By Deborah Gates
Delaware Online
DELAWARE, Md. — Except for with a backyard patch he tended to as a kid with his dad, Michael Neuerburg hasn’t had his hands in the ground.
He’d rather be on the outside, a free man. Since he’s not, the certified welder by trade, serving a 10-year sentence at the Eastern Correctional Institution on a drug charge, has found gardening as a purposeful use of his hands. And body. And mind.
“When I was young, I helped my father in a small garden, but I didn’t know a lot about gardening,”said the 35-year-old Glen Burnie native. “We grow quality vegetables, which are better for the needy than donating hot dogs and potato chips. It’s nice to change somebody’s lifestyle from in here. It started smaller, and grew to this.”
Neuerburg is on a 10-member inmate crew that grows, tends and harvests vegetables, fruit and flowers across nearly an acre of open space on the ECI compound of about 3,000 inmates. The ECI Green Garden launched this year in full partnership with the Somerset County Health Department, distributing to date close to 1 ton of vegetables to feed poor families.
Weekly, and sometimes twice weekly, inmates pick market-ready crops from two dozen plant varieties that are then hauled for distribution to either Catholic Charities Inc.’s Seton Center site in Princess Anne or the Crisfield Housing Authority.
“No other prisons have a garden like this on the compound,” said Mark Vernarelli, spokesman at the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. “Pre-release inmates around the state harvest vegetables on farms for food banks, but this is the only one with a garden of this size tended to by inmates on a compound.
“This is the best restorative justice project we have going — a beautiful garden with vegetables going to Somerset County’s poorest,” he added.
Full story: ECI inmate garden supplies fruits, vegetables for needy