He digs his hands into the soil and pulls out a handful of dirt. He tells me to do the same.

The deeper my hand sinks, the cooler the earth becomes. I pull out a handful of the rich, black dirt, too.

About three years ago, Johnny Carter got the idea to add mulch to some of the Georgia red clay in his garden. Today, you can see the difference in the color, size and yield of the vegetables he grows in the doctored land when compared with those in the plain ol' Georgia dirt.

"The Georgia red clay is good, but it is not [as good] as this," says Carter, 78, holding a pile of dirt in each hand. "It's amazing what the mulch does to the soil. Just plow it in and let it rot."

We're standing in the middle of a garden filled with tomatoes, peas, squash, red peppers, banana peppers and hot peppers. And that's just the rear of Carter's house in Lawrenceville. Corn and rows of late peas and tomatoes grow in a tract on another side of the house. The gardens take up just over a quarter-acre. Hundreds of plants. Carter's babies.

The roots of Carter's story run deeper than the seemingly endless rows of peas and squash. They are stronger than the sturdiest tomato vines or silkiest stalks of corn. His is a tale about family, responsibility, resilience, getting the job done, making the most of what you've been handed sans the complaining. And though I hesitate to even use the word given the way it's been maligned by politicians, it centers on values.

My late father tended a vegetable garden till he couldn't do it anymore. It got to the point my siblings in South Georgia feared they'd drive up to his house one day and find him out among the rows of butter beans and peas, stricken.

As a kid, I couldn't care less about gardening. Growing peas, tomatoes, cucumbers and okra wasn't my thing. Too country. Man, what ignorance. Like so many things my —- and most —- parents do and say, their significance doesn't resonate till years, often decades, later.

"I tell my son and nephews that one day they will think their parents are the smartest people in the world," says Mike Carter, the elder Carter's only child. Mike lives next door to his father. "My father believes that a garden will make a man and teach him a lot about life. That a hard day's work won't kill a man. But I never truly understood this till the last few years, and I'm 51 now."

The elder Carter grew up poor in Barrow County. His mother died when he was 18 months old, leaving his father, a farmer, to provide for four kids. Carter made it to sixth grade but quit to help with crops.

"We didn't have nothing," he tells me. "Had a hard life."

At 18, he joined the Army and became a Ranger. He's a Korean War veteran. He worked at General Motors for 32 years in the body shop. He'd work his shift at GM, then return home to work in a body shop he owned. He retired from GM in 1985 and leased out the shop. He'd always kept a garden, but that's when he kicked it up a notch.

Carter, like my father, plants according to the signs. The drought hasn't been an issue. Several years ago, he had a well dug on the property. He let me try a gourd filled with its water.

"I sent a sample to UGA and had them analyze it," says Carter, who rises every morning around 4:30 to work the crops. "They wrote me a letter back saying that it was 98.9 percent pure."

Pure water, plus rich soil, plus caring hands yield a bounty of produce. Carter gives away as much as he sells; most of what he sells is by word of mouth. He has a canopy with baskets of vegetables and plastic bags set up in his backyard to serve customers. People started asking for his tomatoes weeks ago, particularly during the salmonella scare.

"I told them around July 4," he says. "They are starting to come out now. Hard to have tomatoes ready much earlier than that."

Rick Badie's column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.