New Haven’s community gardens feed families and provide community gathering spaces.
Michelle So
2:56 am, Sep 17, 2025
Staff Reporter
Michelle So, Contributing Photographer
Cherry tomatoes dangle onto sidewalks. Peaflowers wilt slowly in the fall.
Community gardens around New Haven stand out amongst the urban scenery. Plots scattered throughout the Elm City feed households and function as community staples.
Growing up in the New Haven area, Rosie Hampson ’28 sees herself as a “big gardener,” she said. As a child, she and her family tended to a plot at a community garden on Nash Street in East Rock.
Hampson eventually became the president of the environmental club at Wilbur Cross High School. Getting her classmates, most of whom were city kids, to join her in the garden took some effort, she said.
“Lots of students in an urban environment like New Haven weren’t passionate about the environment,” Hampson said. “They weren’t as connected with nature. So, it was really special to see students who haven’t had that experience before grow their own food and flowers and get their hands in the dirt.”
Despite the short growing season, Hampson and fellow Wilbur Cross students were able to grow a bountiful harvest that included tomatoes, basil, flax and sunflowers.
Today, Hampson is an environmental studies major and the New Haven outreach chair for the Yale Student Environmental Coalition — a role she uses to connect Yalies with the city she calls home.
The garden Hampson worked in as a kid was managed by Gather New Haven, a nonprofit organization that manages over 45 community gardens and five farms around New Haven. The organization was formed from a land trust after a merger between New Haven Land Trust and New Haven Farms in 2020, but it traces its roots to 1982, when the land trust was first founded.
Zion Jones, Gather New Haven’s community engagement and development manager, described New Haven as a “food desert,” a term which refers to a lack of access to fresh produce within the city.
“In many urban areas, particularly New Haven, there is a social and political climate that deliberately robs access to fresh, healthy, green food,” Jones said. “These resources are deliberately kept out of neighborhoods or communities of people that have been marginalized.”
In addition to serving as a “third space” beyond work and home, the Gather community gardens provide resources and infrastructure for New Haven residents to grow their own fresh food and build community, Jones said.
At the Yale Farm’s open workdays, students weed the carrot beds after classes. Michelle So, Contributing Photographer
Gather New Haven also runs two community programs: the Farm-Based Wellness Program, a lifestyle intervention program for people at risk of diet-related illnesses, and the Liberated Land Cooperative, which is billed as a “Black and Brown” farm cooperative that promotes “food sovereignty” and “land justice.”
In the fall, the Yale Farm on Edwards Street, or the “Old Acre,” also grows a variety of produce, including tomatoes, carrots and leafy greens, and flowers such as marigolds or snapdragons.
Some Yale students join the farm for its open workdays on Fridays and Sundays to help with harvesting and weeding while socializing with each other.
Jeremy Oldfield, the farm manager of the Yale Sustainable Food Program, pointed toward the farm’s connection to the local community. Most of the food that gets picked is donated to local organizations, including the Common Ground Mobile Market, which brings highly-subsidized produce to neighborhoods across New Haven, the Dwight Community Fridge in downtown New Haven, and Loaves and Fishes in Wooster Square.
The flower garden in the Yale Farm along Edwards Street is in full bloom. Michelle So, Contributing Photographer
“Fresh, healthy produce is of course a wonderful product of urban farms,” Oldfield wrote to the News. “Equally important are the intangibles that a farm offers: a space to gather in shared purpose, an opportunity to connect with agricultural processes and tasks, the types of conversations and stories that arise over shared work.”
During open workdays, students are often found snacking in fields, enjoying fresh slices of pizza or listening to a guest speaker or musical group perform.
In addition to its gardens and farms, Gather New Haven manages six nature preserves.
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MICHELLE SO
Michelle So is a beat reporter for the SciTech desk, covering climate change and the School of the Environment. Originally from Los Angeles, California, she is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College majoring in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
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