A beautiful day, a good harvest and some seed saving

Apologies for the lateness of this posting! One blogwriter was ill and others were out of town, so a quick update for Saturday, September 19th....

Harvests continue, though the total was down from last week’s bumper high. If memory serves, the total for the 19th was about 125 pounds. And thanks to the DePaul Oxfam group and the Loyola vegetarians for their help!

A number of volunteers worked hard harvesting the Italian beans, which have continued to produce well:



Check out the eggplant, daikon, radishes and carrots ready for transport:



And we were happy to see a good crop of red peppers:



It seems like the neem oil treatment is helping the cucumbers and zucchini. The cucumber plants don’t look beautiful but they have continued to produce both the more familiar dark green variety and the paler, striated Armenian variety. There was some debate about whether to pull up the plants this week so that a cover crop could be sown, but we decided to give them another week since there were a number of smaller yet-to-be cucumbers still on the vine.

The zucchini look fab, and this blogwriter can vouch for their lovely sweet taste, delicious grilled with a little olive oil and rosemary. (Last week, a rather large specimen was overlooked during harvest and serendipitously ended up in my kitchen.)



Super-volunteer Al was the only one brave enough to continue the seed-saving process. Having fermented in the shed for a week, the cups of saved seeds did not look appealing:



But Al set about washing and then drying them on plates so we’ll have them for next year.

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.