Hari Manchi, a URI intern, talks with Nan Bartow and another neighbor about improvements being made to the garden this summer. Nan Bartow holds out a mugwort root. “I want to tear out all these weeds,” declared seven-year-old Beatrice Cramer, as she gestured on Wednesday towards a patch of dirt and invasive plants that used to be her favorite flower garden in Beaver Ponds Park. “I hate mugwort!” her sister Cecilia, 10, added. Their cousin True Cramer, 11, and friend Eileen Shao, 13, emphatically said they hate it too. Fortunately, the four of them also love to weed. Eileen, Beatrice, Cecilia, and True all showed up to Beaver Ponds Park Wednesday evening for the first weekly gardening session of the summer, as hosted by the Friends of Beaver Ponds Park. The girls plopped down in the dirt and within minutes, they had uprooted a patch of invasive plants including mugwort. While they dug up the weeds, other neighbors shoveled woodchips over the area to keep more from shooting up. “By the end of today we shouldn’t be standing here because there should be flowers here,” said True Cramer. Under the guidance of (adults) Nan Bartow, Joan Hilliard, Rebecca Cramer, and other neighbors, the girls have become experts at cultivating the Beaver Ponds garden. They have all kinds of other gardening know-how, too. “I try and come here every day,” Eileen said, adding: “My least favorite invasive species is phragmites. You literally can’t cut them!” She got frustrated just thinking about them. Eileen, Beatrice, Cecilia, and True have been gardening at Beaver Ponds Park for as long as they can remember, they said proudly. “I have way too much of an emotional attachment to the pollinator garden because I planted things there,” Eileen explained.  Wednesday’s greenspace session was the first of the summer. The group has been caring for the park for 22 years, Hilliard said. Many volunteers know each other well, and welcome newcomers — like their summer intern with Urban Resources Initiative (URI), Hari Manchi. Manchi earned a scholarship through Yale to steward New Haven “green spaces,” including Beaver Ponds, over the summer.  New woodchips for the flower garden are the first improvement to come to Beaver Ponds Park this summer. The Friends group also just got a water fountain — Hilliard said they used to have to water the plants by taking buckets to the pond — and what Bartow calls the park’s “urban oasis,” an area they’re renewing by cultivating only native plants there. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service helped the park build a deer fence, Bartow said, although, with funding reductions at the federal government, “everybody’s hurting, so they’re not as helpful as they were.”  Maintaining the park, 109 acres with two ponds, keeps neighbors busy. Bartow is there several times a week, with other neighbors, and runs greenspace sessions every Wednesday, which is when most people come to weed, plant, and do other miscellaneous tasks as directed by Bartow, Hilliard, and other directors.  Last summer, all of the flowers from the flower garden, which is known as the children’s garden, were stolen. Eileen and True said that motorcycles have ridden over it, and people have thrown rocks they carefully painted into the pond. They’re also annoyed by the poison ivy around the pond, but at least they know how to deal with that, they explained.  This year, the Friends of Beaver Ponds Park hope they can get city Parks Department funding to build a trail around one of the ponds in the park. James Cramer, dad to Cecilia and Beatrice, said “we’ve been building it by feet a year, and I know other people are too. Everybody’s pitching in. But it would be great to have the city or the state” involved as well. They have planned an “exploratory walk” next week to mark out where a path might go. Cramer and Bartow are optimistic they might have some help. For now, Bartow is reluctant to plant more flowers in the children’s garden — which is what her elementary- and middle-school aged contingent really wants. “As soon as we put something in, they’re gone,” Bartow said, and she has no idea why.  Before Hilliard left the park for the day, she informed Bartow that the kids want flowers. She can’t say no, instead suggesting: “maybe start with the dullest.”  The post Next-Gen Gardeners Weed Their Way Thru Beaver Ponds Park appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less