16 May 2015: It's a Garden!

Saturday, May 16th was that first day of the season when I really felt like we transitioned from starting the season to being in the season.  Of course the rhubarb and mint and oregano have been up for weeks, but they do that on their own.  On the sixteenth, we had harvestable heads of lettuce and radishes popping up out of the soil like the instant thermometer on a butterball (only the total opposite of an instant read thermometer on a butterball).  The lettuce and radish are from seeds sown by our volunteers.  Raise your hand if you planted Black Seeded Simpson lettuce! Oh, not you?  What about Red Sails? Surely, you are responsible for the Cherry Belle radishes?  Meanwhile, the Shirz and Penelope peas are making their way up trellises and our greens are looking great!



With regulars and volunteer groups from Second City and Northwestern University Gives Back, we got a tremendous amount of work done on this extended day.  We planted cucumbers. And sure, we planted your regular old slice it in a salad cause you need something crunchy cucumber (yawn), but we also planted Lemon cukes, which look like yellow tennis balls, and Armenian cucumbers (hubba hubba).  We also planted beans (Royal Burgundy and Milk & Cider), watermelon, Patty Pan squash, and a succession of lettuce. 

And that's just the stuff you can eat!  Don't get me started on the geraniums and Inky Fingers coleus.

The season is under way.  Unless we really screw something up, we will bring a harvest to Vital Bridges every week starting this upcoming Saturday and continuing into the late fall. 

June 3-7

This week in Gardening!  It was a big week for beans.  Although the cool weather has given us a tremendous season for peas, the yields are starting to taper off just in time for beans to start producing.  We have a lot of varieties this year ranging from the historic Cherokee Trail, to Purple Bush, and Scarlet Runners.  The Scarlett Runner Beans have been planted in the dodecahedron as part of our attempt at the 3 sisters (corn, beans, and squash), and they will look beautiful.

Ivy uses her Cat's Cradle skills to make trellis for our climbing beans

While the Scarlett Runners will be a big show with lots of flowers and delicious beans, I am most excited for the Milk and Cider beans that were planted in the hay bales on the north side of the garden.  Months ago volunteers built a trellis out of pruned fruit wood with a beautiful aesthetic. Last weekend a team punched holes in the bales at the base of the trellis, filled them with fresh compost and planted Milk and Cider beans to grow up the trellis.  These beans are an enticing cider color with mottled splashes of white.  The goal is to allow these beans to grow and dry on the plant rather than be picked as "green beans".  The beans will be an impressive addition to every dinner plate they touch.

Dario sifts compost to be stuffed into hay bales for bean planting

Hay bales stuffed with Milk and Cider beans and compost

John offers a drink to the newly planted beans

And beans are amazing and a magical fruit and fix nitrogen and are just one of the healthiest things you can eat, but... they simply don't have the swagger of raspberries.  Melville identified the lack of sex appeal in beans when he wrote, "In this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim)."

This was our first substantial raspberry harvest of the year and more substantial harvests will come.  It's hard to pick the delicate Rubus idaeus without sampling every few for quality, but well disciplined volunteers are responsible for this bounty.

 

And what's this?  Our first Black Raspberries have appeared.  Rubus occidentalis is not to be confused with Blackberries, which are not actually berries at all (we don't grow blackberries, so I'll leave that alone), but instead are just a cultural shift from their red raspberry cousins.  The brambles are dense and need better trellising, but they are healthy and volunteers who wade in to get the fruit are not begrudged for replenishing themselves.

This week also brought another large harvest of leafy greens, which, it turns out, solve every problem your body can imagine.  Some of the greens are varieties of Kale, and some are Collards, but growing underneath some greens are beets!  Golden beets (pictured) and Bull's Blood beets and Chioggia beets.  Under some of the other greens are radishes, French Breakfast, Crimson Giant, and Easter Egg (I think).  Some of the radishes look bizarre (pictured).

Under other leaves are Potatoes, but those are not edible greens and the potatoes aren't ready to harvest yet, so we will save that post.

Thanks to all the volunteers who did such hard work harvesting, planting, transplanting and maintaining so that the garden get's to show off its good side.

indeed, it is the only thing that ever has

Last Friday, I prepared a list of tasks that we thought should be accomplished in the next couple of weeks. Anticipating a large number of volunteers from DePaul University, who would help the garden as part of its 2012 Vincentian Service Day, I made an ambitious list of 18 items, adding a number of tasks that I thought would be nice to accomplish, but probably not possible in a single work day.

I am now glad that I made the full task list. Three groups of volunteers arrived on Saturday morning: a dozen or more students from DePaul; at least eight more volunteers from the Second City Dream Team Meetup group; and a number from the large group of people who return to the garden after attending as a member of another group. (I am an alum of the latter group: after first visiting the garden with Chicago Cares in the fall of 2007, I returned the following weekend on my own and never stopped. )

At the end of the workday, we had accomplished all but two of the tasks on our list.

The DePaul students fanned across the garden, wreaking construction and order, leaving promise in their wake. They tied twine trellises for the sweet peas in beds 4 through 6.

They planted radishes (Crimson Giant; French Breakfast; Cherry; and others) in beds 7 through 9, carrots (Tonda de Parigi and Royal Chartenaux) in bed 12, and a border of marigold seeds in bed 13 for the tomato plants that will soon be transplanted there.

They pulled dead flowers and weeds from the front garden. They planted crowns of Martha Washington asparagus throughout the garden, including at the eastern end of the raspberry bed.

They built a brick walkway leading to our rain barrels. And after all of that hard work, they presented the garden with a thank you card.

The Second City folks were equally busy in the eastern part of the garden. Working in beds 15 and 16, they constructed bean tripods out of aluminum poles and trellises out of whatever they could find, including the pair of repeatedly repurposed papasan chair backs that are a personal favorite as a form of plant support. They planted seeds for three varieties of pole beans (Cherokee Trail of Tears, Sultan’s Crescent, and Bountiful) around the trellises before moving to the potato bed.

After repairing the western end of bed 22, the Second City volunteers dug a trench down the middle of the bed and planted sprouted red potato seeds. The DePaul students came along later and planted seed for a border of allysum flowers that we hope will live up to their reputation as potato companion plants.

Our third group focused on bed 19, under the Stanley plum tree. They planted a bewildering array of greens, alternating rows of rapini (broccoli raab), varieties of spinach (Bloomsdale Savoy, Bordeaux, and Monstreux de Virafloy), and Red Giant Mustard.

 Everyone wrapped the newly seeded beds with chicken-wire fencing. We planted so many rows that we ran out of plastic plant labels—a first. We wound up cutting up a couple of seed pots to make labels for some of our rows.










After only a single day of focused work, the garden was transformed from a collection of muddy beds to an array of fenced future homes of vegetables for the pantry. We are well positioned for the growing season.