When Superior Court Judge Ralph Van Pelt comes home after a stressful day of hearing cases, he finds solace in his garden.
“There’s a real pleasure to eating something you’ve grown by yourself,” said Van Pelt, who grew up in Summerville helping his parents grow crops. “My parents grew up during the Great Depression and they did farming back then. My mother always had a garden. We always had a cornfield when I was a kid. My mother liked to grow flowers and vegetables. My father ran an old John Deere tractor in Chattooga County.”
Van Pelt’s own backyard blooms with oregano, sage, rosemary, thyme, chocolate mint, Kentucky Colonel, Mexico chili peppers and cowhorn hot pepper plants.
“Oregano, sage, thyme and rosemary are some of the most basic spices there are,” he said. “The spices are good in soups especially. Chocolate mint is good for tea. Kentucky Colonel is a mint variety. It is also good for tea. There’s some things you can cook chocolate mint into.”
In his front yard, his garden beds are growing blueberry bushes, bell, sweet and pepperoncino peppers and bloody butcher corn. His side yard holds four new muscadine vines and seven fig trees.
Van Pelt said he continues to add things every year, creating more and more of an oasis surrounding his house. He plans to plant plum trees next year beside his fig trees.
“I have compost bins where I compost everything I can. I compost vegetable kitchen scraps and paper. The compost goes into my raised beds,” said Van Pelt, who also transformed three olive oil barrels into rain barrels to help keep his plants adequately watered.
He began his garden about five years ago by putting in the raised beds. He also planted Henon bamboo plants, the most evident marker of all the growth that’s occurred in that time.
“The bamboo is edible and gets really big eventually,” he said. “I have three different varieties of bamboo. It started out with three 5-gallon buckets and the bamboo spread from that. It now creates a wall in my yard.”
One day, majestic oak trees will line his driveway, bringing a glimpse of the growing grandeur not visible from the road.
While hiking, Van Pelt stuffed his pockets with acorns that he later transplanted in his yard. Now, 20 oak trees are sprouting up from those plantings. His vision was to have an oak tree in his yard that was different than the others on White Oak Mountain, he said.