One Sunday a month, we have a special workday in which we are joined by a team of Chicago Cares volunteers. While our Saturday sessions are usually frenetic with the tasks of harvesting and delivering, our Sundays are often more strenuous, if less glamorous. Freed from the demands of the regular harvest, we focus on longer-term projects and maintenance: weeding walkways, picking up, reorganizing the shed, turning the compost bins, and pruning.
Last Sunday was especially productive. With the help of an industrious team of volunteers, we worked our way through and beyond our to-do list. We cleared our apple and pear trees of the unfortunate victims of a fruit blight. We dismantled one of our listing trio of compost bins so that we can rebuild it with reinforcements. We weeded out front and between the pavers of the entry walkway.
We also built some overdue trellises to support trailing plants. In our latest bed of pole beans, we strung a cat’s cradle of garden twine. To support and—we hope—direct our flourishing winter squash plants in their pumpkiny peregrinations, we attached a wall of wood trellises (an alley find) to poles along the side of the bed. For summer squashes that often tend to rot when they lie directly on the soil, we strung a net of cotton clothesline.
It was all good, needed work that should benefit the garden later.
