Dark clouds hung ominously over Seymour’s Community Garden where a woman and some of her neighbors were digging holes and planting vegetables Saturday.

The garden is located next to Margaret R. Brown Elementary School on the city’s southeast side.

“I use to have a garden before and it’s nice to grow your own food and know what goes into them, especially what’s in cans,” Jean Robinson of Seymour said. The Jamestown Apartment resident canned her own vegetables from the garden last year.

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The first community garden was organized by the Seymour High School FFA chapter and the Greater Seymour Chamber of Commerce in 2014.

Officials with the nearby Jamestown Apartments, owned by the Gene B. Glick Co., reserved six of the 60 plots in the garden for its residents this year.

The company is working with FFA members and the chamber to plant and take care of the plots with help from residents of the apartment complex.

“It allows residents to have fresh fruits and vegetables,” said Michele Yerges, services coordinator with Glick.

There’s also a side benefit, Yerges said.

“It gives them a chance to get out,” she said. Many of Jamestown residents are elderly or disabled and low-income.

The food grown in the garden is shared by those who help grow and harvest it and is given to other residents at the apartment complex.

“Often members of the community such as seniors feel like they are being left out; this makes them feel like the community wants to do something for them,” Yerges said.

The garden also is a learning experience, Robinson said.

“It gives us a chance to come out and try to grow things and learn from our mistakes … what to do and what not to do,” she said.

The group mainly was planting vegetables, including a luffa plant, which, when mature, makes a scrubbing sponge for use in the shower or bath.

“We’re going to have a luffa party at the end of the harvest season to dry them and make luffas out of them,” Yerges said.

Saturday was a day for everyone who had reserved garden plots to come out and get started planting and meet others interested in gardening. It had originally been scheduled for April 30, but was rained out that day.

Those in attendance had the chance to find out more about the community garden, sign up for a garden plot, get started on planting with help from volunteers or receive gardening tips and advice from professionals.

“The community sees these gardens as a part of them,” said Jeanna Eppley, Seymour High School agriculture and FFA teacher. She helped oversee Saturday’s kickoff event, sold FFA plants and helped prepare plots for those that reserved them.

There have been very few issues with the community garden since it began two years ago.

“We haven’t had to worry about security at all; we put a fence up to keep animals out,” Eppley said.

Several plots over from Robinson’s, Jennifer Motsinger and Luke Godding, both of Seymour, planted tomatoes before surrounding them with fencing to contain them in one of their four plots.

The two also had a plot at the community garden last year and said they learned a lot from their previous year of planting.

“We grew everything and the tomatoes and beans kind of went crazy,” Godding said.

Since they live in an apartment, they don’t have the space for a garden, Motsinger said.

“It’s great to have a garden,” she added.

The duo increased their plots from one last year to four this year, expanding the variety of vegetables they plan to grow and the space available for the plants.

“We’re city kids originally, so it’s taken a lot of learning. Thank goodness for the internet,” Godding said.

Though technically in its third year, Eppley said she views it as the second true year for the garden.

“Our first year doesn’t really count; we only had one person reserve a plot the first year,” she said.

The garden is divided into 60 plots that are roughly 10-by-20-feet in size. They can be reserved for $10 per plot.

In previous years, Seymour FFA students had taken care of a large number of the plots themselves.

This year, the day began with only three plots left unreserved, and by mid-morning, they were gone too.

“Our future plan would be to hopefully open another community garden at the school farm over at Freeman Field,” Eppley said.