But if you insist on doing it, he said, this might be a good opportunity to tell people he doesn’t work for the Post.

It seems people approach Darrell wherever he goes about writing a story about their favorite club or church group. He used to try to explain that he writes a weekly garden column for the At Home section as part of his job as horticultural and foresty specialist with the N.C. Cooperative Extension Service in Rowan County.

But no one ever listened, so now he doesn’t even try to explain it anymore.

One woman he ran into at a gas station asked why he never wrote about the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. “I said, ‘Well, Iwork for them,’ ” he said.

Another woman asked him to tutor her son because she thought he was an English major.

A waitress at a restaurant he frequents said she wanted to go to school to be a writer and asked him how he got started. “I said, ‘I’m not a writer,’ ” he said. “ ‘ I just write for the paper,’ I said. ‘They edit those things. I can’t write. They make it legible.’ ”

Darrell’s wife, Gerrie, an English teacher at South Rowan High School, used to clean up his columns. “My grammar is still poor,” he said. “She says my verb tenses are really bad on some things. I must have missed that chapter when Iwas in seventh grade.

“I’m not a writer. I’m an information person.”

It’s not just in his columns that 47-year-old Darrell, who has served as interim director of the extension service since Amelia Watts retired last year, gives out information. People are always calling him asking for help with their flowers, gardens and lawns.

He has gotten some really strange calls through the years.

One man wanted to know how to keep the deer out of his marijuana. A woman claimed her drug-user neighbors were injecting her squash with heroin.

Another woman said she mistook her tulip bulbs for onions and had canned them in pickle mix. Would it be OK if she ate them anyway?

Just within the last couple of weeks, Darrell said a man called and said there were two snakes mating behind a wall in his house. “I said, ‘How do you know they’re mating?’ He said, ‘Well, I could tell.’

“I said, ‘You know those snakes were mating? They were panting or one was smoking a cigarette? How did you know they were mating?’ ”

The man said he just knew and wanted to know how to find the baby snakes and get them out.

People call Darrell about snakes, bats, birds, beavers, bees and spiders. Once, when he was working at the Davie County extension office, a woman called him frantic that she was being held hostage by a large contingent of killer hornets.

“She could not leave her home and was desperate,” he said, “insisting that I come see those creatures and help. After I arrived, I caught one of the insects and showed it to her — it was a group of lazy, green June beetles.”

People have called Darrell before, afraid that the world was coming to an end because they believed a fungus was killing all the trees in the county.

“A lot of people drink heavily and call here,” he said. “Snow days are really bad when people are at home and don’t have anything to do. Rainy days are bad.”

Some of the elderly people who call are just lonely and want someone to talk to. “We just talk to them,” he said.

“Sometimes I won’t have any phone calls in a day,” he said, “and sometimes I’ll have as many as 45 in a day.”

Educating the public is one of the roles of the extension service, according to Darrell, who originally studied to be a teacher.

He had just graduated from Clemson University with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural education with an emphasis in horticulture when he went to work as a high school agriculture teacher in the Marlboro County Schools in Bennettsville, S.C.

“I filled in for a teacher who had quit,” he said. “That should give you an idea. If you can imagine going into a school where your class didn’t have a teacher for eight weeks, it just really wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

When he first started at the school, Darrell said a veteran guidance counselor told him to forget everything he had learned in college, that he wouldn’t need it there. “I decided I didn’t want to do that,” he said.

After six months, Darrell went back to Clemson, earning his master’s in agricultural education with an emphasis in horticulture in 1979. He accepted a job with the Rowan County Cooperative Extension Service after graduation, working for seven years as the county’s horticulture and 4-H agent.

In June of 1986, the same year he married the former Gerrie Ward of Winston-Salem, Darrell left to work as a horticultural therapist at the Hefner VA Medical Center.

“That was a lot different because I was working with psychiatric patients,” he said. “I enjoyed it somewhat. I didn’t enjoy the schedule, and I didn’t enjoy not learning.”

In extension, agents are constantly learning, Darrell said. “You’re constantly trying to keep up with what’s going on. You have to, because it changes every day.”

When he was in college, for example, he said, “all we talked about was how to kill stuff with pesticides, seriously. Now we talk about what we can do not to use pesticides, which is good ... It takes a long, long time because everything we do has to be research-based, and it has to work.”

After a year with the VA, Darrell took a job as professional product sales manager for the Byrum Seed Company in Charlotte. “It was a lot different from extension in that I was trying to sell products,” he said.

What he found was that the buyers didn’t always know what they were doing. The owners of large, lucrative landscape maintenance companies, for example, would ask him what the numbers on the side of a fertilizer bag stood for.

“I ended up when I was at Byrum teaching classes,” he said. “I had seminars on how to do stuff. I even got specialists from Raleigh to come help me teach classes on landscaping, grass turf, grass plots and chemicals to use and things like that.

“I said, ‘Well, if I’m going to do this, I might as well go back into extension.’ So I did.”

In September of 1989, after being out of the business for four years, Darrell accepted a job as the horticulture extension agent in Davie County, also doing community resources, forestry and recycling. He commuted from his home on High Rock Lake for four years before returning to the Rowan extension service.

“I’ve had the privilege of hiring him twice,” said then-Chairman Harold Caudill upon his return.

The transition back to his old job was easy, according to Darrell. “Some people didn’t even know I had gone, believe it or not,” he said. “When you leave for a while and come back, you see what you could have done and you put it in perspective. It gives you a chance to try some things that you thought about.”

Born in Rock Hill, S.C., DarrellEugene Blackwelder was the second of Sarah and C.M. Blackwelder’s three children, and their only son. His father was a maintenance mechanic in a fiber plant, and his mother was a weaver in a cotton mill.

“They worked very hard so Icould go to school and have a good education and have a good life,” he said. “My goal was to do well.”

For 30 years, Darrell said his mother came home with lint in her hair and grease all over her, barely able to walk. “They kept telling me, ‘I want you to do better than this,’ ” he said. “ ‘You’ve got to do better than this. You’ve got to do better than this. I don’t want you to work in this mill like I’m doing.’ ”

While still in high school, Darrell worked with his mother long enough to appreciate his parents’ sacrifices. In the cotton mill, “the first thing you notice is it’s so loud you can’t hear,” he said. “Everything is gray because the lights are fluorescent, and they have these huge humidifiers blowing humidity over the looms so the threads won’t break.”

Darrell, who lives at Pebble Point on High Rock, said he inherited his strong work ethics from his parents. One thing he said they taught him is “if you always do the best you can, you will never fail. At least you tried.”

Whether traveling or reading, he’s always learning

Favorite book: “I don’t have a favorite book. I don’t read fiction ... If I want to read a book, I read to learn how to do something. You know what my Christmas present was? It was a book on how to do ceramic tile. That’s what I’m interested in. Like the book I’m reading now is ‘Pass-Along Plants.’ It’s a book on heirloom plants. I don’t read for enjoyment. I read for information.”

Favorite movie: “I really love comedies. One of my all-time favorites is ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.’ If you asked me what the last movie I saw was, I saw ‘The Mummy II.’ I’ve seen ‘A Knight’s Tale,’ and I saw ‘Pearl Harbor.’ ”

Favorite food: “I would say spicy food, Oriental, Mexican, Spanish, French. There’s not really a whole lot I don’t like to eat when it comes down to it.”

Hobbies: “I really have an affinity for computers, but I don’t know much about them. I like gadgets but Idon’t have the money to buy them, like I was really infatuated with your tape recorder. I used to be a big audiofile, but I’m not any more, unless you’ve got millions and thousands and thousands of dollars ... I love to garden when I have time. I like to boat when I have time. I love to travel. I’ve been to England. I’ve been to Egypt, Germany, Italy. I’ve been to Nova Scotia, Seattle, Montana. I’ve been to North Dakota, South Dakota. I’ve been to Washington. I’ve been to New York State ... I like Shakespeare plays. One of my favorite plays is ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ ”

Pet peeve: “I’ll tell you a couple of pet peeves, and you can decide which one you want. One would be when people are taking advantage of me and they know they’re taking advantage of me, and they know I know they’re taking advantage of me, but they still do it anyway. Another one would be, Ireally wish that I could just once finish something that I started correctly, and it all has to do with time. I’ll almost finish it, but not quite, like I’ll almost have this flower bed done, I’ll almost have this gate finished, then I’ll have something else to do ... Idon’t know if that’s a pet peeve or a personality disorder ... But I guess my major pet peeve would be inconsiderate people.”

Most embarrassing moment: “I got a speeding ticket one night in South Carolina coming back from a family reunion. I did not have enough money so the officer threatened to put me in jail. I was traveling 55 in a 45-mph zone. He took me back to my aunt’s house where the reunion was held in the patrol car, and my father’s family had to pass the hat to bail me out of jail for a speeding ticket.”

Proudest moment: “Sitting on the steps of our new home with my wife, Gerrie, after passing the final building inspection. I was the general contractor, and it had taken 16 long months to complete the task. I maintained a successful marriage and kept my sanity during the process.”

Laughed the most when: “Whenever we get together with both families and tell stories about growing up as kids in the ’60s.”