Hot, dry weather the past several days hasn’t been the best of prescriptions for gardens.
“The weather is killing our peas,” said Joni Tucker, of the garden at Jefferson and Jackson avenues maintained by Allen County jail inmates. Tucker is the jail administrator.
“They’re a cooler season vegetable,” she noted, then shifted to better news on the garden front. “We’ve got one crop of beets out, as well as radishes, and the tomatoes are setting on. We have cucumbers coming along, the peppers (jalapeno and green) are doing well. And aren’t the flowers pretty?”
An herb area is a part of this year’s garden. Cilantro, basil, dill, garlic and parsley are about ready to make jailhouse dishes more tasty.
While the blazing sun has sapped soil moisture to several inches deep, the garden that provides fresh vegetables for inmates’ meals is being kept sufficiently moist through frequent watering, such as that being done by Ryan McCullough Wednesday afternoon. Mulch scooped by the handful onto a flower bed by Greg Vinson will retard evaporation.
A hose attached to the Iola Senior Citizens Center, owned and partly financed by the county, has made watering the garden convenient.
In return, the jail shares its bounty with the senior citizens.
WHILE CORRECTIONS Officer Darlene Kitchens is the garden supervisor, and often is on-site with inmates as they tend to the many beds, it was Tucker who fostered the idea for a garden.
Sheriff Tom Williams remembers Tucker’s persistence.
“Joni kept nagging at me,” he said with a chuckle. “She wanted to find a place in the south part of Iola to put a garden, where it flooded in 2007 and houses were torn down. She had read about inmate gardens elsewhere and thought it would be good idea here.”
Williams wasn’t keen on transporting inmates to a relatively isolated part of town for garden duty.
“I thought the logistics for that would be too much of a problem,” he said.
Kent Thompson, then a county commissioner, mentioned the lot just north of the county’s law enforcement center and next to Denny’s Sports Center.
“He owns the lot and said he’d just as soon we’d have a garden there as him having to mow it,” Williams said.
In a short time, construction of the 4-by-8-foot wooden frames began, Public Works crews brought in a couple of truckloads of topsoil and the garden was born. This year there are 20 of the frames, or about 650 square feet under spade.
“We figure we have spent about $450 on the project through this year, for materials, seed and other things,” Williams said.
Meanwhile, the cook staff at the jail has kept track and thinks about $10,000 worth of produce so far has come from the garden.
INMATES relish the opportunity to work in the garden, Tucker said.
“They see it as a reward,” a chance to get outdoors for an hour or two and soak up sunshine and fresh air, she said. “They also are learning some everyday living skills and realizing that if they behave, they get time off to go to the garden.”
For some, fresh vegetables are a culinary adventure.
“Two of our female inmates had never had fresh radishes before this year,” Tucker said.
In 2009, a male inmate had never pulled a tomato off a vine and eaten it on the spot, she recalled. After his release, he came back several times to help with the garden on his own time.
“Many of the inmates have really taken ownership in the garden,” she said.
