Farmer Savage Preps For Mushroom Season

Gather New Haven​’s chief farmer and Newhallville native Jonathon Savage is going to be planting pink and blue oyster mushrooms for the first time this year — because people love them, because they’re very good for you, and because he likes to learn to grow new crops.

Along with them there will be the usual three varieties of kale and kohlrabi; multiple scallion, tomato, and pepper varieties, to say nothing of the crimson red okra alongside the traditional green, plus basil in five varieties — count ​‘em — Genovese, cinnamon, lemon, Thai, and sweet.

Tuesday afternoon Savage, a Newhallville born and raised agriculturist now in his third season with Gather, provided a tour of the seedlings of many of this year’s record-setting 117 varieties of vegetables. 

Many were just peeking through the soil within the expansive garden greenhouse at Grand Acres, at 49 Grand Ave. in Fair Haven. 

Grand Acres is one of a handful of large-bounty producing farms that combine with about 40 smaller community gardens, largely run by volunteers, with Gather’s help, that beautify our town from end to green end. 

The object isn’t just beauty and good eating, but also the promotion of equity, good health, and wellness. The gardens are the basis for — the tools of — the garden-based wellness programs where folks with, for example, diabetes, can get good exercise growing their own vegetables while learning to cook and eat more healthily.

And young people through paid jobs with the garden and ecology-based entrepreneur programs at the garden sites can launch both for-profit and nonprofit businesses building, for example, the structures for raised garden beds and providing materials for composting.

All these activities (along with the management of Schooner, a sailing and marine biology learning camp based at the Sound School in City Point — and there’s a community garden there too) are all under Gather’s green umbrella since the New Haven Land Trust and New Haven Farms merged to become Gather in 2020.

“We’re in post transition,” said Leigh Youngblood, the interim executive director, who’s been with Gather just since the beginning of this year. New staff is being hired, such as the manger for the community gardens, she said. And there’s a search on for a new executive director to continue to move the consolidated organization forward and replace Brent Peterkin, who resigned in December; she says the goal is to have someone in place by the end of the year.

The chief farmer, however, is already very much in place and at home, and more. 

The grandson of William Reaves, who had been growing vegetables for generations on Hazel Street in Newhallville, Savage said he was given a plot of land in the front yard by his parents when he was five years old. 

“I’ve been growing food ever since,” he said

In his previous gigs working at after-school programs and alternative schools where he taught science and math and even with at-risk young people in lock-down arrangements, ​“I always introduced gardens,” he said. ​“You do your best work when you bring what you love to your work.”

“It’s a dream job,” he said of being Gather’s chief farmer, on the way to the longer-term personal dream, which is to own his own farm, he added.

In the meantime, Savage is the go-to guy providing plants, soil, materials, and know-how for the de-centralized and very busy organization that, in 2023, he estimated will reach at least a thousand people of all ages through its wide-ranging programming.

That will include growing the bounty at the larger farm gardens, on Ward Street, Liberty Street, Grand Acres, and at 613 Ferry St., where Gather beginning on May 27 runs a popular farm stand open to the public through October. 

The bulk of that produce goes in weekly shares provided to the 40 people who will be participating in the farm-based wellness programs; those slots are usually filled by clients from the Fair Haven Community Health Care clinic.

A fifth large farm site, on James Street, adjacent to the Phoenix Press and across from Criscuolo Park, is being closed because the property is on the verge of being sold. 

“We’re looking for a new farm location to replace it,” said Youngblood.

Of their 45 gardens in total (Gather owns the leases but all the work is done by volunteers) about 35 will be very active this season, Savage and Youngblood estimated, and the method of working the land on each as well as the degree of volunteer involvement, can vary dramatically.

Many, like the community garden at Grand Acres (the larger farms usually have a community garden section adjacent) operate on the basis of individuals signing up to grow strictly in their own individual plot. Other gardens, such the Fred Cervin Bioregional Community Garden at at 608 Whitney Ave., have participants all deciding democratically what to grow and where and all sharing in the result.

Then there are gardens such as the Armory Garden on County Street in the Whalley/Beaver Hills neighborhood. It is not only a large, shared, democratic garden, but one where participants have recently (with some help from Chief Farmer Savage) erected their own greenhouse.

“They are at the level where they’re doing programs themselves,” Savage said.

“The interest in urban agriculture is growing,” said Youngblood, and this is the time and the season when they are beginning to field many calls on where and how to start growing or learn to grow your own food, or to participate in the range of Gather’s programs.

Then Savage went back into the greenhouse. The leeks and onions, he reported, were planted at the larger farms two weeks ago. The kale and the collard greens as well. And the spinach and peas were also already planted at three of the farms. 

But the more tender plants like the tomato seedlings – about 15 varieties this year including the Big Beef, the Striped German, the Honeycomb, the Super Sweet 100, and the ever-popular Sungold Cherry – will remain in the Grand Acres greenhouse until May before distribution to gardens all over the Elm City, Savage said

The best place to explore and sign up for the whole range of the programs is the Gather site: gathernewhaven.org.

Other gardening questions, even those related to mycology, which Savage studied up on for this season’s mushroom-growing experiment, can be directed to: [email protected]

Have a favorite garden around town that you’d like this vegetable-flower correspondent to check out and write about? Send an email to [email protected] or leave a comment below with details.

And see below for other recent Independent articles about New Haven’s many gardens and gardeners.

• Kid Gardeners Grow On Clinton Ave
• Whitney Gardeners Dig In On Leek Landfall