Whitney Gardeners Dig In On Leek Landfall

The sky was overcast and the temperature already dipping into the high 40s, but the chill didn’t stop Maria Tupper and her volunteer gardening friends from using a cool new dibble to put in cold-resistant leeks.

The robust little allium ampeloprasums were the first of about 20 crops scheduled to be planted at the Fred Cervin Bioregional Community Garden on Friday afternoon.

Nestled behind a row of already sprouted daffodils by the sidewalk at 608 Whitney Ave. near Cold Spring and adjacent to the First Unitarian Universalist Society of New Haven, which owns the land, the garden is one of about 30 active gardening spaces under the umbrella of Gather New Haven. That organization was created in January 2020 when the New Haven Land Trust and New Haven Farms merged.

Tupper is the chair of Gather New Haven’s gardening committee and she says the organization has hired new staffers, and an interim director, Leigh Youngblood, and is revitalizing itself after the departure of Brent Peterkin, its previous executive director who resigned after two years on the job, in December last year.

In a sure sign of spring New Haven’s gardens are coming to life but unless you planted garlic in October, as the Fred Cervin gardeners did, all that’s coming up at present are the land cover and here and there pretty little early flowers like Siberian squill, which surrounded the dozen long beds adjacent to the sidewalk at Whitney Avenue.

Every Friday afternoon volunteers like Tupper, Aaron Goode, Roy Money, and Gailanne Jenkins are out. On this most recent gardening outing, the main tasks, in addition to the leeks, included putting in long pine boards to raise the beds, ensure better irrigation and revitalize the soil.

New Haven’s composting king and the founder of Peels & Wheels, Domingo Medina is one of the group’s 10 regular volunteers. He keeps a composting pile on the garden site, between the Whitney beds and the terraced area at the back of the property where the leeks were being planted; Medina’s contributions are profound, said the other gardeners, and include not only loads of new soil with the beginning of the planting season but also a know-how that keeps the plot fresh.

Jenkins, a long-time member of the Unitarian society, and Tupper were discussing how big the sweet potatoes were last season and how big they well might be this year. ​“They like the warm weather,” said Jenkins.

“Some of them are this big,” Tupper concurred, her hands tracing the length of a serious shoe box. They both agreed there is some connection between giant sweet potatoes and climate change.

Unlike most of Gather’s gardens (there are 45 in all, but only some 30 active, said Tupper), the New Haven Bioregional Group space was established around 2008 on private land adjacent to and owned by the Unitarian Church, where Cervin, a founder of the Bioregional Group, convened meetings. 

Perhaps because of those origins, Goode pointed out that whereas many of Gather’s other community green growing spaces are organized around offering individual plots for member gardeners to work, the Bioregional Garden is not only a community garden, but a communal one.

“We all garden the whole garden together,” Tupper explained. 

That results in more varieties of crops being planted – individual beds don’t usually have room for more than tomatoes and a few other crops – and also assures that if one gardener gets sick or moves out of town, the others carry on.

Several other Gather gardens around the city have both features, individual and communal gardens, in the same space.

The next step for these communal gardeners is to find a day when all 10 or so can get together so that they can decide what to grow. Those decisions are increasingly being affected, said Jenkins, by the climate that is getting warmer and more erratic.

The group, however, was fairly sure the selected crops will include tomatoes, eggplant, collards, kale, swiss chard, pea pods, and green beans.

While the cars and their exhaust racing down Whitney are clearly not good for the now and future crops, Tupper added that there was a silver lining to the location of their green space: ​“We’re also one of the few gardens with an indoor bathroom.” 

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.