The last-blast-of-summer morning sun was beginning to blaze as Master Gardener Bob Elkins parked on Omaha’s historic South 24th Street and pulled tools and a garden hose from the back of his Kia Soul.
He set the gear near two bags of greenery. One bag brimmed with coleus of many colors. The other cradled a bundle of tall white phlox plants. They lay on the sidewalk near a leaf-shaped flower planter, festive with pink and purple zinnias, outside law offices and other businesses on the busy street. The planter is one of 67 that the City of Omaha and South Omaha businesses had built nearly 20 years ago as part of a $5 million project that renovated and decorated South 24th Street from L to Q streets.
Elkins fished out an index card with a forest of handwritten numbers, letters and words. It represented his work plan for the day for the crew of Douglas-Sarpy County Extension master gardener volunteers that he leads. For example: “Move phlox to bakery W10, 28.” Translation: Move those plants to the planters labeled 10 and 28 on the west side of 24th Street.
The work plan proved to be aspirational. Only one fellow volunteer, Omahan Leah Humphries, instead of the usual nine or 10, made it to this weekly work day in late August. She met up with Elkins outside the gardeners’ home base, Pesek Law.
“Today, you just see one of the brains of the operation,” he continued, nodding and smiling at Humphries. “And me.”
There’s no grousing in gardening though. The duo loaded their tools and plants onto carts and trundled off to tackle a task in an out-of-the-way planter in a construction site: “Trim nutsedge E32.”
So began another day in the life of the South 24th Street business district flora and the volunteers who keep it flowering.
The effort is led by Elkins, an 82-year-old retired Union Pacific human resources expert with a green thumb and a knack for navigating differences. His crew is making the gardens grow better and has become part of the colorful character of South Omaha’s Main Street.
The story is on brand for South Omaha old and new. It’s a story of resilience, neighborliness, hard work and stretching a dollar. It’s a story of people of various ages, races and cultures cooperating to make their neighborhood better.
“It’s good, it’s good,” said Angel Pineda, a veteran cashier at Nena’s Zamora Market grocery store that looks out onto the streetscape. The flower gardens have improved in recent years, Pineda said. The volunteers are a friendly addition to the community.
“I see them planting, cleaning and taking care of the flowers,” Pineda said. “The people are nice. The flowers are more beautiful.”
Flash back to 2005, when the South 24th Street business district was experiencing an economic renaissance. Entrepreneurs from Mexico and other countries, many of whom had saved up money working in meatpacking plants, were opening small businesses in vacant buildings often renovated with the help of federal funds and city help.
But the street and sidewalks were crummy, and fast vehicle traffic was impeding the district’s revival as a walkable shopping and dining area.
John Barrientos, then leader of the South Omaha Business Association, and other business owners worked with then-City Planning Director Bob Peters to craft a plan to improve the streetscape.
The resulting Tree of Life-themed project narrowed streets, installed wide, decorative sidewalks and added sculptures, ornate street lamps and flower planters accented with colorful tiles meant to evoke the cultural origins of the European and Latino immigrants who have powered South Omaha throughout its history.
The project was completed in 2008, though the long-talked-about plan to create a central Plaza de La Raza is only now under construction. In 2016, an international organization bestowed high honors on the project: The American Planning Association that year put the reborn South 24th Street list of 15 Great Places in America.
The project’s purpose: Beautify one of the busiest commercial districts in Nebraska, a place that boasts more than 300 individual small businesses, said Karen Pesek, director of finance at Pesek Law.
But by 2017, The plant life in the planters was struggling, she said. The South Omaha Business Association was spending thousands of dollars a year to have a contractor provide and plant flowers. They would plant annuals, which would die and “then another $25,000 investment needed to be done the next year.”
Another problem: The contractor didn’t weed, water or maintain the beds. The city had installed irrigation systems in the planters, but they often broke and were expensive to repair.
“So (the flowers) would look pretty for about a week or two, and then they would die, or they would get overgrown by weeds,” she said. “So you know, something needed to be done. We needed somebody on the street to really take care of them.”
Pesek and her husband, Ross, managing partner of Pesek Law, were at that time looking to relocate their firm to South 24th because many of their clients are Hispanic. They had gotten involved in the South Omaha Business Association. Ross Pesek loves plants and gardening. So the t Peseks and the business association organized the first community planting day in 2017.
“We said, ‘Let’s weed all of these planters, clean them up, and let’s start planting perennial plants so that they come back year after year,’” Karen Pesek said.
Sixty people from the neighborhood participated in that first community planting day. Soon the Peseks moved their law firm to South 24th Street. The business association dissolved and the money for the planters went away. The Peseks worked with the city and Omaha City Council to create a business improvement district to pay for someone to work three hours a day to pick up trash and water plants.
But as much as they liked gardening, the Peseks were realizing they weren’t experts.
Enter Nebraska Extension. The service, a partnership between county governments, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has a program that teaches Nebraskans to be master gardeners and then volunteer.
Statewide, Nebraska Extension has volunteers serving communities in 55 of Nebraska’s 93 counties. About 325 volunteers work in numerous gardens in Douglas and Sarpy counties alone.
About five years ago, Elkins, one of those master gardeners, volunteered at the annual South 24th Street community planting day.
“I met him just randomly, and I told him, ‘I have this project, but I don’t know what I’m doing because we’re not really gardeners,’” Karen Pesek said. “‘We just like to garden, but we don’t know a lot of things.’”
“Well,” Elkins replied, “I know you don’t know a lot about gardening because you’ve got hostas over here in a sunny spot, and that’s a shade plant.”
She took no offense. Instead, she saw opportunity.
“Maybe you can show us how to do it,” Pesek said. “And he took the idea and ran with it …”
Now there’s a lot more blooming greenery than there used to be, according to business owners and workers. And the community involvement is growing along with the flora.
On that hot late August day, Elkins and Humphries paused at a planter at 24th and O streets on their way to the weeding task.
“It’s taken us four years to get something to grow in there,” Elkins said.
The problems: roots of a tree too big for the planter, subpar soil, relentless sun. In other places, the planters have human problems: unhoused people using them for beds, people picking flowers, dogs doing their business on the flowers, a couple restaurateurs dumping grease in the flower planters. The grease dumping has ended, but the dog issue is proving more intractable.
“Each one of these things has a story, and we get to know all the people down here,” Elkins said.
Elkins and the other volunteers have gotten help from day laborers who wait for work at 24th and N streets. Food truck vendors and restaurant owners have given the volunteers food and drinks. They have been building more cooperation with business owners.
They have had to change up the all-perennial plan. People love planting annuals on the community planting day, and they have the BID’s sole employee, Martin Salazar, to water. A growing number of business people also help water.
“Our goal is to teach,” Elkins said. “We’re trying to get more participation.”
But, he quipped, “Right now, what we get the most is supervision.”
There is education, though, including with unexpected students.
Some of the planters are outside a big childcare center at 24th and N streets. Twins Day Care workers take children for neighborhood walks.
“A couple of years ago, the kids were out for their walk and we were planting petunias, I’ll never forget that,” Master Gardener Sue Brookhouser said, pausing from iris-planting on a recent volunteer work day in September. “The kids stopped and they were looking. We showed them how you pull a petunia out, and it’s got the roots, and you spread it and put it in the soil.”
The children were interested.
“So we just, like, organically, ‘Well, we’re here every week, come out every week,’” Brookhouser said.
The children did. The gardeners showed them how to water and began growing whatever they could get to grow in a planter near the daycare. By summer’s end, they realized there was an opportunity for collaboration.
Karen Pesek and Elkins worked with the daycare owners. They decided to make an herb garden for the children.
The herbs smell good, Brookhouser noted, standing beside a planter redolent with the aroma of the basil and other plants.
The volunteer gardeners planted two beds with herbs and a few flowers “just for the heck of it,” Brookhouser said.
They taught the kids how to plant. The kids came out every week all summer, watered and learned more.
At season’s end, they harvested, and each child got at least five different herbs to take home.The growing, harvesting and sharing have continued this year, and the good smells and good feels have extended further into the neighborhood.
“This summer, I’ve had countless people tell me, ‘I took some of these for my soup, or my stew, or whatever,’ and I’m, like, ‘Great, great, great,’” Brookhouser said.
Concern over immigration enforcement, including a massive 2025 raid at an Omaha meatpacking plant, has dampened the bustle in the area. But it’s still busy enough that the biggest issue raised at the September business improvement district meeting was about parking during the Plaza de la Raza construction.
Earlier in September, workers from a gift shop sipped coffee on break and watched volunteers plant divided lilies in a planter at 24th and M streets.
“I love the plants,” said Myrna Navas, one of the gift shop workers. “It’s nice because when people come here, the area looks better. I put in water in the morning when I come in.”
A few days later, El Dorado Restaurante Mexicano owner Petra Ayala talked about the planter outside the front door that she had filled with five-foot-tall canna lilies. She waters and weeds the bed and is talking with Elkins about what other plants might be best in the future. But she’s proud of what she calls “my flowers.” Customers often remark on them. They’re good for business as well as good-looking, she said.
The business improvement district and gardeners have made the community planting day an ever-bigger community event, said Jennifer Acosta, a community liaison for Omaha Mayor John Ewing. The majority, if not all of the flowers, are donated, she said.
Many come from the Nebraska Forest Service or the City of Omaha’s greenhouses, Elkins said. A few come from the overabundant flower beds he tends at his Omaha condo.
Acosta said she personally has learned a lot while listening to the gardeners teach volunteers during community planting days.
She thinks South Omaha is colorful, welcoming and vibrant. The planters – and those who plant them – make it more so.
“When I say vibrant, I mean yes, that’s an optics of color, right, but also I mean the people who are constantly there,” Acosta said. “There’s always businesses. There’s some that have been there for many years, and some that are quite new. But there’s always new business emerging in the area as well, which is kind of nice to see. It’s still a growing and blooming area, too.”
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