Inmate Gardeners Win Big at Vermont Fair

[__Kratos__]

MONTPELIER, Vt. - A big winner in the gardening competitions at the Champlain Valley Fair were the vegetables and flowers grown by inmates from the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans.

Organic okra, garlic, field pumpkins, cantaloupes, and mini-roses were among the plants grown behind the barbed wire in the yard of Vermont's most secure prison that won top honors at the Essex Junction fair, which ended Monday.

Carrots, beans, eggplant and green peppers were among the inmates' second place winners. The lowest placing entry, onions, came in third. Only one of the prison plants failed to win something.

"We rocked," Andrew Wood, 32, an inmate serving a sentence of 20 years to life for second degree murder, said by telephone on Tuesday.

"By far, the quality of the produce that comes out of the garden is 10 times what you get out of the supermarket," Wood said. "We're all organic. We take a lot of pride in what we do. We've gotten a lot of compliments from the staff, producing above and beyond what we thought would come out of here."

A handful of inmates at the St. Albans prison work 12- to 14-hour days in the summer maintaining the 3 1/2-acre garden that helps feed the other inmates and provides fresh produce for a food shelf in St. Albans, said Barb Hagen, the prison staff member who oversees the gardening project.

The inmate gardeners — who couldn't leave the facility — chose the vegetables that Hagen displayed on their behalf at the fair.

In the winter, the inmates work in the two greenhouses on the prison grounds where they produce vegetables and flowers. Earlier this year the inmates donated thousands of flowers to the families of deployed Vermont National Guard members.

The garden and the greenhouses help save the prison kitchen thousands of dollars a year and give the inmates better tasting food. But the benefits of the garden go way beyond the money saved.

"I will take this with me," said inmate Duane Bedell, 40, of Huntington, who is nearing the end of a six to 20 -year sentence for sexual assault. "Even though it may be only a little, I am repaying the community in some way. I will carry that with me the rest of my life."

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At least their doing something worthwhile and by the looks of it saving tax payers lots of money. Still... why they having fun while doing it? Can't we whip'em a bit?