City plants community vegetable garden

Soon there will be a new garden within the city, but it is not a flower garden.

Located behind the Neosho Rec-Plex on Fairground Road, a flower garden has been converted into a vegetable garden.

“We thought that, especially in the economic times that we are going through, we could convert one of our flower gardens to a vegetable garden to be able to give back to people that really need some help this year,” Neosho Parks and Recreation Director Todd Banes said. “We have planted corn, tomatoes and some lettuce, cabbage and cucumbers., Desiree Bridges, my communications manager, is going to work out some needy organizations to get with. We are just trying to give back to the community, as much as we can.”

Banes noted that they are looking at food banks and said the food will not be sold.

The process of this endeavor started in the wintertime. For about the last six weeks, they have been bringing in dirt for the garden and planted the seeds this week.

“The garden has a circumference of 147 feet,” said Banes. “Everything is in the ground. Now we hope that we get some dry weather so we can get some growth going on, but we have it all planted.”

And soon, some will be able to enjoy the food.

“We planted some 60-day corn, we are hoping to get two corn crops, we will see how the tomatoes go,” he said. “We are shooting for something around mid-July.”

Banes got the idea from researching on the Internet and found that that the city of Baltimore was doing it.

“I don’t know locally if anybody else doing it, I got that idea from there and we kind of went from there,” said Banes. “Everybody thought that it was a worthwhile idea this year. If this works out well, we might try it again.”