“Gardeners’ Exchange” Grows In The Hill

by Allan Appel The New Haven independent

Krista, Brooklyn, and Byron Crosdale beside the seed library catalogue that started it all!

About three years ago Byron Crosdale was visiting the Hill’s Wilson Branch Library on a regular visit, not looking for anything particularly related to gardening, when he discovered that branch’s remarkable “seed library.”

That’s the collection of books on gardening, tip sheets about annuals, perennials, herbs, vegetables, bugs, how to connect to local community gardens, and lots more.

The seed library also features a charmingly old-fashioned wooden card-catalogue whose drawers are full of seed packets that visitors are urged to take — all pioneered by Jeffrey Panettiere, a Wilson branch staffer who is a serious and very knowledgeable gardener himself.

Tuesday afternoon, the clock having rolled ahead now, three years, and Crosdale having become a self-described “seriously addicted gardener,” he arrived at the entranceway of the 303 Washington Ave. library bearing in his arms a half-dozen bell, red, and jalapeno seedlings that he’d grown.

When Crosdale modestly said he was still very much of a beginner, Panettiere replied, “You did pretty well with the peppers.”

Crosdale was contributing them to the fourth annual gardeners’ exchange at the library.

The festive program encourages folks to bring what they’ve grown, or implements and pots they no longer use, and to array them on tables set up along the spacious entryway to the library and adjacent to its lawn and pollinator garden.

Whatever’s there — like Truman Street gardener Leslie Radcliffe’s several hundred sunflower seeds getting ready to sprout or the Roma tomato, squash, and corn seedlings wrapped in little peat cupcake holders that Panettiere grew in the library’s windows — are all free for the taking.

Along with, of course, lots of advice for how to plant, how to get started, and a good dose of sharing secrets of the best dirt, the best temperature, location, and practices.

It’s also all very much about the advancing of community that is at the center of the branch’s growing (pun intended) menu of gardening-related programs.

Gardener Leslie Radcliffe, center, with her sunflower-growing proteges Emma Madsen and Calvin Dupree.

As they stood beside each other and counseled a steady stream of curious new potential gardeners, like Emma Madsen of East Rock, on just how many inches below the surface of the pot the sunflower seeds should be placed (two), Panettiere credited Radcliffe with the idea for starting the Wilson exchange.

“I had a lot of stuff,” said Radcliffe, who, when she’s not wearing her gardener’s hat, wears the cap of a long-time member and former chair of the City Plan Commission.

When she asked Panettiere for where she might share the bounty of the Truman Street garden and of her own, the idea for a community gardener’s exchange at the library was born in the Hill.

Across from them, at tables on the other side of the entryway, Dr. Faith Bailey, from the Davenport Community Garden, and Giulia Gambale, the coordinator of UCONN’s master gardener program, were also exchanging tales and tips with visitors of all ages.

Radishes, for example, are hardy enough to be put in the ground already and (full disclosure) this reporter, a radish lover, therefore took a packet that was offered, of the “French dressing” variety, and he intends to plant them as soon as he finishes writing this story.

The UCONN gardeners had also successfully convinced one shy future gardener to begin her efforts at a flower garden with borage, a bright purple bloom that’s a great attraction to pollinators and you can even eat its flowers.

Bailey reported her crew had, with the partnership of Yale New Haven Hospital, successfully revived the Davenport Community Garden, part of the Gather New Haven network of growing spaces, and it is now thriving once again.

She, Gambale, or other gardeners will have their table, with rich-looking dirt and cool seeds, set up right where it was Tuesday from 10:00 a.m. to noon every Saturday — low-key gardening evangelists in action throughout the summer.  

Crosdale said his wife has also picked up the gardening bug, as it were, but she loves to grow flowers, rather than vegetables. It also appears to have become a family affair, with their 14-year-old daughter, Brooklyn, is recently enrolled in an agriscience program at her high school.

BTW, this reporter cannot be the only one in the Elm City who did not know that Connecticut has a genuine native cactus. It’s the Eastern Star Prickly Pear (opuntia humifusa), and it practically grows itself, with its thorny leaves flopping over like little green pancakes and basically rooting themselves, and then rising up, with almost no maintenance or care required, to produce a gorgeous flower in late summer.

There was a basket of them, which he had harvested from his own garden, available for the taking at the exchange on Tuesday.

Corn, tomato, and squash seedlings at left, and the Eastern Prickly Pear cactus in basket.