no everyday experience is too base for the thinking man

My interests in sustainable agriculture and sustainable transportation began at around the same time. I purchased my first commuting bike in 2005. I probably biked to my first workday at Ginkgo in 2007.

As my engagement with the garden deepened, so did my interest in human-powered transportation. In 2009, I bought a bike cart so that we could deliver garden produce to the pantry without relying on automobiles. I will admit to becoming obsessed with the idea of our going an entire season without resorting to mechanized transport. We've never achieved that goal, but we have come close.

A couple of years ago, my shared interests started to converge in crunchier ways. I purchased a fixed-gear bike for commuting and fell in love with what I think is a Platonic ideal of movement under one's own power. After a while, I hitched the cart to my fixed-gear bike for deliveries to the pantry. Even though the stress of pulling a cart loaded with up to 150 or so pounds of produce gradually crushed my rear wheel hub bearing (and sometimes strained my knees), I kept it up, because I was able to pursue two of my favorite activities at the same time.

I wasn't really worried until I added to the mix a pair of overalls that I had purchased at a Blain's Farm and Fleet while on a business trip to Madison. [I have discovered, by the way, that in addition to being quite practical for gardening, overalls allow one to assume a relaxed demeanor opposite to that imposed by blue jeans, as discussed by Umberto Eco in his essay "Lumbar Thoughts."] On a Saturday afternoon some time early this spring, I realized that I was riding around on a fixie in Uptown, wearing a pair of Carhartts and pulling a bike cart of produce from an organic garden. This look of mine had seemingly arisen gradually through accretion; all that I needed to complete it were muttonchops and a bottle of kombucha.

I felt self-conscious for a second as I practiced a track stand at the red light at the intersection of Lawrence and Broadway. I looked like some kind of weird combination of Wicker Park and Some Rural Exurb With "Park" in the Name. Then I just told myself to relax and get over myself. The light changed, and I mashed to get the cart moving.

more pictures about bike carts and food

I usually try to take a photo of the loaded bike cart before it leaves for the garden. Once at the pantry, I then try to take at least one photo of our produce after I have arranged it in the baskets that the pantry provides for us. If I get to the pantry later than usual, my photos sometimes turn out blurry, because I am rushed and don't always use a flash when I should.


July 2, 2011

Notice the garlic scapes, turnips, radishes, and snap peas amid all of the leaves.





















July 9, 2011

July 16, 2011

July 23, 2011

July 30, 2011

August 6, 2011

August 13, 2011

The colors of our produce shift to the red end of the spectrum.

August 20, 2011

September is mostly a blank in my photo album. I spent most of the month visiting family, and so don't have photos for a number of harvest days, especially for the day on which we  delivered 24 pounds of butternut squash.

October 8, 2011

 Notice the potatoes.

Peppers are abundant.
















October 15, 2011

  The few pears that survived squirrels and heat.















October 29, 2011

Mini-bell peppers.
















November 5, 2011

November 12, 2011

october 23, 2010 – end of a streak

It rained on Saturday, October 23, 2010—both in Chicago at the garden and in Wisconsin where I was on vacation. Dave was also out of town, and Annie was out sick; so no one was around to use a bike trailer to transport the day’s harvest to the Vital Bridges pantry. Susan delivered the garden’s produce in her car.

The following weekend, Susan broke the news to me that we broke the streak of delivering by bike that we had maintained since the beginning of the growing season.

“At least it was with a Prius”, Sue said.




In retrospect, I think that it was for the best that we made at least one delivery by car. A perfect streak of bike delivery would only have provided fodder for a sanctimony that we strive to avoid.

One thing that I enjoy about working at Ginkgo is that we try to follow our principles without being needlessly doctrinaire. We believe in organic agriculture, and we use organic methods as much as is practicable—but we don’t interrogate every orange peel and lettuce core that might make its way into one of our compost bins. We save our own seeds and purchase heirloom varieties whenever possible—but we will also pick up a few conventional eggplant starts if they go on sale at Gethsemane. We keep our carbon costs down by using bike trailers for deliveries—but we delivered by car for years, and will again when necessary. We try not to let the ideal get in the way of the good.

In 2010 Ginkgo Organic Gardens delivered over 1200 pounds of fruits and vegetables, of which all but around 50 pounds was delivered by human power. We’re all pretty happy about that.

Peak Vegetable and hippy tipping points

We arrived early at the garden on Saturday, August 21, worried that there would be neither time nor volunteers enough to handle another eruption from our vegetal Eyjafjallajokull. Our concerns proved to be disappointingly unfounded: the day’s take was 100 pounds less than that of a week ago, and our group made short work of harvesting and packing it. As with Peak Oil or Peak Fish, we might not know for a while whether last week represented Peak Vegetable for this season.

Week 34 yield comparison

There may not have been as many tomatoes as expected (50 instead of 75 pounds), but what was there was cherce. A number of plants were optimally ripe: small, firm fruit fell into the palm at the slightest touch of the vine; in fact, many tomatoes appeared to have fallen in response to the light rain of the night before.

The cucumbers and squash, on the other hand, were sparse. Some of the cucumbers were yellow and watery-looking. We speculated that the plants are still recovering from the combined insult of both powdery mildew and the measures we had to take to remove the fungus. There were still flowers present, so we hope that the reduced harvest is only temporary.

We had a diverse, though reduced, collection from our carrot, radish, and beet beds. We were able to harvest a cabbage; however, the collards and kale yielded less than expected.

Our biggest disappointment came from the potatoes. After the 22+ pound bonanza of Cranberry potatoes last week, we anticipated another large harvest. We dug tentatively around in other beds in which we had planted Yellow Finns and LaRattes, but found little. Our claw foot tub yielded only a few pebbly spuds. We may have been early—after all, some of the plants still had flowers. We decided to wait a couple of weeks more.

Slim pickings in the tub

We had room to spare in the bike trailer for our produce. There was even a space in a rear corner, into which Dave tucked the paper bag of cut flowers that we had arranged.

“Great. I’ll look like a hippie,” I said.

Dave looked at me for a second before replying. “So delivering produce from an organic garden to a food pantry with a bike trailer wasn’t already enough?”

Groovy, man. Groovier, actually.

He had a point.

While Dave and I discussed whether we had reached a hippie tipping point, Candace won a battle with a Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) that had sprouted in the front garden. Alianthus trees are invasives that often colonize recently cleared areas. We usually have to remove at least one alianthus from along a fenceline each summer.

It’s not that we dislike alianthus trees in themselves. Although it is true that alianthus leaves smell like rancid peanut butter, it is also true that by late fall, the fruit from our namesake ginkgo tree reeks like a baloney sandwich forgotten in a glove box. The problem with alianthus is that it suppresses the growth of nearby plants by releasing allelopathic chemicals into the soil. Redwoods do this too; then again, redwoods don’t smell like rancid peanut butter. Perhaps it is the smell, after all.

I left Candace to dismember the alianthus and headed to the pantry. It is certainly much easier to move ripe and glowing tomatoes, cucumbers, and carrots than it is to convince people to take the unsexy but vitamin-rich greens of early summer. If we could serve cooked greens, we’d have no problem.

I returned to the garden to examine the fruit trees. The pears are almost comically large for their trees; we’ll soon need to harvest the fruit and set it up to cure. The laden branches of our Stanley Plum trees describe arcs of tightly grouped purple fruit, still weeks away from being fully ripe. We have few apples, unfortunately: most of our apple trees are trained in espalier along the back fence, and passersby in the alley have a liberal interpretation of usufruct. The fruit on trees that are out of reach, including those on our grafted crabapple rootstock, are almost ready.

The Ginkgo fleet

The increasing yields from the garden are starting to tax the capacity of the bike trailer that we use to transport produce to the Vital Bridges pantry. On July 10, we were able to load everything into two levels of plastic cartons.









A week later, we had to move to a third level. And this is before the tomatoes arrive.














We are not worried that we will eventually not be able to deliver our produce by bike, for we now have two bike trailers. We anticipate the maiden run of the second member of the Gingko delivery fleet next week.