Hundred Pound Summer

Finally Chicago has followed through on its annual promise of summer weather and along with the heat and humidity comes our favorite summertime vegetables. Tomatoes are just starting to ripen, peppers are still green, but the cucumbers, zucchini, pattipan squashes, and broad beans are at full-strength.

Looky here! Liz shows off a couple mean beans:


Of course gardening is not all sunshine and beet greens. The bad news is that we officially gave up the BATTLE OF THE SPUDS against an advancing army of aphids. As an organic garden, we can't use any non-organic pesticides and the ones we had been trying (a mild, biodegradable detergent and neem oil) hadn't been enough to temper their onslaught. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre, c'est la pomme de terre: we tore out half the bed and brought the admittedly handsome spuds up to the foodbank as well.


Digging out potatoes:


Washing potatoes for donation:


Veggies are coming in with such speed, we picked 100.5 pounds of vegetables for donation this Saturday! It's a gratifying thing to pull such a bounty and lug it up to the foodbank we donate to: Vital Bridges' Groceryland. It was a hit!

Dave and Karen at Vital Bridges:


Clients helping themselves to the harvest:


Note: All photos in this post are by Katie Schuering and used with her permission. Thanks Katie!

Our (volunteer) workers' day

We had a beautiful warm spring day on Saturday May 2 to welcome a willing crew of volunteers from Chicago Cares (Thanks, Stephanie -- the brownies were especially good) and the neighborhood for our very own May Day celebration. With such good weather we managed to make progress on a wide range of tasks throughout the garden.

On the cultivation front, we planted all the greens that have been growing at Kilbourn Greenhouse for the last seven weeks (collards, kale, cabbage and chard). We also trained the raspberry canes in arches over their new wire supports, which should make picking a little easier. The smaller variety of seed potatoes (La Ratte fingerlings) had sprouted well, so we planted these in our newly built potato bed, and with many left over we also filled a bunch of containers and the bath tub (that will be an interesting experiment!).

In the dodecagonal bed, we sowed the last remaining outer portion with turnips. The temperature in this bed measured 59F, so we decided to hold off another week on sowing pole beans or snow peas as these seem to prefer 60F and above.

We also made progress on a couple of long-planned infrastructure projects. Alan and some Chicago Cares folks shifted the huge rock pile to the south-east corner of the garden and laid a new patio area, surrounded by a low stone bench on two sides. The idea is to use this shady, unproductive area as a place to work in the heat of the summer on such tasks as weighing and packing produce. We're hoping we can also create a pergola for some more vines.



A separate crew attacked the flaking paint on the benches in the demonstration garden next to the street. The idea here is to coat these with a soy-based sealer, rather than repaint them. But first we need to remove a lot of green paint. Lots of elbow grease was translated into clear progress on these. There's still a little work to do, but the improvement is obvious.



We also had a chance to talk to a local contractor about options for fixing the drainage problems in our delivery and loading area, perhaps by diverting the runoff into a rain garden in the area previously occupied by the rock pile. It's clear that we'll need to raise the area by the gate substantially. The contractor gave us some useful ideas about permeable drainage layers and pavers that we could use in this area. We're hoping to get a quote within the week, so that we can put together a budget and apply for a grant. Undoubtedly, doing this properly is going to cost some money.

The last of our bulbs are still brightening the front garden.





In our herb beds, chives, thyme, sage and mint are all coming back strongly.