Reaping Records

Cullman, Ala., is agricultural country. If you want to impress someone around here, farm.

Cullman County is the state’s largest production center for poultry in every form—broilers, layers, and eggs. It’s also home to some world champion plants, which belong to 87-year-old Charles Wilber, whose wonder-working organic compost has produced two plants named to the Guinness Book of World Records.

“They (the Guinness Record folks) used a photo of my Better Boy (tomatoes) as the cover for the 1987 hardback edition,” explains Wilber, a former marina owner and operator. “Four plants produced 1,368 pounds of tomatoes—that’s an average of 342 pounds a plant.” He cracks a hint of a smile.

“But you’ve got to be careful,” he cautions, “when you use chicken manure in your compost. It has a lot of nitrogen, and if you use too much, you’ll end up with your plants too ‘leggy.’ An inch of chicken manure works like two inches of cow manure.”

Wilber’s gardening magic compost contains one ingredient that surprises most people, and that’s kudzu. This flowering vine can grow as much as a foot a day, giving it for good reason its nickname—“mile-a-minute.” Originally imported as an erosion-control agent, it has spread throughout the South, covering everything from telephone poles to barns and tractors.

“It is about 26% protein and is rich in minerals,” Wilber writes in his How to Grow World Record Tomatoes book (Acres USA, 1999), “(and) has been known to reclaim the harshest clay soils.”

With this kind of confidence and knowledge of kudzu’s redeeming properties, Wilber used this generally despised plant to create his “perfect” compost, experimenting for years before he was satisfied with the result. His formula now consists of a blend of hay made from shredded green kudzu, sudex (a sorghum-sudangrass mix), manure, soil, hardwood ashes or granite dust, and colloidal clay.

The mixture proved its worth by bringing his tomatoes to record-winning fruition only five years after he began using it. The results have been outright astonishing.

Take, for example, Wilber’s cherry tomatoes. One plant grew to the soaring height of 28 feet, 7 inches, creating another Guinness record yet to be beaten. But tomatoes haven’t been his only successes.

Among dozens of other super-sized crops, Wilber has grown a half-pound plum; an 18-pound, 2-ounce radish; and a 105-pound watermelon. Of the watermelon, he merely shrugs.

“The world record is way over 200 pounds,” he nods. “But I’d say 105 pounds is a pretty good size.”

The same year his Better Boy tomatoes made the Guinness cover, he also produced an okra plant 17 feet, 6 and one quarter inches tall. “A fellow in Florida broke that record, but he had a longer growing season down there,” Wilber points out.

“The important thing, though,” he says, “is that big doesn’t have to equal tough. I want big plants and big harvests so that more food can be produced in less space, not just for the sake of seeing how big something can get.”

Wilber attributes his bountiful harvests—all of which he gives to friends and neighbors—to his organic growing methods. “I use no synthetics whatsoever—not as fertilizer, weed-killer, nothing. Birds and ladybugs do a fine job keeping the pests away. Natural products work the best all the way around.”

Wilber hasn’t made much of a garden of his own for the last couple of years—he’s been too busy teaching other people his gardening know-how. He’ll go wherever he’s invited, using hands-on lessons out in the field.

“I’ve done a lot of work in Texas, some in Georgia, and in Tennessee and North Carolina,” he says. “Of course, I get around here, too—Cullman, Decatur, and so on.

“God’s first command to man was to be fruitful and multiply,” Wilber nods his head knowingly. “I hope to see my gardening methods doing that for a long, long time.”

Judy Woodward Bates is a regular contributor to American Profile.

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