody Peters carved his initials -- "I.M.P." -- along about 1933. What the "I" stood for has long been forgotten.

Tenuous tradition

Tucked into a bend in Teel Creek, the winter garden is just a few rows. In the mid-1800s, this bottomland spot filled in a corner of a slave plantation. It came into Jack's family when his father, Walter, bought the land in 1920, a year before Jack was born.

Jack's first memory? Riding to the market with his daddy in an old Model T, back when produce sellers donned felt hats and three-piece suits and butchers wore white shirts and ties.

Come Saturday, Kris will cart the oldest market farmer's crop of kale, turnips and eggs to his southeast-corner table and continue a tried, though tenuous, tradition of nearly 90 years. The regulars who know her story -- and not many do -- sometimes thank her for maintaining a critical link in the local-food chain.

Right now, though, there's work to complete. Kris steers the tractor back toward the barn and, overcorrecting a bit, fudges the turnaround. Jack guides her back on course, and the kale-filled wagon bumps along up the road.

"She didn't want to drive it at all, but I said anybody who can ride their bicycle through city traffic can do this.

"See?" he adds. "Isn't she good?"