In the early mornings, some neighbors of the Quinnipiac Meadows Nature Preserve hear gunshots. Currently, hunting is legal along the Quinnipiac River as long as all shooting happens north of the boundary line extending from Grannis Island (on the southernmost tip of the preserve) to Lombard Street on the other side of the river. The hunting boundary was moved up to this point in 2009 in response to safety concerns for families living nearby.

The winter season is a slow one for big projects that the growers love to do - nevertheless, we have been trying to sell healthy and tasteful seasonings at the winter farmers market at Metropolitan High School to enhance our entrepreneurial and communication skills.

Midsummer here in New Haven. Despite the heat, our Growing Entrepreneurs have been working hard to build a pergola – a spot for shade in the center of the Chapelseed community garden and a structure for grapevines to cling to. I’ve never seen a freestanding pergola before, so I’ve been learning right alongside the Growers.

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.