“Everybody likes them”: Hardeeville veteran’s tomato stand keeps people coming back
Update: As of July 22, Bubba Crosby is sold out of tomatoes for the season.
Neither rain, nor heat, nor the COVID-19 pandemic has stopped 93-year-old retired farmer and Army veteran Bubba Crosby from continuing to grow and sell his beloved large red tomatoes. These concerns have also not driven off the dozens of customers who stream to his Hardeeville back porch throughout the day to buy his tomatoes, a disease-resistant specialty breed local to the Lowcountry.
“When they taste them, they come back,” he said in an interview. “It’s a good crop this year, a real good crop.”
Crosby was a commercial farmer in the Bluffton area for 40 years, during which tomatoes were his main crop, along with watermelon, squash, cucumber and others. After he retired, he started selling just the tomatoes out of his home, although he also grows cucumbers, bell peppers, corn, okra and squash. The tomatoes sell for $3 a pound.
“[The other vegetables] are just for us to eat,” he said. “The whole family eats them — grandchildren and all. We’ll process them and put them in jars.”
Crosby, born in Savannah and raised in Hardeeville, grew up in the 1930s and noted that he has seen a lot of change in Bluffton and Hardeeville.
He said he was 6 years old when the road was built between the two towns. He remembers horses carrying dirt in pans maneuvered by men to lay out the roads.
In 1945, when he was 18, he was drafted into the Army. He said a six-month draft deferment likely saved him from fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, one of the deadliest battles in World War II. In the two years following the war, he delivered mail as a postal worker in various locations across Europe.
“I was on a train riding all over Europe that dropped people off,” he said. “One of those train trips was on Thanksgiving, and they had Thanksgiving dinner on a big field.”
He came back to the Lowcountry and has lived in his current home for 66 years.
Crosby said he has never seen anything like this pandemic, even if he is familiar with pandemics that happened before his time. “We’ve had some stuff, but never this bad.”
So he’s making sure to socially distance, using his cane to guide customers through the tomato purchasing process.
“They all want to buy plenty,” he said.
Crosby sold out of his third picking of tomatoes Saturday. He said Wednesday that he expected that that batch would be the last he would sell this year, but he still plans to pick another batch Monday and may sell them, depending on the quality.
Expect him to be back next year, though, he said.
“Everybody likes them,” he said. “It makes you feel good to sell something that people want.”
This story was originally published July 11, 2020 at 7:30 AM.
