A local businesswoman will soon host a planning meeting for a community garden project.
The meeting will be held at 6 p.m., Thursday, July 9, at the Hey Taxi office, 1162 N. College St., Neosho. Guest speaker will be Craig Jones, planner for the city of Neosho. According to organizers, the objective is to form a committee that will create, organize and run a community garden in the Neosho area, that will be ready for first planting in spring of 2010.
“Basically, the community garden idea is to help provide not just giving food away, but giving instructions, teaching people to plant, to garden, maybe not large gardens but how to manage small spaces,” said Rebecca Brand, organizer. “This group will design how the community garden works and how it serves those who work in the garden and those who benefit from the garden.”
The meeting is open to anyone in the Neosho or Newton County area who would like to be involved in creating, organizing and maintaining a community garden.
“One of the first goals is to form a group that is actually going to design how the community garden will work, how it will be taken care of, and what the community part will be,” she said. “This is in the ground floor. There is no seed, there is no ground, there is no equipment and there is nobody to run in. On Thursday, July 9, we will get together, find out who is interested and hopefully there will be enough that are interested that we can appoint a couple of the members. Some of the research has been done, and I have got a lot of papers that people can go through and copies of how other community gardens have been put together.”
The flyer also notes that the community garden group will need a donated area of ground for the garden, equipment, a grant writer, volunteers, teachers/speakers with ideas or persons with specialized knowledge of community gardens.
Brand is hopeful that the community garden will take off for a few reasons.
“There are a few things that I want to incorporate into this garden, like there is a possibility – the end result is food – and there might be leftovers that you can can and donate to a food bank or donate for Thanksgiving and Christmas,” she said. “The other aspect is community involvement, and getting groups, maybe youth groups or different entities, that need a project to work on that could come out and weed or water or help plant… I believe that it will be beneficial for Neosho. In a couple of years, I hope that it will be a household discussion, ‘yeah, our group is going down to such and such garden.’”
For more information, contact Rebecca Brand at 451-5115.
Neosho, Mo. —
