That’s the earnest and urgent plea of the dry and dusty underground spigot at the Davenport Community Garden in the Hill neighborhood.
For six weeks now, dozens of dedicated neighbors have been laboriously hauling heavy five-gallon jugs, devising a pumping system, and scheduling shifts of work to keep the future bounty of vegetables and flowers from dying of thirst in their beloved garden.
Garden coordinator Faith Bailey and Ward 3 Alder Angel Hubbard on Tuesday.
They have even prevailed on the obliging Fire Department, Engine Company 11 on Howard Avenue, which has delivered 250 gallons of water — three deliveries over the last three weeks.
The garden, which has become a community resource and outdoor oasis, has had no running water this season for the first time in more than 20 years.
With its 24 beds of vegetables and nine of perennials, the garden, on Davenport Avenue at Ward Street, is one of 19 that were recently handed over to the city by the local environmental nonprofit Gather New Haven. Due to financial straits, Gather has ended its leases of city-owned garden plots and has decided to no longer support them. (It is keeping three on Gather-owned land.)
As a consequence, the Davenport garden has not seen a drop of water from the spigot since.
Although the city is convening meetings among Gather board members, Livable City Initiative (LCI) officials, economic development staffers, and others to devise a new arrangement, meetings don’t keep the newly planted raspberries, blueberries, and grape vines alive, along with the sprouting beds of basil, bunching onions, tomatoes, and other future crops.
“We did the hard work to make this garden,” said Hill Alder Angel Hubbard, “but there’s simply not enough urgency” on the part of the city.
On Tuesday morning, Hubbard had just arrived with six five-gallon jugs of water she purchased at Costco, at $15 each — paid for out of her own pocket — and she is one of many Davenport Garden lovers who have pitched in this way during the water crisis.
“This is unfair and unjust,” she said of the response of the city thus far.
The Fire Department making one of its deliveries of water to the Davenport Garden’s emergency “cube” reservoir.
She and the volunteer garden coordinator Faith Bailey — a medical social worker who over the last three years has spearheaded the receipt of two small grants making possible an overall garden clean-up, the shiny new raised beds, and other key improvements — have been in the lead working the phones, writing letters of appeal, and other advocacy to solve the water problem, and fast.
They have spoken and written to Gather board members, the mayor, and others, to get the vital H-2-O flowing while a new larger plan is being fashioned.
“Some gardens already have it. Why not us?” Bailey asked about Davenport’s much-needed water.
While the deliberations go painstakingly on, a core of 20 regular Davenport gardeners — along with many curious neighbors who drop by — are pitching in with water jugs, labor, and hydraulic innovations. One purchased online a 275-gallon “cube” (to hold the Fire Department’s gallons), and another, Chris Hernandez, came by to arrange a brick base to lift the cube off the ground, to mulch, and do other heavy work; now he’s become a regular.
But how could they distribute the water to the beds?
Others purchased heavy-duty five-gallon plastic containers, others battery-powered submersible pumps to insert in each of the containers, and a gardener/volunteer is now able to pull a wagon with three containers and pump up and down the rows of thirsty vegetables.
Perhaps because of the influence of its proximity to Yale New Haven Hospital, the Davenport communal garden is prioritizing health. Members therefore last year determined no longer to raise edible vegetables in beds made of pressure-treated wood due to the chemical content.
Bailey (right) and volunteer gardener Mark Debrady with the cube-and-battery pump system.
While perennials are happily growing in the remaining wood beds along a row on the Ward Street side, all the future salad makings are now emerging in shiny metal beds of different sizes along five well-kept, wood chip-lined rows in the back half of the park.
One regular volunteer, Mark Debrady, said “fresh food that you grow yourself is just so much more nutritious.”
And while he spoke, another neighbor, Tyesha Jenkins, arrived and said for years she’s circumambulated the garden on her walks — to keep early onset diabetes and other health challenges at bay — and has long been wanting to connect to the garden.
Now she has, and one of her additional reasons: “Fruit and vegetables in the stores are just not fresh like they used to be, and they’re very expensive.”
So she’s begun a garden of her own, largely in pots on her porch nearby, and Jenkins was eager to pick up pointers from the Davenport gardeners.
Bailey asked Jenkins for her contact info, explained that members receive a code to open the gate if they can spare an hour to weed or mow or clean up or do other chores; and, voila, another neighborhood gardener was on the team.
Yet as people worked on a sunny, perfect Tuesday morning, the talk was not so much of the joys of gardening per se, but of, to use Hubbard’s phrase, the “peace in the Hill” that the garden brings.
“You feel it’s a non-stressful place,” she elaborated. “You sit, you inhale, it’s a beautiful garden,” and you wouldn’t know you’re in a stressful neighborhood with the challenges of what poverty often brings.
All the gardens operate differently, said Bailey. In Davenport’s case, it was not only a revived neighborhood interest, but Bailey was able to write and to secure grants for revival of the space from The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven and the C.A.R.E. program, which operates out of Southern Connecticut State University.
“We never really got much from Gather,” she said.
Pointing to the neat lanes of wood chips that keep down weeds between the beds, she said, “the city/Gather dropped off one load of chips. I did the rest.”
The grant enabled the gardeners to purchase new benches and tables and also to buy a drip-water irrigation system, Bailey added. Yet it can’t be deployed because it doesn’t work without pressure, and the Fire Department’s cube full of water doesn’t have the pressure.
The spigot simply has to be turned on.
Davenport gardener Chris Hernandez checking on the onions.
Is it an unpaid bill? Bailed wondered. Or a technical issue with the plumbing at the water source? Or is the glitch bureaucratic that is keeping the water from flowing? Part of their frustration, said both Bailey and Hubbard, is that they ask, they implore, but feel thus far they have not received candid answers.
And there is a lot at stake, they said, and not just the vegetables and flowers, but also the welfare of the people in the community.
The “park,” Bailey pointed out — referring to the garden’s front half, which is a kind of grassy refuge facing Davenport Avenue — has been a place of community meetings and gatherings that has a health and welfare importance beyond gardening, and that should not be overlooked.
“All the literature says how critical it is to get outside your house, to socialize, it’s so positive and helps maintain health.”
The freshmen from Career High have come to the Davenport Community Garden, 40 kids strong, to do a clean-up, and students from other schools have rendered community service as well. Bailey said she has colleagues who want to conduct outdoor yoga classes in the park section of the garden, and others who want to do a drum circle.
There’s a lot more than just the blessings of gardening happening at this location in New Haven, but it can’t continue if the grounds begin to turn to dust for want of water.
Debrady, who is in a recovery program, said he volunteers for many reasons, but a large part is the socializing that emerges around shared activities of growing, mowing, mulching, planting, and harvesting. “This garden work is part of my recovery.”
And Chris Hernandez, who had never done gardening in his life, talked about the pleasures “of seeing stuff grow. It’s growing, and you were part of it.”
What does Hubbard, in a larger sense, envision for a future non-Gather model of city support of the gardens?
Whatever the model, three qualities are important, she replied: “Leadership, partnership, communication.”
She and Bailey emphasized the garden not only as a place that grows vegetables and flowers, but equally important emotional crops.
“This is an important Hill North communal space,” Bailey said. “It should be a priority for everyone.”
“All the gardeners just want is to be left in peace, and with water!” Bailey concluded, and then went back to adjusting the battery-powered pump.
Bailey said it’s her understanding that on Thursday the board of Gather, now being led by Kyle Pederson, is convening a meeting with gardeners in the network. And on the June 22, she added, gardeners are convening with Carlos Eyzaguirre, of the city’s economic development department.
In the meantime, the water must come from somewhere, and on some of these very hot days, said Chris Fernandez, all the plants and flowers must be watered twice.
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