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.

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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.

When it rains...we deliver!

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.

Holiday Roads

As the Fourth of July fell on a Saturday this year, Vital Bridges was closed and we at Ginkgo cancelled our volunteer day, favoring (if for one day only) grilling over gardening. Instead, Doug, Dave and Katie headed over to the garden early on Friday the third to harvest and deliver the produce. It was Katie's last day at Ginkgo (she's off to Chapel Hill via Guatemala) and we had another good yield of greens, beets, turnips, and herbs but we were also excited to see this year's first raspberries!

Summertime goodness:



On our way up Broadway, we talked about gardening and the good ol' US of A, from the vast produce plots at Monticello and Mount Vernon, to the Victory Gardens during the world wars; from the back-to-the-landers of the 70's, to the Guerilla gardeners and seed bombers of today. Unloading our pounds and pounds of greens we suddenly felt very patriotic.

Gardeners of America, we salute you!

Summer's here, and harvests are growing

Saturday, June 27 was a beautiful day in the garden, and a nice group of volunteers picked our largest harvest so far this year: 45 pounds, again mainly greens and herbs, but we also pulled up our first beets (mostly red, but there were a couple of golden).

Together, the beets and turnips made up 15 pounds of the harvest.

Beets and turnips ready to go:



Cart overflowing with greens, beets and turnips, waiting for customers at the food bank:




We also harvested a small amount of rhubarb and some garlic scapes. Garlic scapes are the tender, curled stem of the garlic plant – when diced and added to food, they add garlic flavor without too much heat.

Scapes harvested and ready to be weighed:



The spinach has just about exhausted itself, so the plants were pulled and the bed re-seeded with scallions, more turnips, pole beans and “longstanding” spinach (which does better in hot weather). More beans were sown in one of the beds, since one row hadn’t germinated. And there was lots of watering to do. (Little did we know that a large rainstorm would pass through Chicago on Saturday night – hopefully, it refilled the rain barrel, which has been providing us with lots of water this season).

And there was time to work in the flower beds. Thanks to the Chicago Cares team last week, most of the perennial buttercup is gone, though it is a determined plant and we will probably have to pull up a few interlopers from time to time. Weeding also uncovered some struggling calendula seedlings and a small lavender. We were happy to see that some of the wildflowers sown in the bed near the new patio are starting to appear. And we had time to plant more prairie plants in the front garden, including three small bedstraw plants (Galium boreale) and some Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans).

Zinnia in one of the flower beds:



Many thanks to Brian and Dave Sh. for this week's photos.

Planting out the tomatoes and weeding (again)

Saturday, May 16 was a lovely day at the garden. It was perfect weather for finally planting the tomatoes in their new beds. So far, we’ve set aside two beds for tomatoes and two beds for hot peppers and sweet peppers.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite warm enough to plant the hot peppers or the sweet peppers, so they went back into the cold frame for another week. One group of volunteers weeded (yet again) the tomato beds and then planted about 40 long-legged tomatoes, securing them to stakes and surrounding the beds with chicken wire to keep the rabbits out. The temperature was predicted to drop Saturday and Sunday nights, so we were hoping for the best.

Another small group weeded the flower beds just inside the gate, in preparation for planting cosmos, zinnias and calendulas. The native echinacea (purple coneflower) and rudbekia (black-eyed Susan) plants will be coming along later. (We're starting them from seed.)

Meanwhile, the rhubarb (beautiful big leaves in front of photo) and the raspberries continue to flourish.

As do the beans (on the right) and radishes (on the left) in the dodecagonal bed (you can see the two newly planted tomato beds in the background). The beets are still struggling along.


The daikon are looking leafy and there are a few carrot tops sprouting too.



The wine-cap stropharia mushrooms have been ordered. Mushrooms will be a new crop at Ginkgo this year. But...we’re still waiting to find out from the city when they will be able to deliver wood chips...

We've also started trying to ferment some comfrey leaves into fertilizer. We've got to make use of that ineradicable plant somehow. We dug out all the leaves we could find and put them into a container with a lid, and a spout at the bottom. Apparently, they are supposed to rot down quickly into a (possibly foul-smelling) liquid that is especially good for tomatoes.

Sunday's Chicago Cares crew got to work weeding (again!) and re-seeding the spinach bed, potting up the remainder of the plants that were brought over from the greenhouse at Kilbourn, seeding onions and more beets, and planting sweet potatoes!

Many thanks to Evelyn Y. for the photos this week.

Sun, sun, sun, where'd it go?

The weekend of April 18-19 gave a nice illustration of the fickleness of Chicago's spring weather. The Saturday was gloriously warm, with bright sunlight and temperatures in the low 70s. A jolly assembly of volunteers new and old worked in T-shirts mowing cover crop, turning dirt and spreading the newly arrived compost on every available bed. One of our local rabbits made a quick dash for safety after he/she was disturbed from a newly dug burrow amid the hairy vetch underneath the row cover, only to reappear hopefully half an hour later with a mouthful of straw.

With many hands to help, we were also able to plant several beds with hardier crops:

• three varieties of spinach next to the front fence
• carrots and daikon in the regular "deep bed", newly leavened with sand and compost
• a half bed of glazed-leaf collards, and
• Windsor broad beans and sugar snap peas, surrounded by onions, scallions, beets and radishes, all in the "dodecagonal bed"

Back at the garden on Sunday, it felt like we had wound the clock back a month, with steady rain, no sign of sun and temperatures hovering around 50F. A valiant group of Chicago Cares volunteers worked with great enthusiasm despite the fact that any job resulted in getting soaking wet. We lifted the soil in many more beds, spread a thicker layer of compost onto all the unplanted beds and got a head start on bunny-proofing as many beds as our limited supply of stakes would allow. At the same time, a smaller group screwed the new gutter to the eaves along the back of the shed (one task where having a steady rain actually provided some benefit). After restoring our energy with brownies, we tucked the newly planted beds under row cover to insulate them a little from the forecast sleet and called it a (very wet) day.