Lucas Adcock
Staff Writer
When Samantha Adcock moved to Hillsboro, the first thing she worked to accomplish was setting up her garden. She’d always been a plant hobbyist, even during her career in the military – she’d spent five years in the Marine Corps, stationed at Camp Pendleton in southern California. That’s where we met. Since we’ve been married, we’ve had two beautiful little girls that we wanted to raise in the country – somewhere where the horizon was broken by mountains, not by buildings.
Once we moved and found a new home, we went to work on the garden. I’ll give Samantha credit, though, the garden was all her. She wanted it to be her project, so I helped here and there with things she needed – such as the 8-foot fence all the way around it – but ultimately, everything that the garden has become has been from her hard work and effort.
Last year, when the garden was in full bloom, she said to me, “I think I bit off a little more than I can chew…”
As I looked around at the 1,900 square foot rectangle of a garden, I smiled. It had produced so much food that I couldn’t not be proud of her. And she was tending to it so well that I had to disagree with it being too much for her to take on. Amidst the produce, she’d also planted an abundance of flowers including, cosmos, zinnias, bachelor buttons, sunflowers, a variety of marigolds and nasturtiums. As for the produce: cherry tomatoes, pumpkins, green bush-beans, sweet peppers, asparagus, and kale (although the kale was demolished by flea beetles). We also had multiple beds of Yukon gold potatoes that yielded an abundance, and carrots and various herbs including cilantro, basil, thyme and dill.
When I say that we were bringing in bowls of produce every day, I mean bowls. Honestly, more produce than we could handle, so in that regard, we’d quite literally yielded more than we could chew. But I was impressed. And she had done such a great job with it, she couldn’t wait until this year’s garden to try out some new things.
But the garden aside, Samantha also has plenty of other hobbies, on top of being a fantastic mother. She’ll sometimes spend hours creating new and innovative ideas to keep the kids entertained, while also making it an enjoyable learning experience for them. Whe-ther its sensory-play for the baby, or something that our three-year-old can work on, she’s always putting our children first. When she finally gets time to herself, she likes to research things for the garden or crochet or even research things for the kids; these things make her genuinely happy. They’re fun. Over the last few years we’ve collected quite the arrangement of crocheted animals, bags, head bands, and other items that she’s made. Not to mention some of her drawings or banners that she’s made for the kids’ birthday parties. If it’s anything creative or hands-on, she loves it.
On top of her personal hobbies, she loves dogs and horses. And while she doesn’t own any of her own horses right now, she plans to in the future. On the subject of horses, she said, “When I was young, I had a horse named Hotaz. He was a chestnut Quarter Horse/ Arabian cross, but was already pretty old when I got him. He was my heart horse. I had him for about five years before he passed away from colic, and I’ll probably never have another like him.” Since Hotaz, she’s craved being a horse owner again. Owning larger animals was part of the reason that we decided to move to Pocahontas County, out in the mountains and surrounded by land. Someone recently spoke with us, laughing, and saying that we were the only ones that they’ve seen move to Pocahontas County that didn’t originally have ties here. And from what we’ve discovered, that’s true. We happen to stumble across a property online nearly two years ago, and the two of us – living in Georgia at the time – decided to drive up and take a look for ourselves. We fell in love with the area, and now here we are. Every time Samantha has something that she needs to accomplish at home, she does it. She gets it done. If she doesn’t know how to do something, she figures it out. She researches and learns. “I have a vision,” she tells me all the time. “A huge garden, kids, dogs, a barn with animals… my horses… I want to make that happen.”
And she will. We will, together. In time.
lucasadcock@pocahontastimes.com
Lucas Adcock also writes under the pen name L. A. Porter.
