A leafy legacy: Extension agent Bob Neier is retiring after 36 years

As it is for most gardeners, the tomato is extension agent Bob Neier’s favorite vegetable to grow.

“I’ve tried many, many varieties, and I keep going back to Jet Star,” Neier said with a laugh. “It’s old. I’m old. My grandfathers grew tomatoes. I grow tomatoes.”

The simple acknowledgment sums up Neier’s 36-year horticulture career in a walnut shell. Arguably the top gardener in Wichita as the answer man at the county extension, Neier will be retiring at the end of June. And while not old at 58, the man responsible for the Kansas Grown Farmers Market, Christmas tree recycling in Wichita and the Sedgwick County Extension Arboretum wants to make way for someone who can do new things from the Extension Education Center at 21st and Ridge Road.

But not before he deals with this current turn in the weather.

“I’m working on a moisture-tolerant plant list in case it ever rains again,” Neier said wryly on a steaming hot afternoon this week, when the effects of recent floods had temporarily evaporated, but clouds loomed on the horizon.

Neier’s latest reaction to the weather comes on the heels of trying to teach area residents how to garden more efficiently in a drought. Much of his work as a K-State Research & Extension agent — first in Reno County and then in Sedgwick since June 1, 1989 — has been at the wiles of Mother Nature, diagnosing plant diseases, responding to ice and hail storms, warning of insect threats.

But Mother Nature doesn’t hold all the cards. Neier has also saved gardeners from themselves over the years — though he would never put it that way himself — and has encouraged good, beautiful and tasty additions to the Wichita and Sedgwick County landscape.

Coming up flowers

Mary Buffo was growing tomatoes for market when Neier came out to visit her farm in Valley Center in the early 1990s.

“At that time I had 500 or 600 tomato plants and it was really wearing on me,” Buffo said. Neier had recently taken over for Max Morris as extension agent alongside Norman Warminski in Sedgwick County, handling the fruits and vegetable side while Warminski focused on ornamental plants.

Neier “came out to my house, looked at all the wildflowers in the pasture and said, ‘You ought to be cutting these,’ ” Buffo said. “He kind of planted the seed.” The next year Buffo started growing flowers to sell, and, with encouragement and help from Neier along the way, today that’s all she does, her business growing so much that she’s having to increase her booth space at the farmers market.

In deciding to retire, Neier says that he’s met the goals he had at the Extension. One of the early ones was getting the farmers market going.

“His main accomplishment was starting the farmers market ... that as you know has been a tremendous success for the entire community, something that’s going to last forever, or as long as forevers last,” Warminski said, adding to Neier’s list of contributions Christmas tree recycling, Plant a Row for the Hungry, and the educational element of Wichita’s garden shows.

A career as an extension agent is not a prescribed one, Warminski said. Neier has met needs where they were, driving market farmers in a van to conferences on weekends, Buffo said, and going out to garden centers to answer questions whenever asked, said John Firsching of Hillside Nursery.

Warminski wishes the government could work the way the extension agents do.

“When people give their all, then it makes a program successful, and it seems to go smooth. He was not a workaholic but he gave more than the 40-hour week,” Warminski said of Neier. “It was not a begrudging thing. ... Even at the garden show, when we worked 80 hours a week, we didn’t say, ‘We’re not coming in next week.’ We may have been 30 minutes late, but we came in. To say we took comp time for that, nah. It was a program that we did.”

Responding to needs

One of the things Neier has focused on is responding practically to the needs of local residents. The Extension is a place to go for advice on what disease your maple has or what bug is eating your tomatoes.

Once a man called and ask if now was the time to dig your cannibals.

“Of course he meant canna bulbs,” Neier said. “And they’re not even bulbs, they’re rhizomes.”

But Neier has always been careful not to cast the least negative light on a brown thumb.

“It’s not a crazy call if they don’t understand it yet. You try to help them from where they’re at.”

A look through The Eagle archives sees Neier in his first 10 years as an extension agent in Reno County doing seminars on poison ivy, then-trendy perennial gardening, produce stands, and how to design an attractive and functional landscape for a family’s needs.

“We connect with people in so many ways,” Neier said, through the media and through programs and events from Herb Day and Tomato Day to basic-gardening classes to garden tours. Much of his work is alongside his favorite element of the Extension — the 275 master gardeners who volunteer to receive horticulture training and then to help the public out with their gardening.

“We’ve been so blessed to have a strong master-gardener program here,” Neier said. “I’ve just been all these years trying to keep up with all these talented people.”

Neier grew up on a farm outside Mullinville just west of Greensburg that his grandparents had moved to in 1918. (Implements from the farm can be seen welded into the forged fence that Neier and his wife, Evelyn, donated to the Downing Children’s Garden at Botanica.)

Neier went to school at K-State thinking he would one day own a garden center. So he took a variety of horticulture classes from pests to plant pathology to flower arranging. When it came time to graduate, the extension job in Reno County was open, and Neier’s faculty adviser urged him to apply. (Thirty-six years later, another young man who is graduating from K-State — Matthew McKernan, son of Botanica landscape superviser Pat McKernan — will be taking over Neier’s job. He starts next week.)

It turned out that Neier’s wide education also matched what he needed at Extension, and it was a natural fit. “My parents met at an Extension meeting after the war,” in the Farm Life program that was like 4-H for young adults after World War II. “My mom was in 4-H. I was in 4-H.” Evelyn Neier is a 4-H specialist.

While Neier was happy to work in the edibles side of horticulture alongside Warminski, when Warminski retired, Neier was able to move over to the ornamental side and his favorite type of plant — trees.

“I really like trees because we didn’t have any” growing up on the farm, Neier said. “It was pretty much what my grandparents had left. When you saw people who had nice trees, it was ‘Wow!’ We pretty much just had some old thorny honey locusts and Siberian elms. ...

“When I had a chance to move over and do tree stuff ... I did enjoy being able to develop a demonstration site for trees, the Extension Arboretum.” The grounds of the Extension now are planted with 300 trees. Neier will lead a tour of them from 9 to 11 a.m. June 20. It’s free and open to the public.

Trends in gardening

While a lot of plant material has come through the door at the Extension over the years, awaiting diagnosis of a pest or disease or identification as a weed or a desirable plant, “what’s changed a lot for us, we used to get the actual sample and now we’re seeing more and more of it on email or cell phone pictures, and that’s a great way to diagnose a lot of things,” Neier said.

But even with the advance in technology, he sees a surge in gardening interest.

“I think people are growing more. You mainly get interested in horticulture and gardening when you have a bit of soil of your own, that is when you get your first house.”

One trend is people planting more in containers or raised beds. Some of that has to do with people downsizing and not having the real estate, Neier said. With raised beds, what people don’t realize is that they don’t have to have an edging around it, Neier said. Think of farmers planting on top of furrows. And you don’t have to bring expensive soil in. “You can move the soil you have,” Neier said.

He also said that while there is a national trend toward xeric planting, people don’t like that term in these parts. But they do embrace some of the elements, such as planting ornamental grasses, he said. When he first started out, those consisted mainly of pampas grass or pennisetum. “And now there’s so many types.” He recently visited gardens in France and saw what was termed a Mediterranean garden, but “it looked like a prairie garden. It’s kind of weird when Kansas is becoming trendy.”

And Neier hopes that all the drought programming that he developed following the dry years is gaining traction — the current wet spell notwithstanding.

The future in the past

Jet Star tomatoes aren’t the only old things Neier loves. In retirement, he’ll have more time to devote to one of his interests — old barns. He grew up within half a mile of the 1912 Fromme-Birney Round Barn in Mullinville, hearing people say, “It’s a nice barn. It’s too bad it’s going to fall down someday.” Well, it hasn’t. Instead it’s now a tourist site where people can open the door, switch on the light and explore the exhibits that Neier had a hand in creating. He is on the board of the Kansas Barn Alliance.

He also may do some horticultural consulting and speaking in retirement.

“I’m sorry to see him go,” Firshing of Hillside Nursery said. “He’s had a great impact on the city of Wichita and the county. He’s taught me a lot over the years. ... He’s always been gracious with his time. He’s always been a good listener and has tried to find an answer for you as quickly as he can.”

It’s never been just about the plants for Neier, as evidenced in the joy he’s taken in coaching and supporting 4-H horticulture judging teams.

“It’s fun,” Neier said, “to watch people grow and learn and apply and do.”

This story was originally published June 12, 2015 at 2:58 PM with the headline "A leafy legacy: Extension agent Bob Neier is retiring after 36 years."