You won’t find Matthew Browning’s honey-flavored white Lebanese summer squash in any store. His Church Street South neighbors find them — and get them for free — when they pass his front-yard gardens on Portsea Street on their way home from the produce-less convenience store on the corner.
Browning’s bountiful estate, really a mini-farm with sunflowers in the front yard and a cold frame for seedlings in the back, sits on a tenth of an acre surrounding two houses he owns in the Hill neighborhood. The squash grows along with corn and beans out of a single hole in the native American “three sisters” planting technique.
Browning, a family practice nurse, displayed his 21 hills of three sisters. “This is the thing that could change food production in the U.S,” he said.
The Browning bounty was one of 19 farms and gardens within the boundaries of New Haven that displayed their basil, tomatoes, watermelon, corn, and also honey and eggs for all the city to see on Sunday. They did so a second annual city farm and garden tour organized by the Connecticut chapter of the Northeast Organic Food Association (NOFA).
NOFA Outreach Coordinator Kristiane Hubert estimated that 50 people visited the gardens and farms Saturday morning and afternoon, an assortment of private gardens in residences, those run by restaurants like 116 Crown Street, and those operated as community gardens organized by the New Haven Land Trust.
The participants more or less self-organized using social media. Taken together they showed that local food production in New Haven is varied and robust.
“People think you need several acres to grow, ” Hubert told a reporter before she went to NOFA central on Saturday, which was a small table set up at the top of the Wooster Square Farmers Market on Chapel Street.
The day also included discounts at restaurants like Claire’s Corner Copia and Zinc, which prize growing and using local produce. It culminated at Common Ground High School with the screening of “Truck Farm,” a documentary about an urban farmer who created a garden in the bed of his grandfather’s truck in New York City.
“We wanted it [the tour] to be inspiring,” Hubert said.
The 19 gardens offered on the tour ranged geographically from Sherill Baldwin’s and Kimball Cartwright’s “edible landscape” on Lenox Street high in the heights of Fair Haven in the east to the community garden on Springside Avenue at the base of West Rock.
The latter is the city’s only plot where the meditative sounds of gardener Kathy Fay’s trowel mix with the clink of horseshoes.
That’s because the Springside Garden, begun by Safe Haven for its homeless clients four years ago and grown into a community activity, is cheek by jowl with the city’s only horseshoe club in a rustic enclave little known to many New Haveners.
Allan Appel Photo
Fary showed state horseshoe throwing champ Glenn Ellis how wrens had made their nest in her scarecrow.
Fay particularly enjoys gardening near dawn and in the early hours when it’s most quiet and peaceful. But there are also challenges from animals over and above the usual. It’s likely the only garden on the tour where a big snapping turtle from nearby Wintergreen Brook “comes to rest in our leek bed.”
Eggs from Little Dancing Boots,
& A Running ‘54 Plymouth Savoy
Emily Gallagher and Little Dancing Boots.
Over on Derby Avenue at Winthrop in the West River neighborhood, Emily Gallagher is in her first house and well on her way to fulfilling a lifelong goal of becoming as self-sufficient as possible.
Although she still goes to the store for grains and dairy, she grows plentiful corn, tomatoes, Swiss chard, herbs, and more. Gallagher’s broccoli was looking particularly robust. The secret: “Broccoli likes a cooler start.” So she begins it indoors in February and March and then moves it outside into her raised beds in the early spring.
Also prominent behind the beds Gallagher’s Blue Cochin chicken named Little Dancing Boots and her cohorts produce enough eggs to regularly give them to neighbors.
Community activist Stacy Spell stopped by to say hello on his regular Saturday morning clean-up rounds. She gave him a half dozen eggs, which he prized.
“You hear the term sustainability, but you’re living it,” he said.
Gallagher, who grew up in the Hill and in North Haven with a mother as an inspiring gardening model, also boasts a beehive, which should provide the first honey harvest next year.
Her self-sufficiency goal extends to keeping old cars running, including this beauty of a 1954 Plymouth Savoy all dressed up with faux machine guns beneath the head lamps in the spirit of Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers. Yes, it runs.
Gallagher said her next gardening challenge is to grow an apple tree through the espalading technique, which means growing it against a wall and pruning so the branches reach for the plane.
Wanted: Affordable House with “Edible Landscape”
Sherill Baldwin with little figs.
Four years ago Sherill Baldwin and Kimball Cartwright went looking for a house they could afford. An equally important requirement: that it have yard space sufficient for them to create what Baldwin called an “edible landscape.”
They found it on Lenox Street. They transformed a wildness that came with only a couple of peach trees and berry bushes into a bounteous (without being fussy) array of beds that produce tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and much more.
Kimball says she keeps bright tangerine-colored marigolds to keep away the insects and maintains wild-growing milkweed for the monarch butterflies who favor it.
When aldermanic candidate David Baker dropped by to solicit a signature, the talk quickly turned to gardening. One of the concerns of Kimball, gardeners in the Heights and indeed throughout all of New Haven is the level of soil contamination. Because New Haven is an old industrial city, Kimball, Gallagher and many others grow not directly in the ground, which they fear has lead and other injurious chemicals, but from raised beds of freshly brought in soil.
“We grow, we freeze, we dehydrate, we root-cellar, so we eat it all,” and all year round Baldwin said. All that potential exposure is a reason she avoids growing directly from the soil. The metallic remains of an old railroad spur run right behind her edible landscape, and her gardening turned up a few pieces of coal recently.
She and Cartwright credited Urban Resources Initiative’s Chris Ozyck with not only inspiring them to start the garden, but literally making it possible by bringing in all the top soil they needed.
Baldwin is particularly proud of the fig tree she has grown this year. She’s been advised to try to add some new varieties, and her visit early in the morning to Matthew Browning’s farm on Portsea Street also inspired her, she said, to improve her farm’s rain water collection system.
Matthew & Phoebe Browning.
Over at the Browning farm, Matthew and his wife Phoebe await their second child, who will be eating a lot of pureed white Lebanese summer squash. Nothing store-bought for this family. They also purchase a half a cow and a half pig from a farm in Shelton and freeze it for the year.
“I also bow-hunt for deer,” he said. The season will commence in mid-September.
Click here for a previous story about Grand Acres, a New Haven Land Trust garden site that was also on the tour; and here for one on the Fair Haven Community Health Center Disease Prevention Program/Chabaso Bakery garden on James Street.
Way to go, Em! : )
Great article.