This summer, the New Haven Land Trust has hosted two Hunting for Horseshoes events at Long Wharf Nature Preserve. In partnership with Sacred Heart University's Project Limulus, the New Haven Land Trust has brought researchers from the program to teach community members about horseshoe crabs and how to catch them and collect data for the Project. 

Growing Entrepreneurs, the Land Trust’s year-round job program for youth, is in its 12th week. Temperatures are dipping and the end of daylight savings will soon put our after-school workdays in the dark. Will things start to slow down? Not quite. We are switching to Saturday workdays, protecting the garden from the cold, starting a new business venture for the winter, and adding one more youth to our team.

The Incubator Garden is an exciting partnership with New Haven Farms supported by the Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Foundation that currently has 32 families participating! These families are all graduates of New Haven Farms' health and wellness program, a program prescribed by Fair Haven Community Health Clinic as a way to help battle diabetes and obesity.

My name is Xavier Hernandez, and it’s my second  time working with the New Haven Land Trust. My work experience has been great working with these teenagers from the [email protected] program. My favorite part about working in community gardens is getting to use different kinds of gardening tools. My favorite place to work is on Long Wharf Nature Preserve because we get the chance to saw down and pull out all sorts of weeds, and trees. Everyone gets along well and we are all hard working.Working at the garden was interesting this year.

My name is Ajarano Smith-Bowe and I am apart of this year's youth at work crew. Throughout this summer we have been renovating the Grand Acres garden site. As i'm writing this blog post and reflecting on my experience as the job comes to a close I realize what an impact we have had on the worksite, and the impact it had on me. When we first arrived, the site had lots of weeds, a compost pile that had to be done, a fence that had to be made, and how we had to make garden beds. I was also woefully unprepared for the tasks ahead.

During my experience with the New Haven Land Trust I have had a good time. We have made garden beds, compost bins, a fence, we planted, we weeded, etc. We have been in the garden and preserves that I have never known existed before. I had a lot of fun here working with everyone. I enjoyed making the fence and planting. I learned that having a garden isn't easy but that it is very fun to make one.  It was an amazing job experience!

In the Quinnipiac Meadows Nature Preserve, a young osprey sat quietly perched on a dead log with her nest looming 30ft overhead. The sparse shrubs and tall grasses gave her little relief from the hot summer sun. Her parents glide high overhead, screeching concern for their little one.

Hi! My name is Harry Zehner and I work at the New Haven Land Trust over the summer through the City of New Haven and Youth at Work. We are doing many exciting things this summer, working in gardens and preserves in various capacities. The second week of work was filled with new on the job experiences. The first two days were centered around building a new compost heap in the Grand Acres garden. We had already dug three foot holes for the four by four posts that would become the foundation of the compost heap.

Kids 2 Coastline program just finished its first week! Educators welcomed two groups of kids from New Haven's Boys and Girls club, ages 6-8, and 9-10. Eager to learn and explore the Long Wharf Nature preserve, youth groups did their best to combat the 90 degree heat and they succeeded. Enthusiasm never wavered as they explored the salt marsh, learned about ecosystems, habitats, mollusks, tides, the Long Island Sound, stewardship and more.  We got very lucky and were able to find and hold both a fiddler crab and a horseshoe crab in their natural surroundings.