A Westville neighbor came to the Board of Park Commissioners with a complaint, not about noise or trash or crime in the parks — but about the prospect of a community garden.
Community gardens have proliferated in New Haven; almost 50 are now managed by the New Haven Land Trust alone. They provide opportunities to grow local, often organic produce while nurturing a sense of community. So what’s not to like?
A group of potential community gardeners approached Bob Levine, director of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Trees, with a proposal to create a new garden at the corner of Yale and Edgewood avenues, what some consider the “front door” to the park.
A neighbor, Natalie Judd, dropped in on the meeting of the park commissioners to say she lives right across the street from that site and she appreciated the open space that was there now. It’s not that she was opposed to the creation of a community garden in the park — just not there. She said she’d been a gardener back in Michigan and had also been involved with a community garden in the New York Botanical Garden. “But it’s in the middle, not at the front door of the park,” she said.
She had gotten the impression that the proposal was a done deal. Levine assured here there was a process, that there would be a community meeting to get feedback. “I think the chances of it being there [at the park entrance] are slim to none,” he said.
While not a gardener himself (he pleaded ignorance about which crops are planted early in the season — like peas, which are traditionally planted on St. Patrick’s Day — and which are planted later, like beans), Levine (pictured) guessed the season would be well under way before the garden is tilled.
In a phone conversation after the meeting, board president David Belowsky was more optimistic that the garden could get off to an earlier start than that — though not early enough for peas, perhaps. He said a parks department staffer is looking into more appropriate spots in the park for such an endeavor, and he predicted the board could vote on the matter as early as its next regularly scheduled meeting on April 15.