Rosette Street Edible Rain Garden Created

The Hill’s first edible rain garden will offer fresh produce for the neighborhood while also combatting surface runoff in a community effort to promote environmental restoration. 

The rain garden will make use of the captured rainwater from the roof gutters of 207 Rosette St. to feed the plants and garden soil. The garden is at an existing community garden, which Joseph Foran, who owns 207 Rosette, helps coordinate.

The Amistad Catholic Worker House, which is nearby at 203 Rosette, has partnered with the Connecticut Fund for the Environment (CFE): Save the Sound and the New Haven Land Trust to create the rain garden, which will grow raspberries, blueberries, and elderberries for the community.

The Catholic Worker House has been running for about 25 years and is run by Luz Colville and her family. The family opens its door at least ten times a week for community members to get access to hot homecooked meals.

A total of five members from CFE’s ecological restoration team helped create the rain garden along with one community volunteer, one New Haven Land Trust intern, and two members from the Amistad Catholic Worker House. A few neighbors also joined the team to help get their hands dirty and put the garden together from scratch.

“I just love that I can give back to the community I care about,” said Anna Ciacciarella, a Quinnipiac University student and summer intern at the New Haven Land Trust.

Gwen MacDonald, director of ecological restoration, said that the three types of berries were chosen because they are easy to care for, native, and familiar to many in the community.

The ecological restoration team’s projects often focus on restoring Long Island Sound through green infrastructure and habitat restoration. This project is not only an effort to provide to Hill residents but also a way to protect New Haven’s rivers. The rain garden will help with stormwater management by minimizing runoff.

The organization was founded in 1978 and MacDonald said that through its many projects it has been able to be involved in watershed management for all three Connecticut rivers.

Before the organization’s work today, the Amistad Catholic Worker team had three 10-year-old vegetable and fruit community garden beds in the Rosette plot. That produce is most often donated to the Amistad Catholic Worker House and any community members willing to harvest the food. By the end of the project, two additional garden beds were completed.

Garden co-coordinator, Foran and Enedelia Cruz dedicate their life work to bettering the Hill neighborhood community and offering their services in all ways possible for the Amistad Catholic Worker House.

“The block has been a lot safer since it [Amistad Catholic Worker House] came,” Foran said.

Foran purchased the house and property that includes the community garden, at 207 Rosette St., two years ago with the idea to offer the Hill community more food, shelter, pastoral care, and conversation.

This community rain garden was the last project for Anna Marshall, ecological restoration project manager, after dedicating three years to the organization and its environmental work.

“This is the best kind of end I can have,” Marshall said.

Through her work, Marshall has enjoyed being able to not only help the environment but the neighborhood people and the New Haven community. She will be pursuing her Ph.D. to continue her work to improve local communities and the environment.

The garden will be managed by the community and the Amistad Catholic Worker House team, while also being monitored by CFE.