Allan Appel photo
Fair Haven Library Branch Manager Kirk Morrison with weekly table of local bounty.
All books must be returned after three weeks; DVDs, after one; but the farm-fresh vegetables absolutely never need to be returned. In fact they can’t ever even be borrowed.
You want them – collards, okra, kale, white eggplants, cucumbers, turnips, string beans – all new releases from the ground as of this morning?
They’re yours, for free, and with best wishes from the library for your good health. You don’t even need a library card.
That was the happy community gardening news from the Fair Haven Branch Library, on Grand Avenue near Ferry, Wednesday morning.
There, Branch Librarian Kirk Morrison was presiding over the weekly table of local bounty produced both from the garden behind the library and other of the Gather New Haven plots in the Fair Haven area
Mary Ann Moran, the Gather supervisor of the half dozen Gather gardens in Fair Haven, and volunteers bring in the produce early every Monday morning (this Monday was delayed to Wednesday due to the rain). The vegetables are then displayed on an attractive table on the library’s main floor — between the computer terminals and fiction.
Morrison and his staff put out, along with the attractive baskets, cards with translations into Spanish (this reporter leaned that carrots are zahorias and a turnip is a nabo). Lots of what Morrison, in his sixth year at the library, called “teachable moments” also have occurred around the table, whose contents are usually gone by the end of the day.
“People ask each other what’s this [vegetable],” Morrison reported, and there are conversations also about how you cook different items.
He confessed that he himself is now finally able definitely to distinguish between a leaf of collard and one of kale.
On Mondays, Haven’s Harvest brings over rolls and breads contributed by Chabaso Bakery, from its nearby outlet store on James Street; those goods are displayed with the bread, and it is all usually taken by area residents within a 24-hour period, he reported.
“Between this and the mobile market [operated by Common Ground High School and Urban Farm], it’s exciting for us to provide produce for people who don’t have it,” he added.
In fact, the provision is both a reflection of the ever-widening and important role libraries are playing in city life as well as a nice coordination of several organizations – the library, the Gather New Haven, Haven’s Harvest, and the contributions of a local business – to respond to the clearly ongoing needs of people with very limited means in areas, such as parts of Fair Haven, sometimes described as fresh produce “deserts.”
Since the deliveries began weekly in June, the gardeners have delivered just about 100 pounds of produce to the library table. And each batch harvested from, for example, the flagship garden behind the Clinton Avenue School, only eight or so blocks away, arrives at the library for its patrons very quickly.
That degree of farm-to-table velocity is impressive. “You can’t get fresher,” said Morrison.
All this was a thumbs-up good idea according to John Gavilanes, in New Haven only eight months now from Quito, Ecuador.
Not unlike other library patrons who enter, ascend the short flight of steps to the main library floor, and behold the table of col rizada (kale) cebollin (green onions) and other great green stuff, he did a bit of a double-take.
Some patrons, Morrison said, think it’s a kind of display or temporary exhibition and ask if the vegetables can really be touched.
Gavilanes ran a small store in his hometown, the capital of Ecuador, he said (through a library patron/translator) and hopes eventually to do the same in New Haven. He’s enrolled at Gateway Community College learning English, and his business Wednesday morning was to use the library computers to make a “Room to Rent” sign.
He wants to rent a room, he reported, in his apartment on Blatchley Avenue and for that he needed a sign. Yet he has no computer and printer set-up yet in the apartment. Thus the visit to the Fair Haven Branch.
The library, indeed, had a half dozen other patrons of all ages already busy at the computers, their backs to the table, as if having 20 pounds of vegetables inside a library were the most common thing in the world.
Morrison said occasionally he sees kids munching on the string beans (frijoles) or on a roll. “At least that’s something healthy,” he said.
That, of course, is not allowed in the library. Enforcement thus far, however, has been fairly lenient.