Roscoe Gardening Club and Rockton United Methodist open their first community garden

ROSCOE, Ill. (WTVO) — Local gardeners are putting their green thumbs together to work for a good cause. The Roscoe Gardening Club and Rockton United Methodist Church have created a community garden.

The goal of the garden is to help the local community by giving back the food that is grown to local food banks.

“We’re really excited about the possibility of having a lot of produce,” said Roscoe Gardening Club president Reness Mealey.

The partnership was made possible by a grant, along with donations from the church and other anonymous donors.

“I was very excited from the start. I was actually one I’m one of the people that helped kind of push it through our membership and stuff,” said Rockton United Methodist’s David Wellen. “It wasn’t hard. I mean, it wasn’t like, oh, we got to push it through. We wanted to say, we were obviously in a time crunch, to get it done by spring.”

“We don’t want, necessarily … for you to belong to our church or be a part of our church, or just feel God’s love, that you have to come sit in a pew for an hour on Sunday to prove it. And so we just we’re just looking for new ways to get involved,” he added.

The garden is the gardening club’s first, but they hope it won’t be the last.

“Once the wider community sees the success of this garden, we hope to expand it into other locations as well,” Mealey said.