Seeds in the Ground

“What’s our motto, guys?” asked Randy Miller to his nursery production crew after a morning of moving soil and planting peppers. With grins ranging from sheepish to gleefully uncontained, the crew yelled back in fragmented, facetiously dutiful unison: “We don’t only look good, but we do good work!” 

They stood in a circle, right in the middle of Eunice’s new plant nursery, 3rd Day Gardens, among the carefully arranged bushes, trees, and flowers, lined up and lush down an aisle with occasional conglomerations of potted tiny vines and flowers for hanging. Tiny cacti sat on shelves in quirky turtle-shaped pots, amid colorful gardening gloves and Easter-themed garden décor. In the very back, there was a booth filled with large pieces of driftwood; delicate pots of flowers sat among the wood, tucked in nooks and crevices. The greenhouse was filled to bursting, verdant with plants lining the tables and hanging from the ceiling. 

Every Thursday and Friday morning, the group—twelve adults with a diverse set of special needs and developmental challenges—hops into the Eunice Developmental Center’s van for the half-mile field trip. A partnership between the Center and the nursery offers students the opportunity to choose a day in the garden as their assignment for work study, and according to Cecilia Colligan, the Center’s day program supervisor, just about every single one of them who is able, has. 

“They love to go there,” she told me. “They have a sense that they can do things. They can make things grow. It’s really, really powerful.” 

It’s no secret that gardening can serve as an effective therapeutic medium. Its extraordinary benefits have been observed in prisoner rehabilitation programs and in young children, mentally and physically disabled populations, and able adults as well. Everybody grows in the garden. According to the American Horticultural Society, research has shown that time spent in the garden can improve memory, cognitive abilities, task initiation, language skills, and socialization. This is, of course, in addition to the physical benefits like improved coordination, balance, strengthened muscles, and endurance. Not to mention fresh air! 

“They love to go there,” she told me. “They have a sense that they can do things. They can make things grow. It’s really, really powerful.” 

Owner of 3rd Day Gardens Randy Miller knows this all too well. He’s spent the past thirty years splitting his time between his landscaping business, 3rd Day Landscaping, and teaching agriculture courses at Church Point High School and Iota High School. Yes, he said, working with plants can improve people’s lives—it’s improved his own. But for Miller, the real ambition behind starting this nursery was to provide a positive space for a group of people often left behind. “When I was teaching, the special education students being mainstreamed would often struggle so much through the classroom work and in shop,” he said. “I tried to get the school board to let me teach a Special Ed ag class. That way we could work with them at their level, and they would have succeeded more.” 

His ideas for the course were denied. But recognizing that his students’ struggles were less about their abilities to engage with the activities than his own ability to grant them due attention—to meet them where they were—Miller began to think of how, someday, he’d bring these students to plants through a different route. His dream sharpened into a nursery,  designed just for the special needs population. It would be a place where they could spend time, engage with other people, and challenge themselves.

“Parents bring [their children] to the store and they get stared at,” he said. “Or just plain ignored. This is going to be a place where they can come and be safe. And let us love on them.” 

Now that he is retired from teaching, “someday” has finally come. In late 2018, he started scouting a location and meeting with local organizations like the Developmental Center. He soon found the perfect, unused greenhouse right beside the Eunice Community Garden. He learned that the site was once the campus of the Guillory Developmental Center, a state school for adults with special needs. Part of the Guillory Center’s programming had included maintaining a garden where many of the students worked. The school shut down around a decade ago, and the state donated most of the property to the city as a site for the Eunice DMV. In 2013, LSU-E developed the community garden on part of the site where the original garden once stood, but the greenhouse remained unused and the garden had since been abandoned too. When Miller asked if he could lease it, the city invited him to also lease the rest of the garden property and to set up his nursery there, adjacent to the community garden. 

“How neat is it to be working on these very grounds, at a site that was once a school for special needs,” said Miller. “Now we just want to get it back to where it’s serving the community, bringing it back to its roots.” 

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When I visited the site in late March, the operation had only been on its feet for a few weeks. It was one of those rare Louisiana spring mornings that are almost too good to be true—bright blue skies and air that is warm, but not wet, with just the subtlest breeze. 

The Developmental Center’s van pulled up, and Miller greeted each member of the group with high fives. One man walked right past the raised palm to stand in front of me, extending his hand to tell me hello, looking smugly back over his shoulder at Miller, grinning ear to ear. “My name’s Kevin.” 

The crew had spent the last few weeks potting many of the plants I had seen for sale in the nursery, learning about soil and how much water each plant needed, and how to make them look nice.  

“We are overseeing them a lot,” said Miller. “But it’s amazing how fast they can get things like potting done. They focus on it. The trick is making the time to see what they are capable of and working with them in those areas.” 

That day, instead of working in the nursery, Miller wanted the group to start a raised garden box in the Community Garden. Alan, who had once been a student at the Guillory Developmental Center and worked in this very garden space for years, took the lead on filling a wheelbarrow and emptying its contents into the planter’s box, giving the other guys a go when they were interested. After taking his turn, another man exclaimed, “I didn’t know I could do that!” 

“Each of them is so different with what they can do,” said Miller, noting that some, like Donald—whom the supervisors had to continually rein back from wandering too far from the group alone—require more invitation and direct attention. Others, like an old student of Miller’s named Mark, have less interest in the garden work than in socializing. “And that’s great! He loves people—he’ll stand by the door and be our official greeter.”  

After taking his turn, another man exclaimed, “I didn’t know I could do that!” 

For Miller, the nursery’s proximity to the Eunice Community Garden brings valuable opportunities for interaction between the developmentally disabled and other members of the community. He envisions the two sites as sister-gardens, and while getting his nursery off the ground, has also volunteered much of his time to further developing the Community Garden—which has struggled to draw much local interest, until now. 

“Community gardens are typically geared toward inner cities,” he said. “In a town like Eunice, people don’t need a place to raise a garden. They can do that at home. There needs to be a purpose to it.” 

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Miller has been at work enlisting local organizations to claim a box. The day that I visited, Jan Fruge and Freddy Reed were getting St. Thomas More Catholic Church’s box started, planning a home for future cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers. “We want to get people, little kids [especially], involved,” said Fruge. “Playing in the dirt, seeing things grow, and then harvesting and bringing vegetables to the food bank in town, or needy families.”  

“There’s a ton of ways people could get involved with what we’re doing at the nursery,” said Miller, adding that he would love to get some regular volunteers. “But really, just having people from different organizations and parts of the community coming and hanging out with these people. This place [the garden and the nursery together] can be somewhere that families—whether they have children with disabilities or not—can just drop in and spend a nice day.” 

A gardening environment also naturally lends itself to learning opportunities. In the middle of one of Alan’s soil dumps, Gail, one of the women in charge of raking it all out, startled: “Oh! A worm!” A series of excited, concerned, and utterly grossed-out little shrieks followed: “Get it out!” “Ugh, that’s sick.” “Kill it!” Alan reached down and picked the offending creature right up. “I like worm,” he said. “Worm is good.” “You’re right, Alan!” said Miller, patting him on the back and gently taking the wriggler from him. He held it out for them all to see, and explained—in basic scientific terms—how worms actually helped plants to grow. Intrigued, the students then began to compete for who could find the most, and Gail even started collecting worms in a bucket to bring to another plot. Colligan promised that when they returned to the Center, they’d look up pictures and information on the computer.  

“There’s a ton of ways people could get involved with what we’re doing at the nursery,” said Miller, adding that he would love to get some regular volunteers.

When it came time to put the first tiny plants into the ground, Miller and Colligan asked the group what plants they’d like to start with. “Bell peppers!” “Lettuce!” “Cucumbers!” “Jalapeños!” Kevin yelled out, “Hot banana peppers!” “Kevin. You a hot banana pepper!” laughed Miller. 

“Ownership,” Miller had emphasized to me a few weeks before. “So much of this is about giving these [adults] the experience of ownership, of having accomplished something.” 

3rd Day Gardens may be in its infancy, but Miller has big plans for growth. Soon, he’d like to offer employment to special needs individuals outside of the Center’s work-study program. There are plans in place for a chicken coop on site, where people could feed the birds and watch them wander around the garden. A local beekeeper has offered to bring in a beehive covered in glass, where guests can safely watch the bees at work. There will be a potting station where he and his students can help visitors plant cuttings. Donut days and field days are in the works, as is a prayer garden—“a tranquil spot, a tiny Eden.” And on the last Saturday of April, Miller will help to host the first monthly Eunice Community Garden Farmers Market, featuring vegetables straight from the garden’s boxes and from local farmers and gardeners as well as handmade crafts from locals all around. 

Miller’s dreams for what this place can be go so far as a future residential program and community for the special needs population across the whole region—modeled off of Brookwood Community in Brookshire, Texas. But for now, he’s taking it one step at a time. “It’s like that starfish fable,” he told me. “A kid is walking on the beach and there are thousands of live starfish that have washed up. As he walks, he throws them back in, one by one. A man comes by and says, ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ll never get all of them.’ He responds, ‘It will matter to the ones I was able to throw back.’” 

For more information about 3rd Day Gardens, call Randy Miller at (337) 580-2993. 3rd Day Gardens will close from early June until early October, while the Eunice Community Garden remains open year-round.