What's happening at your land trust . . .

A Successful Planting

Thank you to our volunteers who helped out recently with the restoration planting at our Winterberry Wetlands property on the Farmington Canal Trail behind Route 10 Restaurant. This perennial pollinator garden along the trail would not be possible without generous support from the Audubon oasis and Cassertano's nursery, the last of which donated a host of echinacea plants to your land trust earlier this year. We also wish to thank Route 10 Restaurant for their generous support and the use of their water to keep the new plantings healthy. 

Thank You!

The Hamden Land Conservation Trust is deeply grateful to the Claire C. Bennitt Watershed Fund of the Regional Water Authority for its generous grant award to help restore your land trust's Jepp Brook Preserve property. Funds are going toward creating a demonstration pollinator meadow just off the Farmington Canal Trail for the public to learn from and enjoy. Funding enabled us to purchase a brush mower to help control invasive mugwort on the property. We expect to install additional plants when the weather cools this fall and hope you'll join us for a future Volunteer Stewardship Event to help out. 

​​Six Lakes

Owned by out-of-state Olin Corporation, Six Lakes is a 102.5-acre fenced-off property in Hamden, Connecticut, featuring mature forests, hiking paths, and six beautiful ponds. Home to deer, waterfowl, birds, fish, and turtles, its diverse habitats include a cattail marsh, a red maple swamp, and a 150-year-old oak-pine forest as well as wetlands that connect to the Regional Water Authority’s Lake Whitney water supply. Formerly known to HLCT members as Powder Farm, it is also a heavily polluted former industrial site contaminated with heavy metals, PCBs, solvents, and petroleum from decades of munitions testing and waste dumping by the Olin Corporation. Despite a 1986 consent order filed by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, the site remains fenced off and awaiting remediation. Your land trust is part of the Six Lakes Park Coalition (SLPC), a group working to try to ensure that Six Lakes eventually becomes a valued natural and recreational resource open to the public. Students at the Yale Environmental Justice Law and Advocacy Clinic worked with the SLPC to learn more about the history of this parcel. Read the resulting white paper or a summary of its findings. Find out more about this remarkable property.