Ginkgo Organic Gardens: volunteers

Showing posts with label volunteers. Show all posts

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Ye been the salt of the erthe and the savour.

At around 8:30 every Saturday morning from Easter to Thanksgiving, a volunteer unlocks the gate at the front entrance to the garden, turns on the water, and sets out buckets of gloves and hand tools. Eventually, other volunteers join her: sometimes, they trickle in individually, quietly stowing their backpacks under the shed before immersing themselves in the tomato bushes; other times, large groups bustle in, bearing coffee and sign-up sheets, wearing matching T-shirts.


April 13 2013 - Chicago Cares

May 5 2013 - DePaul Vincentian Day of Service

May 5 2013 - with Second City

We never know what kind of help we’ll get on a Saturday. Each workday is an aleatoric composition of community gardening, performed with Cobraheads and rakes instead of detuned pianos. A workday may involve a handful of poncho-clad folks hunched over muddy beds, or it could be swirl of the summer-besotted, clamoring for task assignments. We have had as few as three volunteers and as many as thirty.

June 1 2013 - with Second City

June 8 2013 - with Chicago Cares and Second City

June 15 2013 - with Second City

June 22 2013 - with Chicago Cares and Buena Park neighbors

June 29 2013 - with Buena Park neighbors

The tasks we complete depend on the people who choose to join us. When our ranks are small, we focus on getting the harvest ready for delivery; when flush with willing workers, we expand to tackling bindweed and cutting up branches for compost.


July 6 2013

July 20 2013 - with Chicago Cares and Buena Park neighbors

The elements common to our horticultural jam sessions are energy and compassion. I continue to be surprised by how hard so many people work to grow and harvest food that they will never themselves consume, but give freely to people who they may never meet.

August 3 2013 - with Second City

August 10 2013 - with Chicago Cares and Second City

August 24 2013 - with Chicago Cares


August 31 2013 - with John (center), an Irishman who stopped by during his travels around the world, volunteering with organic gardens

September 7 2013 - with Americorps

September 14 2013 - with Chicago Cares, Loyola, UIC, and Second City

September 21 2013 - with Entertainment Cruises


October 5 2013 - with Chicago Collegiate Scholars


October 12 2013 - with Chicago Cares

October 19 2013 - with Chicago Collegiate Scholars

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Convergence

You know that feeling you get when you arrive at the garden and 10 yards of organic leaf compost confront you like a sleepy cow resting on her haunches in the middle of the road, but then you realize that an unprecedented amount of volunteers have shown up to help spread it? No? Well, whatever... it's a great feeling.

Because our yield was a little light last year we decided to import some fresh compost to amend our beds before we start planting. No disrespect to our compost bins, they're beautiful, but we just needed a little boost.

But before we could spread the compost we had to weed the beds. Luckily, today was our first Chicago Cares volunteer day of the season. Chicago Cares, a group that organizes volunteer projects for curious Chicagoans, lends time and manpower to the garden regularly throughout the season and on days like today we cannot be more thankful.

In addition to the Chicago Cares volunteers, we also had some repeat visitors from Second City and they brought friends! It's rare to see the garden so busy, but thanks to so many hands we made short shrift of the weeding and started turning the cover crop (green manure) into the earth to get all that nitrogenous goodness into our beds.

Each bed got a healthy serving of the new compost and people got to work raking and shoveling.

And, as if we weren't already bowled over by the array of visitors to the garden, we got a special treat. Karen, one of the ORIGINAL Ginkgo founders, dropped by! I'm starting my third season with Ginkgo and I'm constantly amazed by the garden's history. When the garden was started in 1994 the neighborhood was a totally different place and there was nothing on the lot except for a Ginkgo tree and debris. The founders laid the foundations, built the beds, and started something that has grown beyond any expectation. Karen reminisced about what the garden looked like when she was there. Even our longest serving volunteers weren't around to see some of the things she talked about, so it was great to hear. She remembered learning to use a sledge hammer, and when the wrought iron fence was still a chain-link fence. Karen posed under the cherry tree and told us that it was originally from a plant sale at Marshall Fields! Imagining this beautiful unruly centerpiece as a knee-high potted plant in the back of someone's car was a truly profound lesson in the meaning of "grass roots". Stay tuned if you look forward to more of Ginkgo's story!

Monday, April 9, 2012

schwinnbuster

The last couple of work days have seemed slightly Sisyphean, with a lot of moving around of heavy things that we suspect will just have to be moved around again later. Two weekends back, we reconfigured our rain barrels: we elevated one on an additional level of cinder block supports to increase the pressure at the spigot and daisy-chained it to the second. Because our downspout was a little short, we rigged an extending sluice using a board and rope; we’re not sure how this will work.

We should have increased our use of rainwater long ago, solely because conserving resources was the right thing to do. It took a notice that the City plans to charge non-profits for their use of municipal water to provide a final incentive. We may purchase additional barrels and rig up a new gutter to collect even more rainwater from the roof of the garden shed.

Last week, we were joined by the Hardest Working Volunteers in Show Business—folks who all seemed to be in the local comedy and screenwriting scene, and who had no qualms with tearing into substantial tasks like digging out the back fence and turning over the contents of our compost bins.

At the request of our neighbors in Buena Park, we cleared a clogged storm drain in the front area. John found a twenty-dollar bill at the bottom of the pile of reeking muck; he immediately promised to spend the filthy lucre on refreshments next week.

We finished with the annual Bringing Out of Everything From the Garden Shed, followed by the annual Putting Everything Back into the Garden Shed, Only in a Slightly Different Configuration. Because we were in the middle of installing new shelves, we’ll have to reshuffle everything later.

Next weekend will feature more hauling about. We have scheduled a delivery of wood chips that we’ll spread throughout the garden to keep weeds down. We are fortunate in that the front garden will offer aromatic respite from our labors: when we need a break, we can sit on a bench and bask in the perfumed refulgence of our flowering trees and bushes. It’s as good as finding a schwinnbuster in the gutter.