Ginkgo Organic Gardens

more pictures about bike carts and food

2011-12-28T22:54:00.002-06:00

I usually try to take a photo of the loaded bike cart before it leaves for the garden. Once at the pantry, I then try to take at least one photo of our produce after I have arranged it in the baskets that the pantry provides for us. If I get to the pantry later than usual, my photos sometimes turn out blurry, because I am rushed and don't always use a flash when I should.

July 2, 2011

Notice the garlic scapes, turnips, radishes, and snap peas amid all of the leaves.

July 9, 2011

July 16, 2011

July 23, 2011

July 30, 2011

August 6, 2011

August 13, 2011

The colors of our produce shift to the red end of the spectrum.

August 20, 2011

September is mostly a blank in my photo album. I spent most of the month visiting family, and so don't have photos for a number of harvest days, especially for the day on which we delivered 24 pounds of butternut squash.

October 8, 2011

Notice the potatoes.

Peppers are abundant.

October 15, 2011

The few pears that survived squirrels and heat.

October 29, 2011

Mini-bell peppers.

November 5, 2011

November 12, 2011

seed saving: reasons

2011-12-28T12:29:00.002-06:00

The saving of seed is a fundamental activity for Ginkgo’s gardeners, with appeals that range from the refined to the primal. We can state clearly and quickly some of the reasons why we go to the trouble of extracting, cleaning, drying, and storing seeds each year; other reasons, because they spring from deeper within us, often are not articulated.

We save seed because it is economical. A back of the envelope calculation: we can buy a pack of 50 tomato seeds from Seed Savers Exchange for $2.75; we can also purchase seed in bulk (a relative term here) at a price of $27.50 for a half ounce (containing around 6000 seeds). This works out to a price range from 6 cents a seed per small packet to half a cent per seed in bulk. When one considers that the plant from a single tomato seed might produce anywhere from 1-10 pounds of tomatoes with a market value of around $4.00 per pound, a nickel per seed is a tiny investment; however, when one of those tomatoes produces around a seed packet’s worth of seeds that you can save for no cost, it seems silly to buy new seed packets each year, especially if you plan to grow next year the same varieties that you grew this year.

The economic argument is weak, to be honest: many of us spend more than the cost of a packet of tomato seeds for the coffee that we buy on the way to the garden on a Saturday morning, and we do not have a problem supporting seed vendors financially. A stronger argument is agricultural: we support open pollinated, true-breeding, heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables. We want everyone to understand the superiority of produce that has been grown for flavor and nutrition instead of for uniformity of appearance and shelf life. We want plants with stable genotypes that have adapted to the growing conditions in our garden. We want to participate in alternatives to an agriculture that relies on commodity monocultures.

Related to our agricultural motivations are our ecological concerns. The $2.75 that we might pay for a packet of seeds is not the packet’s only cost; a Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA, of our purchase would identify additional, often hidden, external costs. As discussed in Daniel Goleman’s Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything, a LCA is “…a method that allows us to systematically tear apart any manufactured item into its components and their subsidiary industrial products, and measure…their impacts on nature from the beginning of their production through their final disposal”. When attempting the LCA of a seed packet, we would consider the environmental costs that arise from the packaging that encloses the packet for shipping and the oil required to power the vehicle that shipped the packaged packet. We might be overthinking things with regards to seed packets, of course: a seed packet delivered through the mail will have relatively small external costs compared to those of a cell phone or a burger in a Styrofoam clamshell package. On the other hand, a tomato grown using organic methods from saved seed—itself a seed packet—will have minimal external costs. (Plus, you can put that seed packet in a salad.)

A sense of community also motivates our seed-saving. We like supporting organizations that work to preserve plant heritage, such as Seed Savers Exchange. When we plant a storied variety such as the Wapsipinicon Peach tomato or the Cherokee Trail of Tears pole bean, we feel linked to earlier horticulturalists. We recognize that much of this connection is sentimental, based on romantic visions of wizened gardeners puttering in small plots. Many plant varieties were built painstakingly by experienced professional agronomists like Luther Burbank—but not every variety: the Mortgage Lifter tomato was developed by the owner of a radiator shop. One day, we might even be able to contribute to that heritage by giving seeds saved from our own garden, perhaps even from a new cross-pollinated variety—a Ginkgo Volunteer Cherry maybe, or an Old Ginkgo German.

Wapsipinicon Peach

We can usually marshal the above arguments when asked to explain the appeal of seed saving. A deeper reason often goes unsaid: the feeling of magic. Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “[a]ny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Seeds are the product of eons of advanced organic technology: of emergent statistical methods applied by plant species to develop means to store the minimal amount of information necessary to replicate particular structures and activities. A seed is a vegetable program—a capsule containing a set of genetic instructions powered by a small amount of stored energy. When activated by immersion into a specific configuration of inputs that include electromagnetic energy and water, a seed will follow a complex chemical algorithm to convert a relatively undifferentiated mass of surrounding organic material and minerals into a highly differentiated plant. I can understand this, intellectually, to a degree; however, when I stand in late summer in the shade of a seven foot tall tomato plant and consider a single seed from a fruit of that plant, I have trouble believing that that the green leafy tower next to me could result from something small enough to fit under my thumbnail. The fact that I can grow an entirely new plant next year from a tiny bit taken from a plant this year feels like magic. Saving seed seems like casting a spell.

volunteers, october and november 2011

2011-12-27T22:29:00.000-06:00

October 8, 2011

November 5 and 12, 2011

volunteers, september 2011

2011-12-27T22:15:00.000-06:00

September, 2011

Dave weighs produce

Annie screens compost

Dismantling the pole bean trellises

volunteers, august 2011

2011-12-27T22:08:00.002-06:00

August 2011 was frenzied. I would usually snap a few shots of plants before the workday started and then almost forget to take pictures of volunteers.

August 6, 2011

August 13, 2011

August 27, 2011

volunteers, july 2011

2011-12-27T22:01:00.000-06:00

At the end of each Saturday work day, especially when a large group of volunteers comes by to help, we try to take at least one group photo. A set of characteristics of these photos has arisen, and include:

1. When possible, at least one volunteer should pose with a pitchfork, Grant Wood style.
2. Infants and dogs are always welcome.
3. Dramatic changes in hairstyle may occur from one weekend to the next.
4. The floppier the gardening hat, the better the photo.

July 2, 2011

July 9, 2011

July 23, 2011

July 30, 2011

gone to seed

2011-12-18T19:07:00.000-06:00

It is a cliché of gardening prose that non-gardeners are not aware of the origins of the produce that they consume. I suspect that, similarly, many gardeners would not recognize vegetable plants that have grown past the stage from which one usually harvests crops. Just as an urban shopper who grabs a bag of scrubbed potatoes from a fluorescent-lit bin in the produce section of a supermarket may not be able to imagine those spuds freshly dug from a mound of soil, so may a gardener have no idea of what a lettuce or collard will become if left to itself.

As gardeners, we are concerned with maximizing production and the efficient use of soil and weather; once a plant has produced the leaves, fruits, flowers, and edible seeds that the we seek, we pull it and compost it to make room for the next round of succession planting. We may assuage our feelings of ruthlessness with ruminations on the soil cycle—on how the unwanted stalks, roots, and leaves will be transformed in the compost bin into soil in which we will grow similar vegetables again; nevertheless, the change in our perspective in which a plant goes from being the source of food to vegetal waste differs little from that of the littering driver for whom a bag of cooling French fries becomes trash to be thrown through the car window.

Our activities with crops extend beyond simple harvesting of products at the end of seasons; for many plants, we intervene earlier in the life cycle to extract our food. This is especially the case for those plants whose leaves we eat, such as lettuces, collards, chard, and basil. Our objective with these leaf crops is to keep them in the early stages of their life cycles, when their focus is on generating as many stalks and leaves as possible to serve as a photosynthezing basis for later processes of flower and seed production. Our goals as gardeners conflict with the goals of the plant: whereas the plant wants to guarantee the survival of its genotype, we just want salad.

At some point in the season, because of heat or some genetic trigger, a leaf crop plant will usually overcome the impediments of gardeners and bolt, or enter into its flowering phase. When a plant like spinach or lettuce goes into full bolt, there is no more harvesting: the plant’s leaves change from tender and succulent to tough and structural, and are no longer edible, much less palatable.

Lettuce

And like any adolescent, the bolting lettuce plant has volatile chemicals coursing through its body; in the case of lettuce, the plant is manufacturing a burst of sesquiterpene lactones, the compounds that make a broken lettuce stem ooze milky white sap, and which render it suddenly so potently, spit-it-out bitter. When lettuce season is over, it’s over. – Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Basil

Unlike lettuces or spinach, leaf crop plants like collards and basil are more dilatory and less dramatic in their bolting, and gardeners can still intervene to slow the process and stretch out the harvesting of leaves. Pinching the flowering tops off basil plants, for example, can head off bolting for months, until the plant pulls an end run in October and turns bitter enough to dissuade a gardener from continued meddling. Just last weekend (mid December), I harvested the last tiny leaves from the collard and kale plants that we had kept from bolting for an entire season, and only because I didn’t think that they would survive any more days of temperatures in the teens.

Every time I remove flowers from a basil or spinach plant, I reflect that much agriculture is really just an effort to keep plants in a state of arrested development. We struggle to stave off flowering so that we can extract the products of immaturity. I believe that our own culture retards us, the gardeners, similarly. Pop songs celebrate the heady, initial stages of romance and say nothing about long-term relationships. Women feel pressure to maintain the appearance of nubility even after rearing children. Pictures of disturbingly buff geriatrics start appearing in the ad windows of the browser sessions of middle-aged men. We are encouraged not to be who we are becoming but to try to remain who we once were. Our fight to stay young, or at least young-seeming, requires that we purchase clothing and gym memberships and cosmetics and plastic surgery and Viagra. Capitalists harvest disposable income from our attempts to keep age in abeyance.

Arugula

Partly to remind myself of my resolve to resist the blandishments of industries intent on infantalizing me, I do not pull up every lettuce or arugula plant as soon as it has bolted. I enjoy watching a few plants grow up wild and spindly in the spandrels formed between cucumber trellises; watching them change into something completely different from the luscious seedlings that we tended so anxiously in the spring; watching them fully realize their phenotype, becoming what they intended to become.

A plant fully gone to seed reminds me to heed Max Ehrmann’s advice to “take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”

Collard

Swiss Chard

Dill

Photos from the Start of 2011

2011-12-12T13:00:00.011-06:00

After developing an old roll of film I found these photos from the first few weeks of Ginkgo’s 2011 growing season. The beds look empty, like they do now, but there is life starting to reappear on the cherry tree and the rhubarb has self-started. The herbs don’t wait for us to unlock the gate and the mint in particular seems to care less about what we do.

It’s hard to acknowledge that the work is done for the season and that, while some of us may make mid-winter visits to the lot to aerate the compost or tend to this or that, we as gardeners are a seasonal crop too. We lay dormant and wait to be invited back to life.

Looking at these photos is therapeutic when confronting Chicago’s winter. Many people develop strategies to deal with the months of cold dark solitude– planning trips to upset the monotony, signing up for that knitting workshop, developing a reading list. This year I am looking at these photos to remind myself that it all comes back soon. There are no green leaves on the raspberries anymore, but the ground is not dead. All winter long the soil keeps working, replenishing itself, breaking down organic matter in the compost bins, insulating the fig trees, keeping the cover crop company.

So why should I feel dead come February? NAY! I choose life! Replenish Myself! Egg Nog, Hot Chocolate, Mulled Wine, and Mountains of Wreath and Reindeer Shaped Cookies To Bolster My Own Vitality! Overcoat Insulation! And keeping acquaintances company to help them replenish themselves and stave off the doldrums.The garden has returned to a horizontal landscape for the winter. No tomatoes and peppers and sunflowers sticking up, but looking at these photos reminds me of where the season begins and I cannot wait for Spring.

Gingko: 2011 Chicago Cares Community Partner Star

2011-12-04T20:25:00.001-06:00

On the evening of Monday, November 28, a group of us from Gingko dressed up like adults (some of us did not recognize each other) and attended the Chicago Cares Star Awards Gala to receive the 2011 Community Partner Star award.

In its introduction, Chicago cares stated that

Ginkgo Organic Gardens consistently communicates with volunteers about upcoming project dates, other gardens in need of volunteers, and how they can become involved with Vital Bridges, a local food pantry catering to the needs of those living with HIV/AIDS. Their collaboration with Vital Bridges enables volunteers at Ginkgo Organic Gardens to impact the community in a variety of ways. By managing and maintaining a consistent volunteer base every week, their leaders make our volunteers feel welcome and truly appreciated.

And as we're coming to expect, there was a short film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=657kRLOsVac. (This has been the year of documentary for Ginkgo.)

Dave Snyder accepted the award for Ginkgo with his usual combination of grace, erudition, and flocculent majesty. The MC stated "when I looked around the room and saw Dave, I knew that he was the garden guy."

Later that evening, I asked where we would install our award.

"In the shed, of course," Dave answered. "Where else?"

So on the following Saturday, before adding leaves to the winter compost bin, I installed our award in an alcove formed by the joists in the wall of the garden shed: above where we hang the shovels, near the first aid kit and the keys to the cover plate of the water main, where we can see it on Saturday afternoons in summer.

2011 yield results

2011-12-04T17:18:00.001-06:00

The following chart compares the annual yields from Ginkgo Organic Gardens for the past four years. Each year's performance is represented with two graphs:

Each bar represents the yield for a week. The weeks cover the harvesting portion of each season, from the first weekend of June (week 23) to the weekend before Thanksgiving (week 47).
Each line represents the cumulative yield.
Yields are in pounds.

The bad news

The yield for Ginkgo Organic Gardens for the 2011 season was 934 pounds. It's the first time in four years that the harvest has fallen below a half ton; in fact, the yield for 2011 was the lowest that it's been since we started collecting data in our current format.

We suspected midway during the season that the harvest would be lighter than that of 2010—just not by this much. The yield data support some of the reasons that we speculated might be behind this season's poor performance.

Foremost of these reasons was the season's slow start, as evidenced by the yield comparisons for our tomato crop. Our tomato vines in 2011 started producing 3-4 weeks later (weeks 33 and 34, in mid-August) than they did in the prior year. It is likely that temperatures were not sufficiently high during a critical phase of tomato plant development in May and June. Without an unusual late rally in mid-October (39 pounds), in fact, the 2011 tomato harvest would have been the same as that of 2009.

I focus on tomatoes because that crop usually composes the bulk of the garden's yield. In 2011, our yield of 322 pounds was 36% of the total.

Another reason for the low yield is that a number of our crops failed to produce. Our harvest of summer squash, for example, was a third of the 2010 yield (23 lb, compared to 69 lb); and most of our pears rotted or were squirrel-bitten before we could get them to the pantry (13 lb in 2011; 45 lb in 2010).

The good news

2011 was a good year for beets, winter squash, and green beans, and a banner year for peppers. Our tomato harvest, though lower than last that of 2010, was still significant. It was also the first year that we could bring figs to the pantry.

Selected Crop Yields, 2011

Crop	Yield (lb)
Green beans	42
Beets	44
Collards	19
Cucumbers	18
Eggplants	17
Kale	49
Hot Peppers	39
Sweet Peppers	98
Potatoes	26
Radishes	10
Butternut Squash	72
Turnips (with greens)	37
Tomatoes	326
Pears	13
Raspberries	10
Basil	19

putting up for winter: news

2011-10-11T22:45:00.000-05:00

I'm back after a long hiatus. Familial and professional obligations kept me away from more regular chronicling of the 2011 season. I am faced now with a digital mountain of photos and a near-constant whispering internal chorus of potential posts. I won't be able to post everything before the end of the season, so I will preserve posts for later. Perhaps digital photos of produce in winter will evoke summer like a freshly opened Mason jar of canned tomatoes.

Some news:

1. The 2011 harvest may prove to be the worst of the last four years. Our harvest this year was varied—featuring tomatoes, potatoes, greens, garlic, and winter squash, among other vegetables and fruit—but sparse and late. I had half-hoped that we might exceed a ton this year; as the following image shows, as of the end of August, we were facing the possibility that we might not make even half a ton. The final yield may improve because of our banner yield of butternut squash, but not by enough to make up for the low haul of tomatoes, peppers, and tree fruit.

We are not sure if the low yield was a result of the cold spring or the rainy July. Some of us suspect that we've been coasting on our soil's steadily dwindling fertility, and have resolved to amend our beds extensively in the fall and spring.

2. We now have a Twitter feed. Of course we do. We've had a FaceBook page for a while now. Follow us, Like us, Friend us, buy us virtual Cosmopolitans, pester us to play FarmVille, write on our Wall, RT us, DM us, show us tiny photos of shoes sold by Kim Kardashian, offer us the magic formula discovered by a mother in Chicago that whitens our teeth, mine our preferences and sell our personal information for marketing purposes.

3. Michael Leck is a videographer who lives near the garden. Michael approached us a couple of months ago to ask whether he could produce a short video about the garden and its mission. A number of journalism students from institutions such as Loyola or DePaul have filmed or interviewed us over the years (usually without showing us their work afterwords), so it wasn't much for us to agree to another project. We weren't expecting the professionally-produced treatment that Michael sent us. As soon as we figure out the details of where to store it, we'll host the video ourselves.

planting update and garden map as of August 13

2011-08-21T21:21:00.000-05:00

The attached map highlights changes that we have made in the last few weeks.

Departures

We have had to pull almost all of the kale and collards because of a flea beetle infestation. The only kale from the first planting that was unaffected was a small patch in Bed 22. We left a few collards in the north end of Bed 11 and some kale in Bed 9; however, we'll probably pull all but the plants in Bed 22 next week.
We also pulled up almost all of the plants that had gone to seed, including radishes in Beds 12 and 14.
We recently harvested all of the beets in the western half of Bed 14 and half of the potatoes from Bed 10.
We pulled the pea plants from Bed 19 and resowed the bed half with New Zealand Spinach (a heat-tolerant variety) and half with broccoli. None of the broccoli seeds germinated, so the eastern half of the bed is free.

Arrivals

We planted a lot of cabbage. In Bed 9, we planted Copenhagen Market in the southern third and Red Acre in the northern third. In the middle of Bed 14, we planted a few Early Wakefields.
We also planted varieties of carrots. In Bed 12 (our traditional carrot bed), we planted Royal Chatenay in the southern third and Asian Kurota in the northern third. In the eastern end of Bed 14, we planted Tonda di Parigi, a variety that produces stubby, round carrots.

Circling the airport

Because nothing else really seems to grow in the shady end of Bed 19 but lettuce, we plan to plant lettuce there in the next couple of weeks.
We want to try to grow broccoli this year. We plan to replant Bed 10, and maybe Bed 11, with broccoli sometime near the beginning of September.
We'll need to plant fall crops soon to replace crops currently in Bed 17 (pole beans), 22 (blue potato), and 20 (summer squash and cucumber).
Because we'll lose access to municipal water in late October or early November, we'll also need to plan for the green manure crops that will grow as ground cover in the winter.

beta vulgaris

2011-08-18T21:43:00.000-05:00

This year was a truly satisfying year for beets. While our kale and collards were munched into unappetizing doilies by flea beetles and our tomatoes and peppers struggled to raise themselves above knee height, our bed of densely planted Detroit Reds and Cylindras clamored for space into which to extend their lush foliage.

According to the seed packages, we could plant beets two inches apart if we were interested primarily in greens; three inches apart if we wanted to harvest our beets in summer; and four inches apart if we planned to store beets over winter. We opted for a closer planting, because we thought that the greens would go over just as well as the roots, and because none of us owns a root cellar.

The seed packages also recommended that we soak our seeds at least a day before planting them to encourage their germination. Immersed in a mason jar filled with rainwater, the seeds plumped up to resemble Grape Nuts, and clung stubbornly to our fingers as we fished them out and drizzled them along rows of freshly forked soil.

In the following weeks, the beet plants grew vigorously, beating out all but the hardiest weeds in the quest for space in the bed. After their initial coddling, our beets required little from us other than occasional watering.

In 1610, the gentlemen farmers who wrote “A True Declaration of the State of the Colonie of Virginia” were happily eating potatoes—along with the parsnips, carrots, cucumbers, and turnips that they had brought from home—and praising them as food “which our gardens yeelded with little art and labour.” –Jane Mayer, “Down Under”, The New Yorker, November 22, 2010

In late July, we began to harvest our beets, pulling entire plants intermittently from the rows. The roots were small, but well formed; and the greens were darkly vibrant. Our beets radiated vitality.

A year or so ago, when we asked for recommendations of what crops to grow, dietitians at Vital Bridges specifically requested beets. Beets are acclaimed for their abilities to cleanse the liver: just Google “beets liver cleansing” for a host of links to claims of varying degrees of believability. Because many victims of HIV suffer simultaneously from Hepatitis C (talk about salt in the wound), foods that cleanse the liver would, on first reflection, be welcome to the pantry’s clientele.

The theoretical appreciation of the health benefits of beets, unfortunately, does not manifest in a mad rush for our rooty produce when we make our deliveries to the pantry. Beets may radiate vitality, and even glow with virtue; however, they do not suggest summer fun. Our beet greens, in particular, often languish in their market baskets. Other garden products attract the attention of visitors to the pantry: our tomatoes are like models in Daisy Dukes handing out Jell-O shots; our beets, on the other hand, wear cargo shorts and carry clipboards, asking whether you have a second for the environment.

Many of us may have been dissuaded from beets by early experiences with institutional cuisine—the canned, pickled beets, which, along with canned spinach and stewed prunes, filled the compartments of our school lunch platters with unappetizing vegetable matter that we often only ate on a dare. We carried our childhood abhorrence of the purplish and vinegary juice of beets with us into adulthood.

This is unfortunate, because lovingly prepared beets can be wonderful. Beets are not just good for you—they can often be just good. My wife converted to beet love last winter after ordering a salad featuring roasted beets at Karyn’s on Green. She recently made a risotto of beets and greens, using a recipe from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which resulted in leftovers that I ate without hesitation for three days in a row.

We harvested the final beets from our garden last weekend. The beet bed will now, if all goes well, host rows of dinosaur kale and cabbage.

If you think that beets are a hard sell at the pantry, imagine how dinosaur kale goes over.

dodecahedron

2011-08-12T18:25:00.001-05:00


June 25, 2011

We have struggled over the last couple of seasons with attacks of powdery mildew on our squash plants. Last year, we made the drastic step of pulling the entire contents of the “dodecahedron” bed early so that we could amend the bed in an attempt to strengthen the next year’s crop against disease.

This year, we planted the dodecahedron bed with Waltham Butternut squash, sunflowers, and tomatoes. After a slow start, the bed exploded with growth. Aided by good weather, assiduous tending, and (we think) the soil amendments, the bed is now a small jungle of plants. Wandering vines strain against the chicken wire fence. The soil is obscured by lush, green leaves that are a foot wide. Enormous squash flowers hide among the leaves. Sunflower plants tower over everything.

July 2, 2011

July 16, 2011

August 6, 2011

pole beans

2011-08-12T17:30:00.000-05:00

We planted three varieties of pole beans this spring, using seeds purchased from Seed Saver’s Exchange.

We arranged our seeds in circles around tripods fashioned from aluminum tubes lashed with gardening twine. We planted Green Sultan at the west end of the bed; Bountiful in the middle; and Cherokee Trail of Tears* at the east end.

Within a fortnight, young bean plants emerged from the dirt, some with their originating seeds still clasping a leaf.

As the season progressed, the growing vines eventually found the poles of the aluminum trellises, and the tripods soon turned into leafy teepees. I strung clothesline rope between the tripods and added bamboo seats from salvaged papasan chairs. The vines soon covered everything, forming a boat-shaped mass of leaves.

The vine of a pole bean is a marvel of plant engineering, optimized for finding and using support. The surface of the vine is slightly sticky. If you gently wrap the tendril of a vine around a finger and then release it, the vine will often remain curled, as if prehensile. Vines will even use other vines for support, extending into space curled around themselves like gymnasts or modern dancers.

Along the intertwined tendrils’s balletic trajectories bloom tiny-petaled flowers in white or pink. If all goes as expected, bean pods will later emerge from the flowers.

Harvesting beans is a bit like looking for 3-D images in stereoscopic photos. If you look too intently into the masses of vines, you will probably miss many pods that are right in front of you. If you instead slightly relax your focus and wait, pods will pop into your peripheral vision. Many times, I have told people heading to a bean trellis that I’ve already gone over it, only to see them return with handfuls of beans that had escaped me.

We have harvested only a few pounds of beans so far: as with almost everything this year, the bean plants appear to have been delayed in their growth by the cold spring. If the number of flowers is any indication of future yield, though, we may be in for a good crop.

-

*At first, I was appalled that a bean variety would be named Cherokee Trail of Tears. Why would anyone name a vegetable after an atrocity? I later read that John Wyche, the Seed Savers Exchange member who donated the original seeds, descended from people who carried the beans with them along the march during the winter of 1837. So the name of a bean commemorates the victims of genocide, and I will not regard a simple bean pod in the same way again.

june 25 - july 16: a gorgeous mess

2011-07-18T23:01:00.001-05:00

The garden has run riot the last few weeks. If a large group of us could throw a couple of hours each day into the garden, we could keep up with all of its maintenance: tying up unruly tomato vines; keeping the collards from bolting; pulling up purslane and pigweed. As we all have day jobs, we spend what time we can give harvesting and watering.

We have arrived at an uneasy truce with the garden, in which we focus our attentions on the young vegetables in our raised beds and turn a mostly blind eye to the encroachments of chamomile and Queen Anne’s Lace elsewhere, ignoring the weeds and volunteer plants that pop up in unexpected places.

We struggle even with that limited purview: the beds are becoming unruly. The tomato plants stretch languidly, pushing forth side shoots faster than we can train them to stakes with twine, threatening to go horizontal under the influence of burgeoning fruit. The tendrils of pole beans seek support from anything within reach, incrementally threading through the chicken wire fencing that protects their bed. A patch of self-seeded Swiss chard at one end of a bed cheerily menaces the young pepper plants that we intended to grow there. The bed of collard seeds that we had sown directly waited to germinate until two weeks after we, frustrated, replanted with kale starts. The dodecahedron bed is a cage match of squash vines, tomato plants, and sunflowers, all swinging herbaceous equivalents of folding chairs at each other. The flower beds are a study in confusion. The black raspberry plants are climbing the walls of the condo next door, and sweet pea plants are showing up all along the fence line.

The garden is a mess, but a gorgeous mess--like the character of Baya in Le noms de gens.

Although I’ve not written much recently, and my memories of the last few work days have blurred into one sweaty and tomato vine-stained bunch of impressions, I did take a number of photographs on those three Saturdays. The next few posts will be thematic, focusing on one or two of our crops as they grew over the last few weeks.

agrocartography

2011-06-21T21:40:00.007-05:00

Planting maps for selected beds.

Bed 8 contains seedlings from a number of varieties for which we could not determine the varieties when we saved seeds last year. Hint for new gardeners: do not depend on plastic labels left exposed to the elements as a way to keep track of what you plant—especially after the plants have grown unruly in late summer.

june 18 2011: garden site map

2011-06-19T00:51:00.000-05:00

june 18, 2011: maintenance

2011-06-19T00:45:00.000-05:00

June 18 marked the start of a transition in the garden. Most of the beds have been planted, but—other than radishes and herbs—nothing is ready for harvesting. The focus of our work shifts from establishing the garden to maintaining it.

Our small group worked steadily all morning. Some of us weeded. We have a minor problem in the dodecahedron bed with bindweed, a pernicious member of the Morning Glory family. Left unchecked, bindweed will wrap itself around the other plants in a bed, eventually killing them. It is particularly difficult to eradicate because of the deep root system that it establishes.

harvesting chamomile

While some struggled with bindweed, others watered. Susan led a group in harvesting chamomile flowers from the patches that sprung up in the back of the garden. We mowed down the taller grasses in the back using a weed whip. We trained pea tendrils along trellises. We replanted squash seeds and mulched beds with straw. We sifted compost taken from one of our larger bins and used it to mound our row of potato plants.

We did manage a small harvest of greens, herbs, flowers, and garlic and onion scapes. Our yield is still small enough to fit into a single bag strapped to the back of a bike.

potatoes

peas

When I lived in a small town in northern Benin as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I remember the period of a month or so in late spring, between the time when the last of the stored harvest of the prior year ran out and when the new harvests from the current year started to appear in the markets. It was a lean time of expensive canned food or buggy flour. Fortunately for us, we don’t have to subsist solely on the produce of our garden.

The last task in the garden was to remove a large branch from one of our plum trees. Our original motivation in pruning was to improve the health of the tree; however, we discovered that the removal of the branch allowed for more sunlight to reach some of the mounds in this year’s squash bed (20).

chamomile flowers

june 11 2011: packing problems

2011-06-18T23:23:00.000-05:00

On the morning of June 11, I approached the day’s plan with some anxiety. Entire beds were empty, their rows of earlier sown seeds stillborn, victims of poor watering and unseasonable chill. We seemed to be behind schedule. I voiced my concern to Dave, who diagnosed me with having the early season anxieties that beset almost all gardeners, even professional ones such as he. He thought that we had planned well enough, and then recommended that I coordinate the day’s planting of seedlings.

When I reviewed the flats that were arranged in the shade of the plum trees, I understood the reason for Dave’s confidence. There were at least two full flats of kale, three flats of peppers, a flat of basil, and another donation of tomato starts from Slow Food Chicago.

I started to lay out seed pots in the empty beds. As I have been doing with tomato starts, I arranged the pots of pepper and kale plants in a triangular grid pattern in the beds. Matrice and Ian next transplanted the starts to the beds and watered them in.

This year, we avoided mixing sweet and hot varieties of peppers. Most of our nearly four beds of peppers are of sweet varieties: Chocolate; Red and Orange Bell; Beaver Dam; and Bullnose. The hot varieties that we planted should be sufficient, though. We have a half-bed of rare Rooster Spurs, as well as a half-dozen Fatali peppers—with a heat rating range of 125,000-350,000, the sixth hottest pepper in the Periodic Table of Scoville Units.

We soon filled empty beds of stillborn spinach and mustard with kale and peppers. We wound up with a few stray pots of each. We also still had the tomatoes and basil to plant. I had a new anxiety: where to put the rest of our seedlings. Our packing problem was complicated by the need to respect the growing habits of the current occupants of beds. It would not, for example, make sense to plant kale starts in the dodecahedron bed, where they would be overtaken by the butternut squash.

We planted the remainder of the kale plants next to our bunching onions. The Fatalis went between rows of radishes and turnips in this year’s beet bed (14). We planted a tomato start in each space in the dodecahedron bed where a planting of Bloomsdale spinach had failed to germinate. We stuck a few tomatoes in large pots that we arranged at the feet of raised beds.

When we had finished, almost every bed in the garden had been planted. We kept a small section of bed 14 open for sweet potato slips that Dave Short is growing in his kitchen.

While we fit seedlings into available nooks, Dave made the first delivery of the season to Vital Bridges: radishes and herbs. When he returned, he and Annie removed flowers from the radish plants and weeded.

After all of the seedlings were in, we started to put up fences. Thinking that we were out of fencing, John and I went to the nearby Ace Hardware and purchased what turned out to be two surprisingly expensive lengths of chicken wire. It didn’t help that I later found two rolls of wire hidden in the ferns behind the shed.

june 4 2011: generosity

2011-06-14T22:48:00.000-05:00

Saturday, June 4, started hot and bright, and got hotter and brighter. As I biked to the garden along the lakeshore bike path, I sensed the gathering storm of aggressive and irritable hedonism that characterizes Chicago summers: the tramp stamp-flashing, backward baseball cap-wearing, street-meat-eating, sweaty and verdant fecundity of it all.

tending the potato row

In the garden, volunteers, including many from Chicago Cares, were already on the verge of swooning in the heat when I arrived. We kept a minor bucket brigade going, repeatedly filling our small filtering pitcher from the garden hose so that people could stay hydrated.

We found mysterious gifts in the shade of the plum trees. In addition to flats of pepper and basil starts whose orange “Ginko OG” labels revealed their origin in the seedlings that we started at the Kilbourn Organic Greenhouse, there was a flat filled with sturdy starts of varieties of tomatoes that were new to us. We later learned that these seedlings, almost all of heirloom varieties, were donations from Slow Food Chicago. Thanks in advance to Slow Food Chicago for the purple, blond, and peach tomatoes that we should start harvesting in a couple of months.

We busied ourselves with planting. We planted basil seedlings and sowed marigold and sunflower seeds between our new tomato starts. We also filled a bed with rows of beet seeds that had been soaked in water the night before.

The weather has been unsuitable for spinach: unseasonably cold, then brutally hot. Our bed of spinach was almost empty, with only a few spiky and bitter growths that I thought were spinach plants that had bolted really hard. I learned later that these plants were, in fact, dandelions. Spinach will have to wait until late summer.

We cut our day short because of the heat. A group of us then traveled to the Back of the Yards neighborhood to visit The Plant—an aquaponic/vertical garden/industrial repurposing/green incubator/wicked cool idea of tremendous scale. The Plant’s Director, John Edel, gave us a special tour, walking us around the property and conjuring visions of offices, kitchens, breweries, fisheries, and gardens from the piles of twisted industrial rubble and asphalted parking lots that currently exist at the former Peer Foods Building.

pepper seedlings

tomato bed map: beds 13 and 16

2011-05-31T22:22:00.000-05:00

Following are maps of the tomato varieties that we planted in beds 13 and 16.

may 28, 2011: quickening

2011-05-31T22:11:00.001-05:00

The second radish of the season. (I ate the first.)

There comes a time in each gardening season when things start to happen of their own accord. Seeds emerge from the muddy ground to strain against the row cover. The plants that we sow by choice begin to outnumber those that we remove.

The soil no longer seems to be a sink for our inputs of seed, water, labor, and concern. The semblance is, of course, only in our minds: our garden has not been dormant over the last few weeks, but occulted by topsoil. We have been impatient, weary of even the vestige of winter. We need to relax. (I need to relax.)

The day on which we transplant the first batch of tomato and pepper seedlings seems like the official start of a season, like the Memorial Day weekend during which the day occurred. On the annoyingly chilly Thursday evening before Memorial Day, Susan and Dave brought flats of starts from the greenhouse to the garden. We swaddled the seedlings in straw bales and row cover and hoped that they were still alive on Saturday.

transplanting tomatoes

The seedlings emerged unfrozen from our makeshift cold frame on Saturday morning. I arranged the small pots of peppers and tomatoes in the beds in triangular patterns. Before allowing the other volunteers to dig holes for the starts, I mapped the beds by variety, recording the location of each seedling so that we did not have to rely on scrawled markings on plastic tabs or chopsticks when it was time to save seeds for next season. (Did I mention that I needed to relax?)


planting peppers

While I completed the bed maps and worried about incipient OCD, the other volunteers dug holes deep enough so that the surface of the beds came just below the first true leaves of the seedlings. They filled the holes with water. After the soil had absorbed the water, the volunteers removed the seedlings from their pots and transferred them to the holes. Soil and more water followed the seedlings. We finished by mulching the beds with straw and surrounding them with chicken wire (or, more accurately, rabbit-fencing).

Katrina and April fence peas

We moved on to the beds that we had planted in prior weeks. We used branches newly pruned from our fruit trees as fence posts. We retrieved from storage the braided trunk of an old alley-abandoned ficus that we’ve used for the last few years as a fence post, driving the brittle stalk into the soil of the carrot bed and twist-tying it to a roll of rabbit-fencing. (Our appreciation for particular pieces of repurposed detritus approaches animism.)

Annie and Evelyn arranged paving stones in the dodecahedron bed, and planted mounds of butternut squash, radishes, and spinach between the pavers. The pavers always seem like a good idea at the beginning of the season, before they start to disappear into the loose soil of the bed.

oh hai u rly shld B working

While everyone else worked at the Garden, Dave biked out to Kilbourn Greenhouse to pot more seedlings. It is unclear how much potting he was able to accomplish.

pole beans

chives in bloom

garden map: may 28 2011

2011-05-29T19:15:00.001-05:00

may 21, 2011 - chamomile

2011-05-29T18:32:00.000-05:00

As has been the case for almost every workday this year, the morning of May 21 was overcast and unseasonably cool. The seeds in our beds seemed to be germinating slowly. The one crop that was obviously thriving was our infestation of chamomile, which threatened to overrun the back of the garden.

We differed in how best to control the chamomile. Some wanted to dig up the plants; others preferred to hand-mow the patch to within a few inches of the ground. In the end, we did a little of both. We tossed the chamomile trimmings into the compost bin, only to find them growing lustily in the bins the following week.

Those who were not tangling with chamomile performed other work around the garden. John installed screen at the back of the shed in an attempt to prevent wasps from building nests inside. John also patched the shed’s roof.

Volunteers weeded beds of flowers and vegetables, including a patch of coriander that had self-seeded in a bed that we had intended for collards.

We decided to plant a bed of beets, turnips, and radishes. We gathered our seed packets and read the planting instructions. This is when I learned that beet seeds should be soaked in water for at least 24 hours before being planted. We had missed that instruction last year—which may explain why we had such poor results. In the end, we planted a few rows of turnips and radishes.

The front garden was in the midst of a palette shift. The garden's first blooms in March and April are Virginia Bluebells. In May, the alliums and chives bloom, turning the garden purple. This year, there seem to be more dark red leaves of the Smoke Bush to form a ground for the purple flowers.

All of the colors in the garden seemed saturated, enhanced by the filtered light from the overcast skies.

may 14, 2011: ginkgo rhubarb marmalade

2011-05-29T16:49:00.001-05:00

fiddlehead fern

The drizzly chill of the morning did not discourage the group of volunteers that visited the garden on May 14—although we did need reminding that it was not, in fact, April.

We spent the day in tasks of preparation. We were glad to find that the City had reconnected the garden’s metal “buffalo box” to the municipal water supply. We pulled our hose from the shed and snaked it through the garden, running it from the reel in front of the shed to the connection near the street.

eventually, this will be soil

We weeded empty beds in anticipation of the seedlings that were still growing at Kilbourn. We pruned and tied back raspberry bushes. We turned compost. We weeded the perennial bed in which we grow rhubarb, sorrel, and lovage. (For some reason, a group of us can remember the names of only two of the plants in this bed at a time, so that it requires two people to identify all of the plants in the bed. Signs would probably help.)

rhubarb

We planted a few varieties of lettuce throughout the garden. We planted some of the lettuce between the mounds of summer squash that we had started the prior week. We might consider this an example of companion planting, in which we plant together species that have complementary growth habits. We should be able to harvest the quick-growing lettuce before the leaves of the slower-growing squash plants produce too much shade. It’s no Three Sisters, but it’s a start. We’ll need to do similar types of companion planting if we want to increase the yield from the garden.

planting lettuce between squash

We also planted lettuce in the bathtub. This is yet another attempt to make the tub serve some use other than to contribute to the garden’s junkyard motif. Last year’s try at growing potatoes in the tub was unsuccessful—although that may have been as much a result of the seed potatoes as the choice of planter.

Annie surprised us with marmalade that she had made using rhubarb from the garden. We opened a jar and spread the marmalade on bagels that Susan had brought.

Consuming a food that was made from produce of your garden is qualitatively different from consuming produce directly. To eat a green bean picked from the vine or a radish pulled from the earth is to live in the moment: to luxuriate in the season, heedless of the future.

It thought: here I am still, in my black suit, warm and content—and drew a little music from its dark thighs. As though the twilight under the refrigerator were the world. As though the winter would never come. —Mary Oliver, "The cricket did not actually seek..."

To eat a preserve or a relish made from something harvested earlier, on the other hand, is to consume evidence of forethought and delayed gratification. It is living chez la Fourmi au lieu de celle de la Cigale.

Thursday evenings are back

2011-05-25T20:30:00.000-05:00

Starting May 26, the Garden will be open from around 6:30 PM until it either gets too dark or we tire of weeding. Come out and dig up some purslane.

seedlings

2011-05-25T20:16:00.000-05:00

Kilbourn Organic Greenhouse

Around a month ago, we started seedlings that we hope will become this season’s crop of tomatoes, peppers, kale, and herbs. A couple of weeks later, Dave and I left the garden a bit early and biked across town to the Kilbourn Organic Greenhouse, where our seedlings grow until they are hardy enough to be transplanted into beds in the garden.

Our flats of seedlings, or starts, occupied a small space on a counter in the back of the greenhouse, dwarfed by the huge inventory of seedlings that Kilbourn was growing for its annual garden sale. Some of our tomato starts were “leggy”: having grown too quickly because of untimely exposure to heat, they were not yet strong enough to support the new length of their stems. Our peppers and kale, though, were upright and sturdy, even a little stubby—evidence of controlled and even growth.

We transplanted our starts from their tiny cells in the seedling flats to larger pots. Transplanting is delicate work: the soil around the seedlings is loose and can fall away to expose fragile roots, which risks shocking or even killing the seedling.

To protect a start during transplantation, we work with pointed sticks, or dibbles. We first push a dibble down into the cell near the stem of a seedling; using a combination of squeezing the cell’s walls from the outside and digging around the start with the dibble, we eventually ease it from its home.

We next prepare the start’s new home. After using the dibble to hollow out a cavity in the soil in a small pot, we align the dibble beside the start’s stem and guide the start into the soil ”like a lineman making way for the fullback”, according to Dave.

(Sporting similes are rare among the Ginkgo crowd. We occasionally hear the crowds roar at Wrigley, but we’re usually doing something else at the time, like staking tomatoes or spraying aphid soap on kale leaves.)

tubs of tempered water

After filling in the remainder of the pot’s cavity with soil, we add the pot to a flat. When a flat is full of small pots, we water it. As is every other activity involving seedlings, watering is a delicate activity. Pouring water directly over a start in a pot could either compact the soil around the start’s roots or—just as bad—wash soil away from the roots. There is also the chance that the water will not penetrate the soil down to the roots.

A better way to water seedlings is to submerge the entire flat of pots into a basin of water. The water wicks up from the bottom of the pot. When the soil at the top is moist, the pot is thoroughly irrigated. It is also good to use water that has been sitting around for some time. This “tempered water” won’t be so cold as to shock the seedlings; and if the water was drawn from a municipal tap, letting it sit allows some of the chlorine to vaporize. We avail ourselves of the tempered water that Kilbourn keeps in huge tubs next to its seed-watering stations.

Dave with Kilbourn's Kirsten Akre

Ours are truly coddled seedlings, thanks to the Kilbourn Organic Greenhouse: started in controlled conditions of heat and light; oxygenated by the breezes of air-circulating fans; and irrigated through capillary action using tempered water. All that they need to be like Kobe beef is to receive regular massages.

May 7, 2011

May 14, 2011

The idea of massaging seedlings seemed absurd until I read of the practice of brushing, in which one manipulates seedlings to encourage stronger stem growth. If we continue down this path, we’ll soon be wafting sage smoke in the greenhouse and playing Mozart to our tomato starts while performing tiny acts of horticultural Rolfing on them.

consider the cherry tree

2011-05-18T21:57:00.000-05:00

October 30, 2010

November 20, 20

Consider the cherry tree: thousands of blossoms create fruit for birds, humans, and other animals, in order that one pit might eventually fall onto the ground, take root, and grow.

Who would look at the ground littered with cherry blossoms and complain, "How inefficient and wasteful!" The tree makes copious blossoms and fruit without depleting its environment. Once they fall on the ground, their materials decompose and break down into nutrients that nourish microorganisms, insects, plant, animals, and soil.

March 21, 2011

April 30, 2011

Although the tree actually makes more of its "product" than it needs for its own success in an ecosystem, this abundance has evolved (through millions of years of success and failure, or in business terms, R&D), to serve rich and varied purposes. In fact, the tree's fecundity nourishes just about everything around it.

What might the human-built world look like if a cherry tree had produced it?

—William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

garden map, May 7, 2011

2011-05-10T22:04:00.000-05:00

The following image represents the state of the garden as of May 7, 2011. Crops in red are planned; crops in light green and black have been planted.

A Planting We Will Go

2011-05-09T20:45:00.004-05:00

A cloudy morning did not stop more planting at Ginkgo on our first Saturday in May. A solid group of new and returning volunteers sprinkled wildflower seeds in the front beds along the sidewalk while Dave, Annie, Susan, and Alan sketched out our morning plans. We will be looking for marigolds, alyssums, sunflowers, and more in the upcoming weeks!

weeding and seeding the flower beds in front

The potatoes and turnips sowed the week before received some TLC next. John planted more alyssum flowers around the potato plants to naturally ward off any Colorado potato beetles. Rounds of watering the seedlings followed. Many thanks to our rain barrel for stepping up while our hose remains out of commission for a few more weeks!

planting pea seeds

Cucumbers, beans, squash, and peas were next on the agenda. First, teams split up to weed and set up trellises for our spindling plants. Through a collaborative group effort, new seeds were sown before any rain could fall.

planting pole bean seeds

planting summer squash seeds in mounds


Cosimo was good at pruning and charged little.											- Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

Our fruit trees were not left neglected this weekend either. Dave climbed up our pear tree with ease to prune vertical branches that will not bear fruit.

Its white blossoms are open and have us crossing our fingers for a bountiful fruit harvest this year from all of our trees!

three weekends in April

2011-04-24T00:08:00.014-05:00

Julie and Nick pull up kale stalks

The morning of April 2 started cool and overcast, with clouds that eventually made good on their threats to rain on the trio of us that gathered at the garden to prepare the garden for spring. Julie, Nick, and I cleared the kale beds of old stalks, removed wire fencing, and picked up trash.

Meanwhile, a few miles to the west of the garden, Dave Snyder started our seedlings in the greenhouse at Kilbourn Organic Garden. Kilbourn grants us greenhouse space each spring, so garden volunteers do not have to crowd narrow apartment windowsills with precariously balanced rows of pots of seedlings.

April 9 was the first volunteer day of the season. A group from Chicago Cares joined us, as did a group from DePaul Oxfam. At one point, I counted twenty-six people in the garden, all of who looked to us for instructions.

Doug and Ben

During the winter, the small group of volunteers that (for want of a better term) refers to itself as the garden’s “steering committee” agreed to define formally three positions that would need to be filled each Saturday workday. The positions would rotate among the steering committee members so that we wouldn’t tire of them. I once described the positions as the Lover, the Foreman, and the Driver; word-besotted folk that most of us are, though, we already have a number of alternate names.

The Lover, or Der Spielmacher, serves as the guide to the garden and to gardening, giving the Ginkgo spiel to new volunteers—what the garden is, how it works, who it helps, what our yield is, etc. Aside from welcoming volunteers, the Spielmacher’s responsibilities teaching volunteers how to perform tasks like staking tomatoes and weeding correctly, as well as wearing the floppy garden hat and helping people to enjoy what they’re doing.

Spielmacher Dave and the April 2 volunteer crew

While the Spielmacher is helping volunteers grok the garden, the Foreman is running crews. The Foreman prepares the list of the day’s objectives and assigns groups of volunteers. The Foreman also maintains what little discipline we need, asking people to walk around instead of in the beds, pick up tools, etc.

pulling up last year's wildf

We won’t need someone to be a Driver for a few weeks. When we start harvesting, though, one of us will assume the responsibility of packing and delivery of produce to the pantry. The Driver winds up serving the additional role of liaison between the garden and the pantry.

On April 9, Dave Snyder was the Speilmacher and I acted as Foreman. Our volunteer group raked leaves, weeded beds, organized the shed, and cleaned up the garden. Because we had so many people, we needed only a couple of hours to make the garden neat and ready for the season.

raking in the front garden

weeding the dodecahedron

Stephanie's lemon cupcakes in their special purpose cupcake holder

On April 16, Susan and Evelyn worked with a group of eight volunteers. Sue summarized the day’s work in an email:

We did some more cleaning and weeding, smoothed out a big hump of compacted soil that I've tripped on right by the shed (it was a big job!), inventoried tools (to facilitate tool return at the end of the workdays....) and shelled various leftover seed pods in the shed to prepare for the new plantings.

The following Saturday, April 23, Dave led volunteers in unearthing the fig trees that we buried last fall to spend the winter underground. The figs look spindly right now after their hibernation, but should soon recover. One of the saplings produced small fruits last fall, so we might even be able to harvest figs this year.

good neighbors fix bad fences

2011-04-18T21:50:00.000-05:00

In late March, I visited the garden after an absence of a few weeks to see how it had weathered the end of winter. In addition to stray bits of windblown trash and the desiccated stalks of last season’s kale plants, I discovered a plastic bin full of branches that we had left uncovered over the winter. The malodorous ferment of snowmelt and rotting vegetation inside was a pungent reminder of the need to store buckets upside down at the end of autumn.

not the branch water I prefer

Usually, a few fetid buckets of sludgy compost are the worst of what awaits me in spring. This year, though, I found that a section of the garden fence had collapsed over the winter, probably as the result of the heavy snowfalls that we experienced in January. The extent of the damage to the fence was not apparent until the snow melted; when it finally receded, the snow revealed a serious problem. A six-foot section had ripped away from its supporting posts and completely separated from the rest of the fence. Only the gate to the neighboring property’s fence protected our garden from someone being able to walk in from the alley.

fallen fence section

After volleys of emails, we found someone to help. Chris Salus, the brother of Eric Salus, one of Ginkgo’s founders, agreed to look at the fence and see what he could do. Chris wound up fixing the entire thing himself over the next couple of weeks, working during on his days off from his job as a fireman.

repairs after first week

Chris told us that the fence posts, constructed of cedar instead of pine, had rotted; what’s more, they had not been set in concrete. Chris set the posts in concrete and reattached the fence section with longer screws.

repaired fence

Thanks to Chris’s efforts, our fence is now whole again. We can turn our focus to the 2011 growing season.

winter

2011-01-13T23:05:00.000-06:00

In the depth of winter, I crunch through dirty snow on the way to work and wince at the bleeding cracks in my knuckles. I use “deliverables” to refer to pieces of paper instead of boxes of tomatoes. I catch myself describing other people as “resources”. I paint my bathroom and stream Netflix and nurse single malts and peruse seed manuals.

Once a week or so, I set all of that aside and visit the dormant garden. I curse and yank and bang on the frozen lock until it opens. I deposit a few scraps in the compost bin (my ambitions to set up winter composting were thwarted by the frigid weeks of December) and walk around the empty beds, following the tracks of rabbits and squirrels in the snow.

I am not melancholy, nor do I pine for summer: to everything its season. I do, however, enjoy visiting the garden in winter and performing little tasks that maintain my connection to this plot of land. I pick up trash and gather up pots that have been blown around. I inspect the fruit trees. I stand on the small porch and think about projects for next year. Then I lock everything up and return home.

final results for 2010 and yield comparisons

2010-12-11T23:56:00.005-06:00

The garden is an unhappy place for a perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing that we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe….It’s easy to get discouraged, unless…you are happier to garden in time rather than in space; unless, that is, your heart is in the verb.

—Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education

While scratching the start of my winter beard, I read Pollan and remember the 2010 season of the Ginkgo Organic Gardens. My memory is aided by the analysis that I recently completed of the garden’s yield, and which I now share.

2010 featured bumper crops of tomatoes, collards, and cucumbers, surprising harvests of potatoes, but poor yields of tree fruits, beets, and spinach. It was the first year of human-powered delivery and fig trees. It was a year relatively free of impediments such as powdery mildew and aphids, but pestered with crop failures. The year’s yield was higher than that of 2008, but lower than that of 2009.

Method

Ginkgo volunteers respect data. We might occasionally hang an unscraped hoe in the shed; we may leave stray tomatoes to rot on the weighing table; but we never fail to record the results of each weekend’s harvest in our garden log.

This year, I decided to analyze the harvest data with three objectives:

to compare the season’s yield with that of the years for which I had readily available data
to describe the changing composition of our harvests
to estimate the dollar value of what we donated

Yield Graphs

The following graphs compare the yields of various classes of produce throughout the growing seasons of 2008, 2009, and 2010. Each growing season is described with two charts: a bar chart that shows the yield for each week of the year, and a line chart that tracks the cumulative yield to date. Yields are in pounds.

Total Yield

The total yield for 2010 was 1291 pounds—enough to where we can continue to describe ourselves as a “half ton garden”, and more than 2008’s yield of 1141 pounds, but much less than 2009’s yield of 1607 pounds, which we now recognize as possibly being a record.

Vegetables

Although tomatoes are botanically a fruit, I included them as vegetables in the analysis. Regardless of how I class tomatoes, we grew a lot of them in 2010: 377 pounds, 75 pounds of which we harvested in one weekend. We also grew 172 pounds of cucumbers and 150 pounds of collards, more than we had grown in the prior two years. On the other hand, our yield of 33 pounds of green beans was a third of that of 2009—when, because of the One Seed Chicago campaign, we were awash in free packets of Blue Lake Pole Bean seeds, which proved to be prolific that year, but not in 2010. Our relatively low yield of 44 pounds of sweet peppers resulted from a decision to plant fewer beds of peppers than tomatoes. Our 2010 yield was also lower than that of 2009 both because of failures of spinach and beet crops and because we decided, after two years of battling powdery mildew and cutworms, not to grow winter squash.

The following stacked bar graphs compare the composition of vegetable crops for the last three years. The graphs are dense because of the number of crops that we grew, but certain trends are evident, such as the relative contributions of tomatoes, collards, and cucumbers to our yields.

Fruits

2010’s yield of fruit was 68 pounds—a little more than the 59 pounds from 2008, but only 40% of 2009’s yield of 153 pounds. Most of the difference between the yields of 2010 and 2009 can be attributed to 2009’s bumper crop of plums—64 pounds, of which 60 pounds we shook out of the trees in one weekend. In contrast, we only obtained 6 pounds of plums in 2010. Although the plum trees appeared to promise another great harvest for 2010, we lost most of the fruit to high winds in late spring and early summer. The apple trees yielded almost no fruit this year (in fact, almost every apple that survived theft and windfall is featured somewhere in the blog), nor we did get much from our grape vines.

Herbs

Our 2010 yield of 25 pounds is only 3 pounds less than that of 2009. We had slightly less success with basil this year, but slightly more success with sage.

Estimated monetary value

How much would our produce have fetched if we had sold it instead of donated it? Or as I prefer to ask: how much would clients of the Vital Bridges pantry have had to pay to obtain produce of quality comparable to what Ginkgo offered?

To arrive at an estimate, I used prices for produce that I recorded at the Whole Foods at 3640 N. Halsted during a visit on December 4, 2010. I used prices for what I deemed to be representative organic equivalents to our produce when possible. Although Ginkgo is not a USDA certified organic garden, I think that our produce would compare favorably in both purity and quality to vegetables from certified growers, so I feel justified in using prices for certified organic produce in my estimate. For produce for which I could not find an equivalent at Whole Foods, I used what appeared to be the default unit price of $2.49/lb.

Because the bulk of our produce was in tomatoes, the price that I used for equivalent Whole Foods tomatoes affects the estimate greatly. On the day of my visit, the Whole Foods did not have organic heirloom tomatoes; however, it did offer both heirloom tomatoes and organic grape tomatoes, so I used a price that was the average of the two.

Based on the Whole Foods prices for equivalent produce, the monetary value of the vegetables, fruits, and herbs that the Ginkgo Organic Gardens grew in 2010 was $4188.00.

Crop	2010 yield (lb)	Whole Foods Equivalent	$/lb (Dec 4 2010)	Total (2010)
Arugula	0	n/a		$-
Beans - Green & Yellow	32.75	green beans	$2.49	$81.55
Beans - Fava, Flat Italian	0	n/a		$-
Beets	19.75	organic gold	$2.49	$49.18
Cabbage	10	organic	$1.49	$14.90
Carrots	26	organic bulk	$0.99	$25.74
Collards	149.5	not in store; using equivalent	$2.49	$372.26
Cucumbers	171.65	organic	$1.99	$341.58
Eggplant	0	n/a		$-
Kale	58.2	organic green leaf	$2.49	$144.92
Lettuce - Leaf/Head	3.5	packaged mixed baby greens	$7.96	$27.86
Lovage	0.75	not in store; using equivalent	$2.49	$1.87
Mushrooms	0	n/a		$-
Mustard greens	0.25	not in store; using equivalent	$2.49	$0.62
Onions	0	n/a		$-
Peas - Snap/Snowpeas	11	conventional	$3.99	$43.89
Peppers - Hot	11.25	jalapeno - conventional?	$2.99	$33.64
Peppers - Sweet	44.25	organic - average of green and red	$3.84	$169.92
Potatoes - White	62.25	organic white	$1.99	$123.88
Potatoes - Sweet	15	yams - conventional?	$1.69	$25.35
Pumpkin	0	n/a		$-
Radish - Daikon	5	organic	$1.99	$9.95
Radish - Red	19.5	organic	$4.00	$78.00
Scallions	0.85	not in store; using chives	$3.99	$3.39
Sorrel	1.75	not in store; using equivalent	$2.49	$4.36
Spinach	0.5	organic baby	$5.99	$3.00
Squash - Acorn / Fall	0	n/a		$-
Squash - Summer	50.25	organic	$1.99	$100.00
Squash - Zucchini	19	organic	$2.49	$47.31
Swiss Chard	60.5	organic red	$2.49	$150.65
Tomatoes	376.5	average of conventional heirloom and organic grape	$4.99	$1,878.74
Tomatillo	15.75		$1.99	$31.34
Turnips w/ greens	28	organic	$2.49	$69.72

Apples	0	n/a
Grapes	0	n/a
Gooseberries	1.5	not in store
Pears	45	organic Bartlett	$2.49	$112.05
Plums	6.25	not in store; use pears	$2.49	$15.56
Raspberries	15.5		$9.33	$144.67

Basil	4.1	packaged organic	$3.32	$13.61
Chives	7.65	packaged organic	$3.32	$25.40
Dill	0.1	packaged organic	$3.32	$0.33
Garlic / Garlic scapes	1.35	packaged organic	$3.32	$4.48
Marjoram	0	packaged organic	$3.32	$-
Mint	3.3	packaged organic	$3.32	$10.96
Oregano	3.05	packaged organic	$3.32	$10.13
Parsley	0.1	packaged organic	$3.32	$0.33
Rosemary	0.4	packaged organic	$3.32	$1.33
Sage	3.45	packaged organic	$3.32	$11.45
Tarragon	1.05	packaged organic	$3.32	$3.49
Thyme	0.1	packaged organic	$3.32	$0.33

TOTAL				$4,187.70

november 20, 2010 – sharpening day

2010-11-28T21:13:00.001-06:00

On November 20, a small group of us arrived to a garden mostly empty of plants. We had not come to tend to the remaining collards and kales that struggled to survive in the cold, but to tools that were rusty, stiff, dinged, and dull.

We brought our tools out from the shed. A couple of us scoured rust and dirt from clippers and loppers with steel wool. We sharpened the cutting edges of the tools with a sharpening stone and honing oil. Others filed nicks from the blades of shovels and hoes. We sharpened machetes and knives. Finally, we coated blades and hinges with WD-40 and stored tools away for the winter.

While we worked on tools, Susan cleaned up in the front. She raked ginkgo leaves into a pile, only to encounter a father and child jumping into the pile when she returned with a wheelbarrow. She reraked the leaves and brought them into the garden, depositing them next to a pile of older leaves in an impromptu Goldsworthy sculpture.

Before leaving for the day, I collected the seeds that we had saved over the season, paying special attention to the heirloom tomato seeds. A couple of months ago, Evelyn finished cleaning and drying tomato seeds, storing them in small plastic containers that takeout restaurants use to store sauces.

The image illustrates one of the problems of this season—our difficulties in identifying tomatoes late in the season. We labeled our tomato starts when we transplanted them to the raised bed in spring; however, the growing plants obscured the labels, and rainwater eventually washed away the writing. When it was time to identify tomato varieties for seed, we wound up guessing. Next year, we plan to map where we plant our tomatoes so that we do not have to rely on written labels.

november 13, 2010 – putting the figs to bed

2010-11-28T19:23:00.000-06:00

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don’t remember summer even saying good-bye. —David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Back in May, I mistakenly identified the species of fig that we planted. Although I don’t know which species we did plant, I now know that it definitely was not Ficus carica. Because our figs are decidedly un-hardy, we need to protect them from harsh Chicago winters.

This weekend, we prepared our fig saplings for winter. Dave and Michael dug shallow trenches that were a little longer than the trees were tall. Michael had a harder time of it because we did not pre-dig a trench for the larger fig when we initially planted it. While Michael dug his trench, Dave and I cut a 4-foot square of plyboard into two rectangular pieces.

Dave and Michael next wrapped the bottoms of the saplings with burlap. They bent the wrapped trees down so that they lay in the shallow trenches. We then covered the trees in their trenches with plyboard and then dirt. Finally, we marked the trench edges with wooden stakes.

The trench keeps the saplings oxygenated and surrounded by insulating soil so that the trees will survive the winter protected from wind. The plyboard protects the trees from being crushed by snow or the careless walker.

Dave explained that we’ll be able to use this method with our figs for at least 5 years. When the trunks become too rigid to bend, we can cut them back and start over with one of the tree’s suckers.

november 6, 2010 – the unseemly sweet potato

2010-11-28T18:44:00.002-06:00

frost-damaged pole bean plants

Since mid-October, we have arrived each Saturday morning wondering whether it would be the last one of the season. The unseasonable warmth of the last few weeks led us to hope that we might be able to extend the growing year farther into November than usual. We started talking about measures such as hoop houses for our collards.

Nature and the City put a stop to all of that thinking. Nature’s kibosh came in the form of a freeze on Friday night. Even though Saturday was relatively warm, the damage from the freeze was obvious, and obviously permanent—wilted stalks, soupy leaves.

the party's over

The City weighed in by disconnecting our water: as public land, the property that houses Ginkgo Organic Gardens is subject to the annual water schedule of the City’s parks. With our frost-damaged plants and the loss of reliable water, we decided that it was time to pull up all plants but the collards and kale (which actually benefit from frost).

We were fortunate in that it was also a Chicago Cares day, so there were plenty of people to clear the beds. We stripped the tomato and pepper plants of all fruit (even the green ones) and composted the rest. We pulled up all of the radishes and harvested the small heads that had been growing from the central stalks of our cabbage plants.

We felt like scavengers, shaking down dying plants for meager remains, until we started digging in the sweet potato bed. Our harvest of 15 pounds was much better than we had hoped. It was especially gratifying to obtain such a yield when we remembered that all of our sweet potato plants came from slips that Dave Short had started in jars of water in his kitchen.

the USP

At least 3 pounds of sweet potato was contained in one unnatural-looking root that was large to feed a family all by itself. It was a bulbous and veiny and—frankly—testicular-looking tuber. It was an unseemly sweet potato.

I bundled the USP with the rest of the produce and biked everything to the Vital Bridges pantry. As I have for almost every weekend since the end of spring, I arranged the produce in baskets on a metal cart that I wheeled out to the waiting area of the pantry. I chatted with the volunteers and pantry clients and urged someone to take the scary-looking growth that was the centerpiece of the day’s offering.

It was only when I started collecting the plastic tubs for the return to the garden that I understood that this would be our last delivery to the pantry for at least six months. I was saddened to realize that although Ginkgo’s work with the pantry was over for this year, people would continue to need fresh vegetables and fruit. The limitations of our efforts became humblingly apparent.

I returned to the garden to find the beds stripped and the compost bins overflowing. Today had been the last harvest. The growing season of 2010 was over. It was time to focus efforts on preparing the garden for the winter ahead, and to start planning for 2011.

october 30 and 31, 2010 – Halloween weekend

2010-11-28T15:26:00.002-06:00

The Saturday before Halloween was dry, and warm enough that you could get away with wearing a sweatshirt and no hat, if you still wanted to deny the end of summer. The fronds of the fern bed had died away to reveal the logs that we had seeded with shiitake spores in the spring and then forgotten.

We were able to eke a few more pounds of produce out of the garden. The last crop of radishes popped up from the raised bed, ready to be picked; our stalwart collards and kale continued to yield; and we managed almost 10 pounds of tomatoes—though some were on the edge of being too mealy to eat. We could just see the tops of our sweet potatoes pushing up through the ground: we decided to wait another week or so before harvesting them.

While I delivered the harvest to the pantry, the other volunteers prepared the garden for Halloween. For the last few years, we have participated in the Halloween festivities of the Buena Park neighborhood where the garden is located. We usually decorate the front garden with a scarecrow or two and hand out treats to passing children.

This year, we fashioned our scarecrow out of a suit of old clothing stuffed with leaves and draped over one of our garden signs. We used the seed head of one of our giant sunflowers for the scarecrow’s head and its stalk for arms. The seedy face of our scarecrow reminded me of a Green Man or John Barleycorn.

To accompany our scarecrow, we hung from the trees ghosts made from ragged sheets of row cover bound with gardening twine around piles of autumn leaves. The garden started to look disconcerting, if not actually spooky.

The following day, we set up our table in the front garden, stocking it with candy and hot cider. Many of the volunteers arrived in costume. Dave (disguised as The World’s Largest Garden Gnome) roasted chestnuts on the garden Weber. The DePaul Oxfam team handed out candy to a parade of costumed trick-or-treaters and dispensed hot cider to parents who took a breather from chasing after garbed children and asking, “Now what do you say?”

It was one of those evenings that reminded us of the value of being a community garden.

october 23, 2010 – end of a streak

2010-11-28T13:01:00.002-06:00

It rained on Saturday, October 23, 2010—both in Chicago at the garden and in Wisconsin where I was on vacation. Dave was also out of town, and Annie was out sick; so no one was around to use a bike trailer to transport the day’s harvest to the Vital Bridges pantry. Susan delivered the garden’s produce in her car.

The following weekend, Susan broke the news to me that we broke the streak of delivering by bike that we had maintained since the beginning of the growing season.

“At least it was with a Prius”, Sue said.

In retrospect, I think that it was for the best that we made at least one delivery by car. A perfect streak of bike delivery would only have provided fodder for a sanctimony that we strive to avoid.

One thing that I enjoy about working at Ginkgo is that we try to follow our principles without being needlessly doctrinaire. We believe in organic agriculture, and we use organic methods as much as is practicable—but we don’t interrogate every orange peel and lettuce core that might make its way into one of our compost bins. We save our own seeds and purchase heirloom varieties whenever possible—but we will also pick up a few conventional eggplant starts if they go on sale at Gethsemane. We keep our carbon costs down by using bike trailers for deliveries—but we delivered by car for years, and will again when necessary. We try not to let the ideal get in the way of the good.

In 2010 Ginkgo Organic Gardens delivered over 1200 pounds of fruits and vegetables, of which all but around 50 pounds was delivered by human power. We’re all pretty happy about that.

october 16, 2010 – cover crop and new gloves

2010-11-28T12:09:00.001-06:00

After a late start on October 16, 2010, I did not arrive at the garden until almost 11:00 AM. The other volunteers had just finished packing and weighing the harvest, so I turned around and headed back north, towards the pantry.

When I returned to the garden, the others were busy preparing beds for winter. Unfortunately, we ran out of cover crop seed midway through one of the beds. We probably overseeded the dodecahedron bed in our concern over its rehabilitation. We agreed to wait until early spring to plant more cover crop, as it would probably be too cold for any seed that we ordered now to germinate by winter.

Evelyn surprised us with a dozen new pairs of latex-dipped canvas gardening gloves. Our current inventory of gloves had become threadbare and mildewed, so the new gloves were welcome.

october 9, 2010 - spa day

2010-11-21T21:27:00.001-06:00

Some of the tomato plants have not yet received the memo about fall.

October 9 was unseasonably warm. The combination of the clear, angled light of autumn and the warmth of early summer was exhilarating. People spilled outside, wearing the light clothing that they had yet to pack away: pleasantly betwixt, taking nothing for granted.

A large number of volunteers visited the garden on this morning. A group from Chicago Cares joined our regular group of DePaul volunteers. With so many willing workers around, the garden enjoyed the horticultural equivalent of a spa day: a full mani/pedi, facial, seaweed wrap—and even a little Rolfing.

The harvest took little time to collect, weigh, and package. I delivered our produce to the pantry, dazzled by stark combinations of gold and azure along the bike path.

The other volunteers threw themselves into a variety of gardening tasks. Some worked on the beds in which we grew this year’s crop of carrots, squash, and eggplant, composting spent plants and turning the soil with our large garden fork. Some saved seeds from daikon radishes, while others thinned seedlings from our final crop of French Breakfast radishes.

The soil in the northeast corner of the carrot bed did not yield easily to the fork.

Saving daikon seed can be tedious-even with cookies.

Plastic kitty-litter boxes make for surprisingly good weeding buckets.

We were surprised this year by the growth of one of our young fig trees, especially when the sapling bore fruit. The fruit appeared too late in the season, so we were unable to harvest them. Dave explained that a fig fruit is actually a modified flower cluster called an inflorescence. We cut open one of the fruit/stems and examined the tiny flowers that lined the inner chamber.

Cross section of pre-Newtonian fig, showing peduncular tissue surrounding stamens. It's not every day that one gets to make a physics joke in a botanical note--probably a good thing. It's probably also good not to have many occasions to use the word "peduncular".

october 2, 2010 - sexing the squash flower

2010-10-28T21:00:00.001-05:00

After the warmth and sunshine of the previous weekend, the overcast and windy morning of October 2 threatened to be dispiriting. The garden initially appeared drab, but eventually yielded color to the determined eye.

Almost all of our plants were still producing. The volunteers and clients at the pantry are surprised that we can still bring them tomatoes and peppers. We gardeners are surprised at the number of green beans that we continue to harvest, from plants that were established almost as an afterthought in a bed from which we had removed earlier plants mid-season.

While I delivered the delivery, other volunteers prepared the garden for high winds that were predicted later in the day. Later, while Michael turned our compost beds, Susan led the other volunteers in stringing up herbs to dry in the garden shed. In a few weeks, we’ll stem and crush the dried sage and oregano leaves. If we are ambitious enough, we might even make little bouquets garni to donate to the pantry.

It is usually easier to turn the compost if you're standing in the bin.

When I returned, the others were ready to call it a day. Dee asked whether she could take home some of the flowers from our squash bed. When I mentioned that I thought that we might still get a few more squash before we had to pull up the bed for winter, Dee replied that she only planned to take the male flowers. This was how I learned that squash flowers are gendered: the female flowers are the ones with the bulbs that become the squash fruit.

Male squash blossom

Female squash blossom. The smaller bulb at the base
of the flower will become the squash.

sept 25 2010 - baby Ben makes a visit

2010-10-24T18:09:00.000-05:00

September 25, 2010 started bright, clear, and unseasonably warm—a giddy resumption of summer. If it wasn’t for unavoidable reminders of the actual season, like the bed of dead cucumber plants, you could almost imagine that summer was not yet over.

The vegetable plants even seemed fooled: carrots pushed up out of their bed, chard glimmered in the sunlight, and a line of radish seedlings wandered across the soil.

Doug and Debbie surprised us by bringing their newborn son to the garden. Many of us downed tools and gathered round to greet little Ben.

While some of us dandled, others speculated as to what Doug read to Ben while he was still in utero: A Sand County Almanac? Doug’s PhD thesis?

Eventually, we returned to harvesting and packing: Ben was too young to notice Dave’s beard, so there was not going to be any the hair-grabbing entertainment. (There will be plenty of time for that later.)

Doug then brought out his other garden delivery: a large bag of mixed seed for our green manure cover crop. A couple of weeks previously, Doug had measured the area of the raised beds to determine the amount of seed to purchase.

At a point towards the end of each growing season, we usually have to decide when to stop harvesting crops and pull plants from the beds so that we can start the winter cover crop. It is a question of timing for us: the longer we wait, the greater our harvest yield; however, if we wait too late, until after the City turns off our water connection, we may not have enough time to establish our cover crop before winter comes. Although the crops resume growth as soon as the snows clear in the early spring, we still need to give them sufficient time to amend the soil.

Our timing quandary applies this year to all beds but the dodecahedron—the bed in the back of the garden where we tried to grow beets and green beans this year. As mentioned previously, because of numerous crop failures in that bed this season, we decided to start resting and amending it early. A few weeks previously, we cultivated the bed with our garden fork and applied various amendments, including kelp meal. Although we can’t vouch for whether the kelp meal actually had the “mystical powers” that its container purported, we do hope that it will add minerals and other nutrient to the depleted soil of the dodecahedron bed.

While I made the delivery, other volunteers pulled up the cucumber bed and sowed much of the cover crop seed. We will continue to sow the cover crop as we pull up the plants in the other beds, protecting the seeds from pigeons using row cover.

sept 18 2010 - volontiers

2010-10-24T12:58:00.002-05:00

We employ a variety of definitions of volunteer in the garden—often simultaneously.

One definition is horticultural: a volunteer plant is one that establishes itself in an area independent of human agency. Urban foresters, for example, may characterize trees such as alder, sumac, or ailanthus as volunteers that colonize vacant lots in advance of larger trees like oaks and maples. On a smaller scale, volunteer fruits and flowers pop up in unattended parts of yards or gardens. Seeded by wind and birds and sprouting in beneficial neglect, they grow until they attract the attention of a gardener, who will then decide their fate: to pull them up, to leave them alone, or to encourage them.

Whether a volunteer plant is an invasive (like many mustards), a weed like bindweed or pigweed, or a fortuitous crop is often a matter of opinion. For example, purslane is a weed to many, but a prized wild food to others. The pleasure that some take in morning glory is countered by the anxiety of other gardeners, who see it as a pest.

Our garden hosts a variety of volunteer plants. Some are harmful, such as the bindweed that can choke our bean plants in the early summer. Some volunteers, like purslane, are innocuous, but still unwelcome, plants that compete with vegetables for nutrients in our raised beds. Plants such as ornamental amaranth can be unlucky volunteers, migrating to the raised beds via seeds from our compost bin: in the right place, they would be allowed to thrive; in a tomato bed, however, they are destined for a return to the bin.

Other volunteers are encouraged, especially in certain parts of the garden.


Ground cherry and Walking Onion

The flowerbeds immediately inside the entrance to the garden, as well as around the base of our flowering cherry tree at the garden’s center, can be horticultural grab bags. From year to year, we are not certain what will appear, in addition to (or in spite of) what we plant with intent. Among our carefully nurtured seedlings of Nigella and Cosmos and sprigs of sedum, we will discover new arrivals of Wandering Buttercup or strange stalks of Walking Onion. This year, the flower beds produced growths of what we think is ground cherry, a relative of tomatillo, as well as a profusion of white, aster-like flowers.

Our most welcome volunteer plants, though, are the cherry tomato plants that spring up along the edges of the garden. These plants are hardy, starting in piles of soil from fallen fruit; working their way through holes in the weed barrier. Sometimes, these rogue plants bear fruit before their bedded companions; in at least one season, tomatoes from volunteers were the last that we harvested. These plants can cheer us when we encounter setbacks like crop failure: at least we grew something, even if all we did was stay out the way.

Another use of volunteer—for me, at least—is personal and tangential, because it is from another language, and not quite cognate: more of a bilingual pun. The French word volontiers, which shares Latin origins with the English volunteer, means “willingly or gladly”. It is used in French much in the way that people currently use “absolutely” in English (at least in Chicago): as an enthusiastically positive response to a request.

An appreciation of such enthusiasm leads to our third, and most common, definition of volunteer: a person who willingly contributes labor to an enterprise without expectation of material compensation. Like surprising blooms, people arrive at the garden each Saturday to help: willing to work for hours in all kinds of weather, tending a garden that is on public property instead of part of their private homes; planting and harvesting produce that they themselves will not consume. Some volunteers only work for a few weekends before moving on; others become perennial. For over sixteen years, there have always been a few people in the garden on Saturdays and Thursdays between Easter and Thanksgiving.

Saturday, September 18, 2010 was no exception. On this day, two groups of volunteers came to help: a group from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago joined our regular helpers from DePaul. The rain was steady that morning, and our paltry collection of ponchos did not provide sufficient protection; however, it was a warm day, and the volunteers did not seem to mind getting wet.

The peppers and tomatoes seemed to glow under the gray skies, and the rain meant that we did not need to worry about washing the collard leaves.

After we finished the harvest, I asked the volunteers to gather and pose for our regular parody of American Gothic—to which they complied volontiers.

Sept 11 2010 - of tree personality and produce labels

2010-10-23T16:12:00.002-05:00

The rain that fell at the start of the garden workday on Saturday, September 11, 2010, did not deter a committed group of volunteers from Chicago Cares from the harvest. Volunteers plunged into dripping tomato bushes to harvest fruit—including the jungle of younger plants in one of the replanted beds that serve as unruly examples of why it is important to stake indeterminate varieties.

The garden still yields a surprising diversity of vegetables and herbs—though the diminishing harvest, collected under cloudy skies, can engender a certain melancholy as we think of the gardenless and gray winter Saturdays to come.

The previous weekend, I lost the fitted cover for the bike trailer during my return to the garden from the pantry. I now use an old shower curtain to secure the produce. With its towering cargo of tulip bins shrouded in vinyl sheeting, the trailer resembles a mini Puppet Bike.

I took the trailer to the Lake Shore Bike Path. Near the intersection of the path with Wilson Avenue, I noticed that a maple tree was already starting to show its fall colors—the earliest that I had seen in the area. I have long been intrigued at what causes a particular tree to move to its fall phase. It is not just that different species of tree, or even different cultivars of species, change at different times; the start of autumnal change seems to depend on individual trees. I once watched one locust tree across the street from my office change from green to gold three weeks before its virtually identical neighbor, only a few feet away, started its transformation.

What causes one tree to change its colors weeks before a nearby tree of the same species does? Is it the extremely local combination of soil condition, wind pattern, or angle of sun that determines when a tree initiates the withdrawal of chlorophyll from its leaves? Is a tree’s time of change the interaction of the tree’s chromosomes and its local environment? Or does a tree have something akin to a personality that decides when to change? And if a tree has something like a personality, what about other plants, like tomatoes or squash? On the other hand, how much of what we consider personality is really a product of the mind? How many of my own nominally volitional acts are really just expressions of genotype moderated by environment?

It is a fairly long ride from the garden to the pantry, especially when pulling a loaded trailer. I pass the time pondering questions like whether maples and tomatoes have personalities.

At the pantry, we remembered to label the baskets. A few months ago, Aurelia, a member of another group of Chicago Cares volunteers who works at the pantry*, prepared a set of laminated cards that we could use to label our produce. The labels are a nice touch: they help our cart of produce in baskets look even more like a stall in a farmer’s market, lending dignity to what can sometimes be a distressing interaction.

*When events on the Chicago Cares volunteer calendar coincide, I will sometimes leave one group of Chicago Cares volunteers helping in the garden to find another group helping at the pantry.

September 4

2010-10-03T22:29:00.000-05:00

The feel of a workday in the garden depends on who arrives to help. The garden depends on volunteer labor, and benefits greatly when large groups join the harvest. We enjoy introducing new volunteers to the tasks and pleasures of gardening: how to harvest collards, being sure to leave a few photosynthesizing leaves so that the plant will continue to thrive; how to remove green bean pods so as not to damage plants; how to stake tomatoes. As I am aware that almost everything that I know about gardening I learned from another volunteer, I am always happy to instruct someone else.

Although an important part of our work, such instruction can be stressful, especially when we’re pressed for time. We like to complete the harvesting, weighing, and packing before 11:00 or so, so that we can still deliver to the Vital Bridges pantry before noon: if we arrive much later than that, many clients will already have left, pulled away by the need to catch a bus before their transfers expire. So it is sometimes a relief when everyone at the garden has been there a few times and knows what needs to be done.

On September 4, most of the volunteers were veterans of the workday. The garden hummed with self-directed activity and common purpose. While some pulled carrots and radishes, others dug up the last of the potatoes. We harvested tomatoes and ripe peppers. Some of us gathered summer squash; others clipped collard and kale; others washed or weighed produce. Doug measured our beds so that he could order sufficient cover crop for winter. We evaluated our fruit trees and planned for the next pruning.

Because I have been delivering this season, I have missed the times after the harvest, when the volunteers turn from the tasks of gathering produce and focus on work that sustains both garden and gardener: dropping seeds into holes poked into freshly worked beds; lifting a fork’s worth of loamy soil from the bottom of a compost bin; arranging cleaned tools on hooks in the shed.

On the other hand, the other volunteers rarely get to watch people gather to fill their bags with our produce, so perhaps it all evens out.

the tour bus leaves in ten minutes

2010-09-30T21:58:00.001-05:00

A friend of mine admitted that she suffers a mild depression at the end of August because she anticipates the arrival of fall and winter. Perhaps she maintains her own version of the tradition that Montaigne describes in his essay "That to philosophize is to prepare to die":

…and as the Egyptians, after their feasts, had a large image of death shown to the guests by a man who called out to them: “Drink and be merry, for when you are dead you will be like this”….

The harbingers of decay in the midst of plenty were few in the garden on August 28—but if you paid attention, you could spot them: the ends of the leaves of the tomato plants were curling, and wildflowers were becoming dry and brittle.

Brandywine

Even while showing its age, the garden was yet prolific: tomatoes and peppers glowed in the morning sun; the squash flowers bloomed; the chard was lush; and the pears were alarmingly large. We gathered the harvest, weighed it, and packed it in the bike cart.

Some of these pears are as large as an infant's head.

Summer squash blossoms

It was, as usual, surprising to see how the produce looked once arranged in baskets.

The volunteers and clients of the Vital Bridges pantry usually refer to me as "the garden", as in, "Hello, garden!" or, "The garden's here!" An odd synecdoche: the actual garden, along with all but one of the volunteers who work in it, is a couple of miles south of the pantry.

I returned to the garden to find a throng of people. We were apparently the final stop of a community garden tour hosted by NeighborSpace.

We stood around, unprepared for guests, amid unkempt flowerbeds and strewn seedling pots, and failed to resemble respectable and knowledgeable gardeners.

Peak Vegetable and hippy tipping points

2010-08-24T23:04:00.000-05:00

We arrived early at the garden on Saturday, August 21, worried that there would be neither time nor volunteers enough to handle another eruption from our vegetal Eyjafjallajokull. Our concerns proved to be disappointingly unfounded: the day’s take was 100 pounds less than that of a week ago, and our group made short work of harvesting and packing it. As with Peak Oil or Peak Fish, we might not know for a while whether last week represented Peak Vegetable for this season.

Week 34 yield comparison

There may not have been as many tomatoes as expected (50 instead of 75 pounds), but what was there was cherce. A number of plants were optimally ripe: small, firm fruit fell into the palm at the slightest touch of the vine; in fact, many tomatoes appeared to have fallen in response to the light rain of the night before.

The cucumbers and squash, on the other hand, were sparse. Some of the cucumbers were yellow and watery-looking. We speculated that the plants are still recovering from the combined insult of both powdery mildew and the measures we had to take to remove the fungus. There were still flowers present, so we hope that the reduced harvest is only temporary.

We had a diverse, though reduced, collection from our carrot, radish, and beet beds. We were able to harvest a cabbage; however, the collards and kale yielded less than expected.

Our biggest disappointment came from the potatoes. After the 22+ pound bonanza of Cranberry potatoes last week, we anticipated another large harvest. We dug tentatively around in other beds in which we had planted Yellow Finns and LaRattes, but found little. Our claw foot tub yielded only a few pebbly spuds. We may have been early—after all, some of the plants still had flowers. We decided to wait a couple of weeks more.

Slim pickings in the tub

We had room to spare in the bike trailer for our produce. There was even a space in a rear corner, into which Dave tucked the paper bag of cut flowers that we had arranged.

“Great. I’ll look like a hippie,” I said.

Dave looked at me for a second before replying. “So delivering produce from an organic garden to a food pantry with a bike trailer wasn’t already enough?”

Groovy, man. Groovier, actually.

He had a point.

While Dave and I discussed whether we had reached a hippie tipping point, Candace won a battle with a Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) that had sprouted in the front garden. Alianthus trees are invasives that often colonize recently cleared areas. We usually have to remove at least one alianthus from along a fenceline each summer.

It’s not that we dislike alianthus trees in themselves. Although it is true that alianthus leaves smell like rancid peanut butter, it is also true that by late fall, the fruit from our namesake ginkgo tree reeks like a baloney sandwich forgotten in a glove box. The problem with alianthus is that it suppresses the growth of nearby plants by releasing allelopathic chemicals into the soil. Redwoods do this too; then again, redwoods don’t smell like rancid peanut butter. Perhaps it is the smell, after all.

I left Candace to dismember the alianthus and headed to the pantry. It is certainly much easier to move ripe and glowing tomatoes, cucumbers, and carrots than it is to convince people to take the unsexy but vitamin-rich greens of early summer. If we could serve cooked greens, we’d have no problem.

I returned to the garden to examine the fruit trees. The pears are almost comically large for their trees; we’ll soon need to harvest the fruit and set it up to cure. The laden branches of our Stanley Plum trees describe arcs of tightly grouped purple fruit, still weeks away from being fully ripe. We have few apples, unfortunately: most of our apple trees are trained in espalier along the back fence, and passersby in the alley have a liberal interpretation of usufruct. The fruit on trees that are out of reach, including those on our grafted crabapple rootstock, are almost ready.

Ginkgo book swap August 21

2010-08-19T20:45:00.001-05:00

Help new ideas blossom at Ginkgo Organic Gardens' 2nd annual book swap!

Clean out those bookshelves and bring your beloved-but-no-longer-needed books to the gardens this Saturday, August 21st. From 2-4pm, we'll paw through each other's donated books, listen to readings by local authors, eat some snacks, and enjoy the garden greenery. (And psst - if it rains on Saturday, bring books and bug spray on Sunday, August 22nd, instead.)

All leftover books will be donated to Open Books, a community-based nonprofit that promotes literacy in Chicago.

The treasures...left written in books, I turn over and peruse in company with my friends, and if we find anything good in them, we pick it out, and think it a great gain if we thus become useful to one another.
—Socrates, quoted by Xenophon, quoted by Matthew Crawford in Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

many hands make light work—and heavy trailers

2010-08-15T08:19:00.021-05:00

The harvest on August 14 was huge—in fact, one of our largest in three years. We were fortunate in that a large number of volunteers, including a group from Chicago Cares, arrived early to help.

The bulk of the volunteers started on tomatoes. Harvesting tomatoes is time-consuming work, especially when the tomato plants are in full, unruly growth. As new volunteers arrived, we sent them straight to the tomato beds. Our efforts were rewarded with 75 pounds of tomatoes—the most in three years, just surpassing the prior record of 72.5 pounds harvested on August 22, 2008.

A smaller group worked on potatoes. We had noticed earlier that some of our potato plants were turning yellow and dying back—a sign that the potatoes underneath were ready to harvest. We decided to harvest one half of a bed in which we had planted Cranberry and La Ratte varieties. Using long shovels, we dug carefully into the mounded rows, taking pains not to slice through the potatoes that were buried underneath. We sifted dirt through various grates and retrieved mostly rose-colored Cranberry potatoes. The yield from just the half-bed was over 22 pounds—already the highest yield of potatoes in three years, and we still have plants to harvest in another bed, a bathtub, and various containers.

We then moved to the cucumber beds, from which we obtained 45 pounds of vegetables. We clipped leaves from our still prodigious collard, kale, and chard plants, and harvested the second of our three cabbage plants.

After weeks of waiting, we were finally able to take a number of more or less fully ripened sweet peppers. We pulled up another bunch of large carrots, as well as a number of beets. We also pulled the first of a new crop of small, white radishes.

After washing and weighing the produce, we surveyed our collection of white plastic bins, wondering whether we would be able to transfer everything into a single bike trailer. We rearranged and sorted. We made difficult choices to conserve space, removing the greens from the beets and the tops from the carrots. We were congratulating ourselves on squeezing everything into eight stacked containers (a new record) when we remembered the two bins of potatoes. At this point, Julie offered to carry half of the potatoes. So with the trailer at near capacity and the potatoes in Julie’s pannier and my backpack, we set off for the pantry.

While Julie and I made the delivery, the other volunteers turned to garden maintenance. Some treated squash and cucumber leaves for powdery mildew. Others cleaned up in front, righting downed fencing and picking up trash along the street. Still others cleared the dodecahedron bed and prepared it for amending. (I will describe the amending of the dodecahedron bed in a future post.)

This trip to the pantry was my first in which two carts were required to hold all of our delivery. Lori Cannon told us that the Armenian cucumber has become a favorite of pantry visitors. A regular visitor to the pantry told Julie that he had eaten tomatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for four days in a row.

The total harvest for August 14, 2010 was 182 pounds, second in size only to the 212 pounds harvested on September 12 last year. It would have been impossible to gather this amount of produce in the few hours that were available to us without a large number of volunteers.

The garden is at its peak, and we haven’t even started taking plums and pears yet. Come out and help with the harvest. Let’s break the bike trailer.

From inns of molten blue

2010-08-12T22:25:00.008-05:00

In searching for food, the colours of fruits are helpful clues, and, unlike the carnivores, primates have evolved good colour vision. Their eyes are also better at picking out static details. Their food is static, and detecting minute movements is less vital than recognizing subtle differences in shape and texture….The sense of taste is more refined. The diet is more varied and highly flavoured—there is more to taste. In particular there is a strong response to sweet tasting objects.

I remember the preceding passage from The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris, at least once every August in the garden. Morris’s words usually come to me when I am deep inside an overgrown tomato bush, mosquito-bitten and vine-smeared, stained fingers straining for a ripe fruit. Sometimes I think of them while eyeing the confusion of leaves under which cucumbers or zucchini take refuge; mostly, though, I associate them with tomatoes.

We harvested 46 pounds of tomatoes on Saturday, August 7. We also picked beets, cucumbers (including one that had escaped notice until it was the size of an arm), collards, and kale; a sheaf of chives; and Platonic ideals of carrots that were as wide as a wrist. The stars of the day, though, were the tomatoes: Purple Calabashes that gripped their vines like fragile fists; meaty Purple Cherokees that threatened to split or fall to messy deaths; golden and heart-shaped Dad’s Sunsets; delicate, egg-like Thai Pinks.

There were many varieties of cherry tomatoes, too. A dawn-warmed cherry tomato, pulled from its vine and popped straight into the mouth, contains a liquor never brewed: an elixir of summer, the distillate of picnics and fireflies and feigned deafness to your mother’s calls to come in for the evening.

We packed everything into the bike cart. As the bike cart and its owner creaked and groaned under the load on the way to the pantry, the other volunteers turned to needed garden maintenance.

Karen watered; Michael and Jamie removed cucumber and squash leaves that had succumbed to powdery mildew, and Dave sprayed the remaining healthy leaves with a mild solution of baking soda and liquid soap. Annie and the Schearing sisters weeded out front. We cleared the flower beds of Queen Anne’s Lace and built a section of decking from wood salvaged from a condo porch project. Afterwards, a few of us sat around scratching our welts and discussing geodesy and Thomas Pynchon.

Except for the mosquitoes, it was a perfect gardening day.

denizens

2010-08-07T21:28:00.007-05:00

The garden is home to many winged and fluttering creatures, as well as to the occasional furred marauder. The following gallery shows a few of the garden's non-tomato residents.

Insects

We know that the Garden is host to a wide variety of pollinators. The milkweed, Queen Anne's Lace, and Coneflower blooms crawl with flies, bees, wasps, moths, and butterflies. Lady bird beetles wander in the tomato vines.

There are unwanted insects, as well. Grasshoppers gnaw on the kale leaves. Every mosquito in Uptown seems to be waiting for us on Saturday mornings and Thursday evenings.

Animals

There is at least one rabbit warren somewhere on the Garden property. We're always surprising a bunny in fragrante delicto—though not usually actually on the inside of our fencing. Bunnies have not done much damage this year.

We also have squirrels, of course. Squirrels seem to stick to fallen fruit, though they will nip at the occasional tomato.

yield comparisons, week 31

2010-08-05T20:21:00.012-05:00

Based on the data from harvest logs of the last three years, this year's yield to date compares favorably with yields from the prior two years. The total yield to date for 2010 of vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs is 323 pounds—slightly more than the 299 pounds of 2009, slightly less than the 336 pounds of 2008.

Total garden yield is but a crude metric. The chart of collards yield, for example, shows that we are producing a lot more collards this year than before; what it does not show is the fact that we planted 1.5 beds of the stuff this year—probably three times as much as we did last year. We can't normalize the yield to bed area, in other words. We may need to resign ourselves to qualitative comparisons until we exercise more rigor in our data collection.

My intent was not to be wonky about collard yield, but to reassure that the fertility of our garden is not decreasing. We seem to be doing fine.

Graphics reveal data. Indeed graphics can be more precise and revealing than conventional statistical computations.—Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

cucumbers

2010-08-05T06:51:00.014-05:00

The harvest for the weekend of July 31, 2010 was the most varied of the season so far: a half dozen beets from the planting that finally germinated; the last of the turnips and wax beans; a slightly reduced yield from our trio of greens (collard, kale, and chard); a vibrant collection of tomatoes; a head of cabbage; and a bouquet garni’s worth of herbs.

We also pulled over 39 pounds of cucumbers. One benefit of donating our produce is that we avoid the usual gardener’s challenge of finding people willing to accept cucumbers. (I imagine that right now, shopping bags stuffed with cucumbers are sitting in the break rooms in offices all over the Midwest, perhaps labeled with sticky notes that unnecessarily state that the cucumbers are “Free!”) We grew two varieties of cucumbers this year: the variety with dark green skin that many of us know; and Armenian cucumbers, which are larger and milder, and resemble squash. Like most cucurbits, Armenian cucumbers tend to hide in their beds and to grow to unwieldy proportions.

We still managed to get everything into a single bike trailer, although the cucumbers were a challenge.

The day's volunteers. Gingko's Rule of Volunteer Photographs dictates that someone has to hold a pitchfork. This week was Michael's turn.

que jardiner c’est apprendre á philosopher

2010-07-29T22:59:00.009-05:00

Saturday, July 24 started dewy and overcast, but was sunny and bright by the afternoon. We harvested our first handfuls of cherry tomatoes and a couple of sweet peppers. We pulled a dozen or so turnips, a clutch of carrots, a bucket of cucumber, and a bunch of yellow summer squash. However, the bulk of the day’s harvest—as is usual this time of year—came from our beds of greens: collards, kale, and Swiss chard.

We await ripening cabbages, potatoes, and apples; based on the number of cucumber flowers, we'll soon be awash in gherkins.

While I delivered our produce to the pantry, the others tended the garden. Our pea and wax bean plants had finished for the year, so we composted the plants and prepared the beds for fall crops. We also turned the compost bins and weeded.

Earlier that morning, some of us discussed the garden’s yield to date. Our harvests seem to be smaller than they were the same time last year; in fact, we are concerned that our raised beds may have gradually declined over the last few years. We’re not sure whether the soil in the beds needs amending, whether our seeds were too old, or whether it has been too dry.

Because we have been recording our weekly harvests over the years, we have a body of data that we can interrogate to determine whether our garden’s fertility has, in fact, diminished. I am almost finished with a set of KPI (key performance indicator) charts that we can use for analysis, and which I plan to publish in the blog.

The fact that I use an acronym like KPI hints as to the day job that I generally strive to keep separate from my gardening avocation: compost is compost, and Excel is Excel, and the twain usually don’t meet. However, there is no need to rely on anecdotes when you have three years of data.

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Je veux…que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux, mais nonchalant d’elle, et encore plus de mon jardin imparfait. —Montaigne, "Que philosopher c’est apprendre á mourir", Essais

market basket of goods and services

2010-07-18T21:49:00.008-05:00

After arriving at the Vital Bridges pantry on Saturday mornings, I arrange the garden's produce as artfully as I can, using baskets that the pantry provides. Just before I wheel out the cart that contains our gussied-up and food-styled donations, I take a few photographs to celebrate the fruits (and vegetables) of our labors.

The other garden volunteers do not usually get the opportunity to see glamour shots of our produce, so these photos are as much for them as for followers of the blog.

The photographs serve as a record of how the offerings of the garden change over the growing season. As spring yielded to summer, our donations changed from radishes and peas to cucurbits, beans, and turnips.

One thing that has not changed (and that shouldn't change for a few more months) is the weekly mess of collards, kale, and chard that we bring. If anything, the amount of collards is increasing.

June 26: mostly leaves—collards, kale, chard; herbs

July 3: collards, kale, chard; chives and herbs; radishes; snap peas

July 10: massive amounts of collards, kale, chard; yellow wax beans; the last of the snap peas

July 17: yellow summer squash, zucchini, and cucumber; lettuce; turnips; yellow wax and green beans. We may need to start using a second cart.

The photos of the cart do not include the bouquets of flowers and containers of fruit that we also bring. During June, we were able to bring in red and black raspberries; last week, we brought gooseberries.

The Ginkgo fleet

2010-07-18T20:56:00.005-05:00

The increasing yields from the garden are starting to tax the capacity of the bike trailer that we use to transport produce to the Vital Bridges pantry. On July 10, we were able to load everything into two levels of plastic cartons.

A week later, we had to move to a third level. And this is before the tomatoes arrive.

We are not worried that we will eventually not be able to deliver our produce by bike, for we now have two bike trailers. We anticipate the maiden run of the second member of the Gingko delivery fleet next week.

making the earth say beans instead of grass

2010-07-14T21:42:00.009-05:00

A full month has passed since the last blog entry. In that hot month, the garden has waxed verdant and fecund. You can barely discern our claw foot tub now through its raiment of flowering potato plants, and the dodecahedron bed is a jungle of striving bean tendrils.

Although we've been remiss in our blogging, we have been steadily photographing the garden, and keeping records of our weekend harvests. We'll gradually bring the blog up to date.

For now, though, a few pictures, and an excerpt from Thoreau's essay "The Bean Field":

Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass—this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.

When it rains...we deliver!

2010-06-12T13:15:00.012-05:00

Saturday, June 12 dawned grey and murky. Nonetheless, a handful of stalwart volunteers turned out for our second harvest of the season. Not only were the collards going strong

but we also had our first harvest of snow peas (tasty!).

The radishes also continued to flourish.

Of course, once all the produce was weighed and loaded onto Al's bike trailer ready for delivery, the rain bucketed down. Undaunted, Al set out to deliver.

Yes, those vertical lines in the photo are rain.

The rest of us huddled on the porch and wondered whether the rain would stop enough so that we could get some gardening done. Just as we pulled out some gardening books, thinking we would do some research, the rain turned to drizzle, and the gardening commenced.

Al had talked with one of the dietitians at Vital Bridges the previous week and she mentioned that beets were a welcome crop. Our first crop failed to germinate, so we sowed again. Last year, we had beautiful golden beets as well as the more familiar red beets. Here's hoping the new crop germinates.

We also spent some time in the front garden, trying to repair damage to fences done by large dogs or small children. The few fences in the front were put up to try to protect some of the new prairie plants that were put in last fall. Unfortunately, some didn't survive the winter (despite being mulched), and some survived only to be destroyed in the spring. And here's hoping the plants and fences survive.

our first delivery

2010-06-05T23:18:00.005-05:00

On May 29, we were worried. We stood at the edge of the dodecahedron bed, looking onto packed dirt irregularly pierced with wooden labels that named beets and beans that we knew would not germinate. We acknowledged our setback—glad that we were weekend farmers and not subsistence ones—and resowed from new packets of seeds. We pulled up the moribund and bolting spinach plants and replaced them with squash seeds. We poked leftover potato sprouts into the spaces that arose between the weakly sprouting rows of plants in their trenches. We tended greens in their muddy rows and hoped for the best.

On June 5, our worries proved to be unfounded. We arrived at the garden to find our new crops vigorous and luxuriant: our collards were especially lush. To our relief, the potatoes had started growing in earnest, and our bush beans had finally received the growth memo. We had crossed that anxious threshold that occurs in the fourth week or so between the sowing of the first seeds and the harvesting of the first crop, when everything is either underground or spindly.

With the assistance of a group of volunteers from Chicago Cares that gamely donned the garden's collection of gamy ponchos against the morning rain, we harvested French breakfast radishes and large leaves of collard greens and kale. We clipped stalks of oregano, sage, and chives from our herb bed. We sheared leaves from the “cut and come again” bed of lettuce under the plum tree. We loaded our harvest into the bike trailer and I left to make the garden's first delivery of the 2010 season.

Three years ago, I started volunteering with Ginkgo both because I was concerned about hunger and because I was interested in learning about organic agriculture. My attachment to the garden has deepened over time because I appreciate the garden’s moral efficiency. While in the garden, we focus on the soil in our raised beds and the plants that live in them, acting on shared commitments and beliefs about ecology and best practices in organic agriculture. When we leave the garden for the food pantry, we act on another commitment that is equally important to us: to provide food of high quality to people who struggle with illness. We connect the health of place to the health of people.

Vital Bridges provides “food, nutrition, housing, case management and prevention services” to people in Chicago who live with HIV/AIDS. For a number of years, Ginkgo has donated the bulk of its produce to the Vital Bridges food pantry in Uptown/Edgewater, on Broadway near Bryn Mawr. Every Saturday during the growing season, volunteers from the garden make a delivery to the food pantry. We arrange our produce in baskets on carts that we wheel into the area where people wait to obtain food from the pantry. When a person in the pantry fills a bag with a handful of collards, or a couple of tomatoes, or a bundle of chives from the garden, she completes a link in which we are happy and honored to participate.

During today’s visit, Lori Cannon, who manages the food pantry, talked to me about the kinds of vegetables that are of interest to the HIV community. Beets, in particular, are important because of their purported ability to cleanse the liver. An increased demand for beets would be just fine with us, because a ripe golden or chioggia beet emerging from damp earth is something we never tire of seeing in the garden.

I returned to the garden to find the other volunteers busy in a variety of tasks. Some of us drilled rows of holes in salvaged logs that will serve as a growth medium for mushroom spores, joining the spores that have already started in piles of straw at the bases of our fruit trees.

Others planted sprouted purple potatoes in bins that we located at the ends of our raised beds. (Ivy, one of our volunteers, has an uncanny ability to sprout potatoes at home: for a couple of weeks, the only potato plants in the garden that appeared to be viable were from spuds that Ivy had originally purchased from the grocery.) Others sprayed soapy water on the undersides of the leaves of our collards and kales to ward off the threat of aphids and thrips.

—

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us. He is helping himself in a way that dignifies him and that is rich in meaning and pleasure. But he is doing something else that is more important: he is making vital contact with the soil and the weather on which his life depends. He will no longer look upon rain as an impediment of traffic, or upon the sun as a holiday decoration. And his sense of man’s dependence on the world will have grown precise enough, one would hope, to be politically clarifying and useful.

- from “Think Little”, in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

Photo album, May 29, 2010

2010-05-29T13:45:00.004-05:00

The tomatoes were transplanted from the greenhouse on May 21 because we wanted to be certain that the danger of frost had passed; the last frost date in Chicago is May 15. The transplants look happy.

And the spinach, which was sown directly into the soil earlier in the season (no need to worry about frost), is doing well in this bed, but not in the other two beds. We're not sure why this happened.

The potatoes are coming along a little more slowly than expected, but they look happy.

And the lettuce looks amazing!

The herbs and flower beds are getting to be fairly self-sustaining. Many herbs came back quickly owing to our unexpectedly mild winter.

Solanum lycopersicum

2010-05-23T04:51:00.010-05:00

Flowers in bloom: Allium; Yellow Iris; Creeping Buttercup; Silver Dollar Plant

Late last summer, we saved seeds from our harvest of heirloom tomato plants. Many of our tomato plants were ringers of a sort: most of our own seedlings died in the year's inclement spring, and we had to resort to purchasing replacement heirloom starts from the weekly farmer’s markets at Uncommon Ground and in Evanston.

After this inauspicious start, the season improved, and we enjoyed a successful tomato harvest. The variety and quality of our tomatoes inspired us to save seeds for the next year. After cleaning, curing, and drying the seeds, we filed them away in tiny manila envelopes, keeping them cool and dry (and in at least one crisper section of a volunteer's refrigerator) until a couple of months ago, when we started them at Kilbourn.

Today, our volunteers (including groups from the DePaul chapters of Oxfam and Americorps M3C) transplanted the bulk of our tomato seedlings into three beds.

After weeding the beds, we loosened soil with our garden fork and graded the beds with rakes and hoes to establish a level planting surface. We then laid out our seedling pots in each bed, arranging them in a chevron pattern: two plants in one row, then one plant in the next, then two plants, etc. After sorting the seedlings, we dug holes deep enough so that the plants would extend no more than four or so inches above the ground level. We filled each hole with water from our rain barrel.

We then removed each seedling from its small plastic pot. We first loosened the soil in a pot by gently squeezing the pot’s base. We then turned the pot on its side and teased out the seedling in its soil plug by squeezing the pot and pulling slightly on the plant. When we were lucky, the seedling and soil plug emerged intact from the pot; when we weren’t lucky, we wound up with a handful of loose soil that threatened to fall away from its fragile cargo. We placed each seedling and its soil surround into the hole that, by now, had absorbed the water that we had poured in earlier. We pinched off any leaves that were below the soil line, filled in the holes with dirt, and "watered in" the seedlings.

We staked our seedlings after planting them. As the tomato varieties that we grow are all indeterminate , we must provide them with support as they grow. Right after transplanting, most of the seedlings were too small to require much support; it is, nevertheless, good to start early. We drove tomato stakes into the ground a few inches away from each seedling. If a seedling looked as if it needed support, we loosely secured it to its stake with garden twine, using a figure-eight loop that supports the stem without binding it.

Finally, we replaced the wire fencing that surrounded each bed to protect our seedlings from rabbits. Although rabbits don’t generally eat plants in the nightshade family (to which both tomatoes and potatoes belong), they have been known to take out the occasional tender seedling. Squirrels are also a problem, prone to the annoying habit of taking a single bite from a tomato fruit and then discarding it, as though they kept forgetting that they didn't like tomatoes, after all.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. - Margaret Atwood

A Fortnight’s Worth of Farming

2010-05-20T21:51:00.004-05:00

May 8 was a day of exuberant tuber planting. We planted sprouting pieces of potato in trenches that we dug in one of our raised beds. We also planted potatoes in our old claw foot bathtub. In other beds, we planted turnips, radishes (both the red variety familiar to many of us as well as white daikon), and two kinds of beets. We planted carrot seeds in a specially-prepared bed: carrots grow better in soil that is loose and sandy, so we keep a bed fluffed up just for them.

We also planted leafy greens. In one of the two beds that benefit from the shade of our plum trees, we planted mesclun and a variety of zombie mustard whose seed was the sole survivor of an mesclun planting of a few years back. This mustard is so tough, it’s almost an invasive plant--but it works well in salad, so there's little chance of it taking over the garden. We also transplanted collard and kale plants that we had started from seed at the Kilbourn Organic Greenhouse.

While some of us worked with vegetables, others of us worked with fruit. We planted two saplings of Chicago Hardy Fig (Ficus carica), a variety of the fruit tree that can survive colder climes like ours. We learned from Doug and Dave, our two volunteers who double as members of CROP, how to plant these saplings in a trench instead of a hole. When winter arrives, we’ll bed the saplings in their trenches and cover them so that they won't be exposed to the wind.

In addition to tending our food crops, we maintained the front garden of perennials and native plants. We weeded, collected trash, and removed a dead trunk from our smoke bush.

May 15 started warm and sunny, but ended chilly and cloudy. Our garden planning this year has been somewhat slapdash: aside from certainty about where the tomatoes and peppers will go, we’ve spent a lot of our mornings standing in a group, trying to remember what was supposed to go in each bed (Cucumbers? Sweet potatoes?). Our planning is not totally improvisational, of course—we’re not planting cucumbers right now, for instance—but it has more than the usual amount of whimsy.

We were a little anxious to see that our spinach plants were not thriving. Perhaps it was the spell of recent cool weather; perhaps our seeds were simply too old. If our spinach plants don’t improve, we’ll probably plant a replacement crop, because it will soon be too hot for spinach to grow without bolting.

We planted Yellow Wax bush beans in the dodecahedron* bed, alongside the beets and pole beans that were already there. We also planted the bush beans in the bed where we started peas, because an entire row of pea seeds did not germinate. (This lack of germination has become worrisome.)

We direct-sowed kale seeds in our kale bed to fill in places where our transplants were faring poorly. We also planted more potatoes. We learned that two five-pound bags of potatoes go a long way: we could have gotten away with extravagantly planted whole potatoes instead of just potato pieces.

This Wednesday, Doug transferred our tomato and pepper starts from the greenhouse to our temporary cold frame. For the last few years, we have cobbled together cold frames with hay bales and salvaged windows. Usually, we keep the seedlings in the cold frame for a week or so to harden them off, or acclimatize them to an environment harsher than that of the greenhouse. We’re not waiting that long this year: the seedlings are leggy, with long stems and shallow roots, which poses the risk that they'll be too weak. We’ll need to plant them deep, stake them well, and hope for a couple of mild weeks.

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*The bed is not actually in the shape of a dodecahedron (a solid), but a dodecagon (a polygon). It might not even be a dodecagon: none of us has actually taken the time to count the number of sides. It’s irrelevant, in any case: dodecahedron sounds marginally cooler than dodecagon, and this isn’t geometry—it’s gardening.

Photo album, May 8, 2010

2010-05-08T15:17:00.006-05:00

The fig trees that were planted the previous week seem to be very happy in their new locations. This one was planted at the foot of the herb bed. Before the tree was planted, a trench was dug out in front of it and then covered over.

Our fig trees came from Italy by way of a friendly gardener. In the winter, the trees will be put to bed in their trenches and covered over with dirt and plywood to keep them warm. Being Mediterranean plants, they can't tolerate Chicago-style winters. We've been assured that this method will work.

Check back with us next spring to see how the trees do.

I was thinkin' I could use me another helpin' of these potaters

2010-05-04T21:38:00.007-05:00

May 1 saw the first working appearance of the garden’s newest tool: a bike trailer that we will use this season to deliver our donations of produce, flowers, and herbs. The trailer is sturdy, steel, and rated to carry up to 175 pounds. Weight won’t be as much a challenge for us in the harvest months as will volume: 80 pounds of tomatoes and greens, stacked in the plastic tulip bulb crates that we rescued from a grocery store, makes for a high center of gravity.

(These crates are, by the way, of such utility in their new role as containers of fresh produce that we still marvel that anyone would discard them.)

We are pleased to have a bike trailer to deliver produce, for a number of reasons. We will no longer depend on the willingness of volunteers to load the back seats of their cars with crates of freshly harvested (read: wet and muddy) vegetables. Fewer delivery vehicles in the garden will reduce the wear on the land near the back gate that suffers from erosion caused by water from nearby downspouts. We won’t have to worry about parking when making deliveries. Some of us will be able to combine our garden-geekery with our bike-geekery. Plus, of course, there’s that whole reduced carbon footprint thing.

The first delivery with the bike cart was of something to the garden: two sacks of potato seeds that we ordered from Seed Savers Exchange. If potato seeds look like potatoes, that’s because potato seeds are potatoes—expensive and pedigreed potatoes, in this case. We have two heirloom varieties—Yellow Finns and Cranberry Reds.

After letting the potatoes air out for a week and sprout eyes, we’ll cut them into smaller pieces (each piece with an eye) and plant them in various raised beds, as well as in the old claw foot bathtub that we reserve for spuds. You can grow potatoes in anything from potting soil bags to garbage cans to entire fields, as long as you remember to mound soil regularly around the growing plants to encourage them to produce more of the root nodules that we’re seeking.

Mmm-hmm.

Photo album, May 1 2010

2010-05-01T15:05:00.005-05:00

We had a great (and large) group of volunteers on May 1. This meant we had time to work in the front garden (for a change). Thanks for all the weeding, folks!

And some volunteers tried to keep the raspberries under control by tying them in.

The chives have been going strong since early in the season.

And there was time to enjoy seeing all the growing going on -- take a look at these snow peas!

And there was time for a nice chat at the end of the day.

The growing is starting

2010-04-24T20:29:00.013-05:00

It was a busy and productive day thanks to all the volunteers who showed up.

And thanks to the mild weather, some tiny spinach seedlings have already started to appear.

As have some peas.

Kale and collards — started in the greenhouse at the end of March — were planted in a couple of beds. And, owing to the fickleness of Chicago weather, row cover was draped over the beds in case the temperature drops.

A number of volunteers spent time thinning the blossoms on the pear trees to prevent the spread of disease and to encourage bigger, better fruit.

These industrious folk are finding a route for the hose under the shed and along the back of the garden, out to the front garden, ready to be hooked up once the city turn on the water.

And the cold frame is set up and ready to go for when it's time to bring the peppers over from the greenhouse. We're still having some cool nights, so it's a little too soon for them to join the party in the garden.

(And this blogger apologizes for the lateness of recent postings; they were delayed due to computer crashes and thesis-writing! Things, however, are looking up.)