16 May 2015: It's a Garden!

Saturday, May 16th was that first day of the season when I really felt like we transitioned from starting the season to being in the season.  Of course the rhubarb and mint and oregano have been up for weeks, but they do that on their own.  On the sixteenth, we had harvestable heads of lettuce and radishes popping up out of the soil like the instant thermometer on a butterball (only the total opposite of an instant read thermometer on a butterball).  The lettuce and radish are from seeds sown by our volunteers.  Raise your hand if you planted Black Seeded Simpson lettuce! Oh, not you?  What about Red Sails? Surely, you are responsible for the Cherry Belle radishes?  Meanwhile, the Shirz and Penelope peas are making their way up trellises and our greens are looking great!



With regulars and volunteer groups from Second City and Northwestern University Gives Back, we got a tremendous amount of work done on this extended day.  We planted cucumbers. And sure, we planted your regular old slice it in a salad cause you need something crunchy cucumber (yawn), but we also planted Lemon cukes, which look like yellow tennis balls, and Armenian cucumbers (hubba hubba).  We also planted beans (Royal Burgundy and Milk & Cider), watermelon, Patty Pan squash, and a succession of lettuce. 

And that's just the stuff you can eat!  Don't get me started on the geraniums and Inky Fingers coleus.

The season is under way.  Unless we really screw something up, we will bring a harvest to Vital Bridges every week starting this upcoming Saturday and continuing into the late fall. 

A Planting We Will Go

A cloudy morning did not stop more planting at Ginkgo on our first Saturday in May. A solid group of new and returning volunteers sprinkled wildflower seeds in the front beds along the sidewalk while Dave, Annie, Susan, and Alan sketched out our morning plans. We will be looking for marigolds, alyssums, sunflowers, and more in the upcoming weeks!

weeding and seeding the flower beds in front

The potatoes and turnips sowed the week before received some TLC next. John planted more alyssum flowers around the potato plants to naturally ward off any Colorado potato beetles. Rounds of watering the seedlings followed. Many thanks to our rain barrel for stepping up while our hose remains out of commission for a few more weeks!

planting pea seeds

Cucumbers, beans, squash, and peas were next on the agenda. First, teams split up to weed and set up trellises for our spindling plants. Through a collaborative group effort, new seeds were sown before any rain could fall.

planting pole bean seeds

planting summer squash seeds in mounds

Cosimo was good at pruning and charged little.

- Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

Our fruit trees were not left neglected this weekend either. Dave climbed up our pear tree with ease to prune vertical branches that will not bear fruit.

Its white blossoms are open and have us crossing our fingers for a bountiful fruit harvest this year from all of our trees!

A Fortnight’s Worth of Farming

May 8 was a day of exuberant tuber planting. We planted sprouting pieces of potato in trenches that we dug in one of our raised beds. We also planted potatoes in our old claw foot bathtub. In other beds, we planted turnips, radishes (both the red variety familiar to many of us as well as white daikon), and two kinds of beets. We planted carrot seeds in a specially-prepared bed: carrots grow better in soil that is loose and sandy, so we keep a bed fluffed up just for them.

We also planted leafy greens. In one of the two beds that benefit from the shade of our plum trees, we planted mesclun and a variety of zombie mustard whose seed was the sole survivor of an mesclun planting of a few years back. This mustard is so tough, it’s almost an invasive plant--but it works well in salad, so there's little chance of it taking over the garden. We also transplanted collard and kale plants that we had started from seed at the Kilbourn Organic Greenhouse.

While some of us worked with vegetables, others of us worked with fruit. We planted two saplings of Chicago Hardy Fig (Ficus carica), a variety of the fruit tree that can survive colder climes like ours. We learned from Doug and Dave, our two volunteers who double as members of CROP, how to plant these saplings in a trench instead of a hole. When winter arrives, we’ll bed the saplings in their trenches and cover them so that they won't be exposed to the wind.

In addition to tending our food crops, we maintained the front garden of perennials and native plants. We weeded, collected trash, and removed a dead trunk from our smoke bush.



May 15 started warm and sunny, but ended chilly and cloudy. Our garden planning this year has been somewhat slapdash: aside from certainty about where the tomatoes and peppers will go, we’ve spent a lot of our mornings standing in a group, trying to remember what was supposed to go in each bed (Cucumbers? Sweet potatoes?). Our planning is not totally improvisational, of course—we’re not planting cucumbers right now, for instance—but it has more than the usual amount of whimsy.

We were a little anxious to see that our spinach plants were not thriving. Perhaps it was the spell of recent cool weather; perhaps our seeds were simply too old. If our spinach plants don’t improve, we’ll probably plant a replacement crop, because it will soon be too hot for spinach to grow without bolting.

We planted Yellow Wax bush beans in the dodecahedron* bed, alongside the beets and pole beans that were already there. We also planted the bush beans in the bed where we started peas, because an entire row of pea seeds did not germinate. (This lack of germination has become worrisome.)

We direct-sowed kale seeds in our kale bed to fill in places where our transplants were faring poorly. We also planted more potatoes. We learned that two five-pound bags of potatoes go a long way: we could have gotten away with extravagantly planted whole potatoes instead of just potato pieces.

This Wednesday, Doug transferred our tomato and pepper starts from the greenhouse to our temporary cold frame. For the last few years, we have cobbled together cold frames with hay bales and salvaged windows. Usually, we keep the seedlings in the cold frame for a week or so to harden them off, or acclimatize them to an environment harsher than that of the greenhouse. We’re not waiting that long this year: the seedlings are leggy, with long stems and shallow roots, which poses the risk that they'll be too weak. We’ll need to plant them deep, stake them well, and hope for a couple of mild weeks.

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*The bed is not actually in the shape of a dodecahedron (a solid), but a dodecagon (a polygon). It might not even be a dodecagon: none of us has actually taken the time to count the number of sides. It’s irrelevant, in any case: dodecahedron sounds marginally cooler than dodecagon, and this isn’t geometry—it’s gardening.

Transporticulture

Saturday afternoon the Active Transportation Alliance brought a whole slew of bicyclers for their annual Veggie Bike and Dine.

Veloship:


Folks were effusive about how great the garden looked – which, although we appreciated the sentiment, surprised us. We thought it looked awfully defoliated since earlier that day we'd harvested another 117.2 pounds for donation! Tomatoes and peppers are definitely coming in, but the big bumper crops were cucumbers and squashes. We also harvested swiss chard, kale, collards, beets, radishes, broad beans, bush beans, potatoes, basil, and handful of daikon.

Reviewing the data:


Late August and early September is the time of year with the biggest harvests! Come by and see how we're doing!

Note: Photos are courtesy and copyright of Arline Welty (top) and Katie Schuering (bottom).

Is summer finally on the way?

The garden welcomed a large crew of volunteers on a beautifully sunny holiday Saturday, May 23, to seed, weed, water, harvest and transplant.

The ornamental alliums (members of the onion family) in the front garden are fully in bloom now. Unfortunately, a few were snapped by the wind. These were cut and made into a bouquet for one lucky volunteer. Also unfortunately, there was a lot of trash in the front garden, which was picked up by the bravest volunteers.



A new wildflower bed was seeded next to the new patio.

Onions, pole beans and snap peas were sowed in the large dodecagonal bed. Bush beans and soy beans were sowed in half of a nearby bed.

The fava beans sowed earlier in the dodecagonal bed are looking happy.



And the radishes in that same bed continue to flourish.



Swiss chard was moved from the cold frame and transplanted into new beds.



Unfortunately, the tomato plants suffered a bit from the wind earlier in the week. They were looking a bit beaten down. Hopefully, the thorough watering they got on Saturday, and the sun over the weekend, will help them toughen up a bit.

The herb bed is rather full, so cumin and tarragon were started in pots. Chives and mint continue to proliferate and be harvested.

Creeping buttercup had taken over about three-quarters of one of the flower beds, so a team of three spent a good long time weeding, but only managed to get about halfway finished. Creeping buttercup is a nice looking plant with its serrated, variegated leaves and bright buttercup flowers, but it was strangling the sedum and everything else that might want to be coming up in that bed later.

We’re looking forward to lots of transplanting (and a lot less weeding) next week. The sweet peppers and the hot peppers are spending their last week in the cold frame, just to be safe.

...and the wood chips from the city finally arrived! They were spread throughout the garden to help keep down weeds.

With thanks to Evelyn Y. (again), who seems to have become our unofficial photographer.