Grassroots-Veggie Tour Reveals Some Surprises

Lena Largie showed a merry band of community-garden supporters something they’d never seen before: a melon cucumber.

The supporters met Largie, and the melon cucumber, during a bus tour on a crisp and cloudless Sunday afternoon in which they got to see what grows when they sow into the New Haven Land Trust.

The New Haven Land Trust invited the supporters on a tour of two community gardens and the Long Wharf Nature Preserve to share a snapshot of what it does with the money they give.

It turns out the Land Trust does a lot with just a little. With a budget of $150,000, the Land Trust supports 50 community gardens and six nature preserves in the city.

The tour bus took supporters to the Davenport Community Gardens, where they got to meet Largie, a volunteer coordinator who helps manage the garden at the corner of Davenport Avenue and Ward Street.

She’s been helping to organize and tend the garden for about five years. Thanks to her Jamaican heritage, she happily showed off Caribbean favorite plants like callaloo, a green leaf vegetable Largie said was ​“like a cross between spinach and collard greens,” and sorrel, a hibiscus plant used for making a popular drink.

The garden was filled with peppers, tomatoes, pumpkin and squash, along with the aforementioned melon cucumber.

The Davenport Community Garden also is now home to its own composting area thanks to industrious young people like Eneida Martinez, a recent graduate of the Sound School, who not only helped build the composting area, but made rebuilding a bridge at the Long Wharf Nature Preserve her senior project.

Largie said she really enjoys being a volunteer coordinator of the garden. ​“It’s my therapy,” she said.

The next stop in the tour was the Fields of Greens Community Garden on Arthur Street, which is lovingly coordinated by Jamilah Rasheed and her co-coordinator Aasiyah Abdush-Shakur. Rasheed said she adapted the name from the movie Field of Dreams, believing if she worked to build a community garden on top of vacant lot in her community her neighbors would come. And they have. ​“My attitude toward the garden — it’s a spiritual thing,” Rasheed said. ​“We are people of the earth. It’s in us.”

Abdush-Shakur said her thumbs are as brown as her skin, but that hasn’t stopped her from participating in the garden. ​“I’m learning a lot about healthy eating and it’s helping me and my family,” she said.

Land Trust Board Member Maria Tupper said community gardens are not only places that help discourage blight, but they are also a good way to create more healthy food choices in neighborhoods where they might be limited. She said the Land Trust helps facilitate the gardens by providing resources such as soil testing, raised beds, uncontaminated soil and even water.

The last stop, before supporters attended a party with a purpose at Ordinary Bar, 990 Chapel St., was at the Long Wharf Nature Preserve. There they got to see the finished results of Eneida Martinez’s bridge, which took her about five months to plan and just six days to build.

Martinez said when she embarked on the project she was all, ​“I can build a bridge!” But when it came down to brass tacks, she realized she needed some help. She enlisted the help of the Sound School’s marine construction class to get the bridge specifications just right, and the help of fellow students to get the work done.

Part of the money that the Land Trust is raising will go to pretty up the entrance to the Long Wharf Nature Preserve. Executive Director Justin Elicker said many people don’t know that the preserve exists and new signage will help that cause. So will the 100 new trees being planted by the owners of Jordan Furniture. The trees will replace trees considered invasive and harmful to the ecosystems of the preserve. They also will act as a buffer to the highway, John Cox said.