One of the best vegetable gardens in Owensboro is growing in one of the most unlikely places. The two and a half acre garden has been turning out bushels full of tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, corn and cucumbers inside the walls of the Daviess County Detention Center.
Joe Corcoran visited the jail and reports the tons of vegetables are helping the inmates in more ways than one.
Most jail inmates' days are run by sounds...bells, buzzers, clanging steel doors and guards' orders. But for a group of inmates at the Daviess County Detention Center in Owensboro, they spend their days with a very different sound; the sound of a very old, very used John Deere tractor to plow, till and harvest their more than two acre garden inside the jail walls.
Inmate Gary Mayfield says he works the garden because he just likes to be outside, he likes the heat. He's serving another five or six months for the attempted theft of anhydrous ammonia and then leading police on a chase. He's one of only eight male inmates in the Center's Community Service Program for low-risk inmates with non-violent histories to be chosen to take care of the garden.
Major Ken Ehlschide came up with the idea for the garden about a year ago. "Altogether we measured and it's 2.3 acres," he says, "We started out in the spring and in our spring crop we did red potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, cantaloupe, watermelon...corn also and cucumbers. Since then, for our fall crop, we've done green beans, we've already harvested more than 1,200 pumpkins."
1.236 pumpkins to be exact. They donate most of them to elementary schools around Owensboro and to the Boys' and Girls' Club to be used for art projects and Halloween decorations, and they're not done yet.
"We've also planted carrots, lettuce and we currently have broccoli, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower that are in the ground as well that are blooming up."
The garden's been so successful this year, the jail's been able to donate produce they can't use to a food pantry in town. The Help Office has been operating on West 4th Street since 1971. Their Executive Director Woody Woodward says they help more than 6.500 people a year who are food insecure...as many as 60 to 65 clients a day and the fresh produce the inmates deliver makes a huge difference.
"It's rare that we have those types of things," Woodward says, " and it really means a lot to be able to give fresh produce to clients who come into see us. It doesn't stay here very long, quite frankly, almost the same day that it comes in it goes back out and we especially like to do that because when they bring it in it's ready to be distributed so we don't keep it around long. We give it out with the rest of the products in our food pantry as quickly as we can. It's really a nice treat to be able to give fresh produce. Those of us that can afford it may not feel that way but when you don't receive something and then you have a chance to have it, it means a lot. It's a great partnership; they feel good about doing what they're doing and we certainly are pleased to be able to have the product to give out."
But most of the produce stays right there at the jail and Major Ehlschide says they're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart.
" We harvested over 7,000 pounds of potatoes. The majority of those will be used right here at the jail for inmate meals and it helps reduce the cost for the taxpayer to feed the inmates we have. We have approximately 700 inmates, so it takes a lot of food to feed all those individuals so this is just something to help reduce that cost a little bit."
Kitchen manager Cheryl Wiggington is the inmates' best customer. Because of the contractual set up at the Detention Center, she has to buy the vegetables, and a lot of them.
"We have been buying the green beans and the potatoes, my goodness we bought 2,000 pounds of potatoes. So far, over the last two weeks, it's been over 2,000 pounds on the green beans."
And she says she can't get enough, she's ready to buy just about everything that comes out of the garden.
"It makes everything taste better. Like with our spaghetti and stuff we cut up the fresh tomatoes and put it in those recipes, our salads, when we had the fresh tomatoes, we were dicing them up and putting them in the salads for everyone. Fresh is always better; they were tickled to death, they were like little kids in a candy store. "
And it's not just vegetables. There are about two dozen chickens on the farm in their own hen house providing more than 20 eggs a day.
Major Ehlschide says, "Just eggs, we just have hens and we just started that this year. Now I didn't know a lot about hens so I started small with just 25. What I tried to do this year is think outside of the box a little bit, this is the first year we ever had a garden of this size and its the first time we ever had any chickens. We utilize the fresh eggs for the inmate workers. They have them on Sunday so they can have fresh farm eggs kind of as a treat for the guys over there who want those."
And Major Ehlschide says that's what it's all about, giving something back to the inmates who work so hard outside in the fields something tangible. But he says, more importantly, there's something intangible the men get from the work they do. Both he and the inmates use the word "pride" a lot.
"Absolutely. The guys that work out their, they have a lot of pride, they take a lot of pride in the work they do. This has been a great project, a huge project and they're the backbone behind it and they do a great job for us out here. And some of the workers we selected, they have worked on farms, in the garden, stuff like that in the past but also half of our work crew has not, so that gives them the ability to go out and learn a new trade, something they may be able to take with them when they get out of jail and get back into the community."
That's Gary Mayfield's plan. He did have some some farming experience when he was a kid growing up in Kentucky. He just wished he paid attention more, "My Papaw and them they raised tobacco in a small garden, nothing like this magnitude...corn, green beans, tomatoes. Yeah, I take pride in what I do, regardless of where I'm at, I like whatever I do to turn out right."
And Mayfield says he thinks back to his Papaw and his small garden when he's out in the Detention Center's garden now, and he thinks about a lot more.
"You know it's kind of like you're not here, you know what I'm saying? It makes me feel like I'm not locked up because you get out and you get to do stuff, this stuff I'd do at home anyway, so it kind of gets me out of this place, make me feel like I'm not as locked up as I actually am."