9 May 2015: rodent-proofing the fruit trees

9 May 2015 was chilly and overcast. We were fortunate that the rain stopped before we opened the garden to welcome the group of hardy volunteers who had arrived to help, including a group from Chicago Cares.

There are varieties of loveliness in the garden that occur throughout the year. It is sometimes easy to miss the shortlived beauty that appears just after a spring rainstorm, especially when it is cold and damp. Blooms and seedlings glowed in the cloud-obscured morning sunlight as raindrops dry on petals and leaves. The front garden was carpeted with petals that had fallen from flowering trees overhead.

Our group had work to do that day that wasn't particularly lovely: we needed to rodent-proof the beds that house the fruit trees in the back of the garden near the alley. While some of us installed hardware cloth around the tree trunks (to keep critters from digging into the beds), others sifted compost. After covering the hardware cloth with compost, we sowed seeds for alyssium between the trees.

We finished the day by planting a bed of carrots. In previous years, we fussed over our carrots, preparing a special bed for them by incorporating sand in the hopes that the looser soil would ease root growth. We've never really had much success in this coddling of our carrots; this year, we're letting them fend for themselves in a regular bed.

less for the flowers, than for what the flowers convey

Chicago Cares, a longtime partner in Ginkgo's mission to grow both food and community, surprised us again with a gift of gardening equipment, including hand tools, tomato stakes, and hoes. The flagship (or perhaps prairie dinghy) of this bounty was a new Ames wheelbarrow, which replaced the barrow that we used until the handles broke. I don't think that anything will break on our new wheelbarrow for a long time.

Ginkgo thanks Chicago Cares for its generous investment in community gardening.

Christmas in September

Some assembly was required. Behind Ivy and Lauren is part of the older wheelbarrow, which we'll find a use for. Few objects leave the garden once they enter it, other than fruits and vegetables.

Five minutes later, this was full of rotting hay for mulching.

You Shouldn't Be Able to Wear Pants in the Summer

I don't like to bring myself into this... but last week when my roommate and I roamed the apartment closing windows, putting box-fans away, packing up t-shirts and unpacking flannel-lined winter jeans, he said from inside a maroon tuke and scarf, "You shouldn't be able to wear pants in the summer." And he was right!  I mean what is this!?  Furthermore, I'm not a fan of the "interrobang".  I'm just at a loss.  As he spoke, little clouds of water vapor crept past his chattering teeth, confused about the early arrival of winter. 

Two weeks ago the heat and humidity were so oppressive that gardening became arduous, and I'm not begging for that to come back, but the tomatoes are wondering why the lettuce is still around.  Some of them have begun to ripen, and we are grateful, but compared to last year (a drought year) we are far behind in tomatoness.

Kafka put it best, "Coal all spent; the bucket empty; the shovel useless; the stove breathing out cold; the room freezing; the leaves outside the window rigid, covered with rime; the sky a silver shield against anyone who looks for help from it. I must have coal; I cannot freeze to death; behind me is the pitiless stove, before me the pitiless sky, so I must ride out between them and on my journey seek aid from the coal-dealer. But he has already grown deaf to ordinary appeals; I must prove irrefutable to him that I have not a single grain of coal left, and that he means to me the very sun in the firmament. I must approach like a beggar who, with the death-rattle already in his throat, insists on dying on the doorstep, and to whom the grand people's cook accordingly decides to give the dregs of the coffee-pot; just so must the coal-dealer, filled with rage, but acknowledging the command, "Thou shall not kill," fling a shovelful of coal into my bucket."  But of course fish peppers don't care any more about the coal dealer than the coal dealer does about the narrator.

What we need are history majors, anthropology majors, people with family cultures rooted in agriculture, anyone who knows of a dance, ritual, ceremony, OSHA-safe activity that can be used to implore the sun to linger a little longer so that we can finally call this thing a summer.

The sunny faces and plants in these pictures might contradict me and lead you to believe that I am exaggerating, but I assure you... it's not been summer yet and I'm wearing the pants to prove it.

Orange fruited tomatoes ripening.

These guys are labeled as "Orange Banana" but they are red... and globular... so I'm not sure.

A volunteer Sunflower is the first to start opening this season!

Go get'm

Fish peppers.  A beautiful variegated hot pepper.

The arugula is just now beginning to set out flowers and the flavor is becoming harsher.

Alan harvests the first Cabbage of the season.

What a beaut!

Thanks to Chicago cares and our independent volunteers for the hard work.

And a smattering of prairie flowers livens up the hugelkultur mound.

In Bloom

Spring was best described by Kurt Cobain who said, "Sell the kids for food.  Weather changes moods.  Spring is here again." ba da-da-dada-ahem!  While Cobain's words are often unintelligible, the blossoms on our ornamental cherry tree are well pronounced.

Was Saturday the 28th so beautiful because flowers were opening? Was it because we had gorgeous weather?  Maybe it was because we had an excellent and curious crop of volunteers.  Whatever the reason or combination thereof, it felt like spring and it felt good.

Volunteers worked to plant more early season seeds and we transplanted some of our hardier greens (Don't mistake this optimism for naivety.  We're not out of frost danger just yet).  Aside from planting, volunteers including a great group from Chicago Cares, calculated the dimensions of some of our beds so that we can update Ginkgo's site map.  We also began construction on our new compost system by cutting cedar 2x4s left over from the fence.  Another ambitious team helped to transfer finished compost from the existing bins to the beds.  They were able to empty the bin, a task that was impossible even a week ago because the pile was frozen.

The smell of warm dirt mingling with cedar  and cherry blossom might, after all, have been the reason why Saturday was a perfect day in the garden.
 

 

 

 

another day, another pile

Last Thursday, John took delivery of a load of wood chips from Crosstown Tree Service. The delivery truck was too large for our gate, so the service dumped its load where it could, flooding the back area. John spent the next two hours shoveling enough to where he could barely close the back gate. To complicate matters, the new pile of wood chips partially covered the older pile of compost that we had received the week before. We had a huge and—after Friday’s rain—sodden mass of organic material that needed to be shifted.


We were thus fortunate that many volunteers arrived on Saturday morning, ready to work. In addition to a biweekly group of volunteers from Chicago Cares and a new Meetup group from Second City, a number of individuals dropped in, asking for something to do.

We had a list of tasks with which to occupy them. First, we had to weed the areas between the raised beds. Then, while some of us worked from one side of the pile, shoveling chips into wheelbarrows for distribution throughout the garden, others worked from the muddier side, loading wheelbarrows of compost to work into the raised beds.

By the end of the day, most of the garden was either covered with wood chips or overflowing with organic compost and thoroughly worked.

Away from all of the earth moving, a couple of us worked in the northeast corner of the garden lot, sowing sweet pea seed in containers that we arranged around the fence. We hope that the sweet pea will crowd out the bindweed that usually menaces the corner in early summer.












We did little planting on Saturday, except for sowing a “cut-and-come-again” bed of lettuce in the bathtub. Now that the pile in the back of the garden is no longer a worry, we can turn back to planting quick-growing, cool-weather crops and make use of the time before we can transplant our tomatoes and peppers.

Convergence

You know that feeling you get when you arrive at the garden and 10 yards of organic leaf compost confront you like a sleepy cow resting on her haunches in the middle of the road, but then you realize that an unprecedented amount of volunteers have shown up to help spread it? No? Well, whatever... it's a great feeling.Because our yield was a little light last year we decided to import some fresh compost to amend our beds before we start planting. No disrespect to our compost bins, they're beautiful, but we just needed a little boost.But before we could spread the compost we had to weed the beds. Luckily, today was our first Chicago Cares volunteer day of the season. Chicago Cares, a group that organizes volunteer projects for curious Chicagoans, lends time and manpower to the garden regularly throughout the season and on days like today we cannot be more thankful.
In addition to the Chicago Cares volunteers, we also had some repeat visitors from Second City and they brought friends! It's rare to see the garden so busy, but thanks to so many hands we made short shrift of the weeding and started turning the cover crop (green manure) into the earth to get all that nitrogenous goodness into our beds.
Each bed got a healthy serving of the new compost and people got to work raking and shoveling.

And, as if we weren't already bowled over by the array of visitors to the garden, we got a special treat. Karen, one of the ORIGINAL Ginkgo founders, dropped by! I'm starting my third season with Ginkgo and I'm constantly amazed by the garden's history. When the garden was started in 1994 the neighborhood was a totally different place and there was nothing on the lot except for a Ginkgo tree and debris. The founders laid the foundations, built the beds, and started something that has grown beyond any expectation. Karen reminisced about what the garden looked like when she was there. Even our longest serving volunteers weren't around to see some of the things she talked about, so it was great to hear. She remembered learning to use a sledge hammer, and when the wrought iron fence was still a chain-link fence. Karen posed under the cherry tree and told us that it was originally from a plant sale at Marshall Fields! Imagining this beautiful unruly centerpiece as a knee-high potted plant in the back of someone's car was a truly profound lesson in the meaning of "grass roots". Stay tuned if you look forward to more of Ginkgo's story!

shear gratitude

Thanks to Chicago Cares , we now have a number of new gardening shears, clippers, pruners, and scissors, along with a 250-foot rolls of row cover and a compost thermometer.

Our tool inventory has dwindled over the last few years, so we are glad to have the new gardening implements. We may just tether the new tools to the shed to keep better track of them.

Gingko: 2011 Chicago Cares Community Partner Star

On the evening of Monday, November 28, a group of us from Gingko dressed up like adults (some of us did not recognize each other) and attended the Chicago Cares Star Awards Gala to receive the 2011 Community Partner Star award.

In its introduction, Chicago cares stated that

Ginkgo Organic Gardens consistently communicates with volunteers about upcoming project dates, other gardens in need of volunteers, and how they can become involved with Vital Bridges, a local food pantry catering to the needs of those living with HIV/AIDS. Their collaboration with Vital Bridges enables volunteers at Ginkgo Organic Gardens to impact the community in a variety of ways. By managing and maintaining a consistent volunteer base every week, their leaders make our volunteers feel welcome and truly appreciated.

And as we're coming to expect, there was a short film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=657kRLOsVac. (This has been the year of documentary for Ginkgo.)

Dave Snyder accepted the award for Ginkgo with his usual combination of grace, erudition, and flocculent majesty. The MC stated "when I looked around the room and saw Dave, I knew that he was the garden guy."

Later that evening, I asked where we would install our award.

"In the shed, of course," Dave answered. "Where else?"

So on the following Saturday, before adding leaves to the winter compost bin, I installed our award in an alcove formed by the joists in the wall of the garden shed: above where we hang the shovels, near the first aid kit and the keys to the cover plate of the water main, where we can see it on Saturday afternoons in summer.

three weekends in April

Julie and Nick pull up kale stalks

The morning of April 2 started cool and overcast, with clouds that eventually made good on their threats to rain on the trio of us that gathered at the garden to prepare the garden for spring. Julie, Nick, and I cleared the kale beds of old stalks, removed wire fencing, and picked up trash.

Meanwhile, a few miles to the west of the garden, Dave Snyder started our seedlings in the greenhouse at Kilbourn Organic Garden. Kilbourn grants us greenhouse space each spring, so garden volunteers do not have to crowd narrow apartment windowsills with precariously balanced rows of pots of seedlings.

April 9 was the first volunteer day of the season. A group from Chicago Cares joined us, as did a group from DePaul Oxfam. At one point, I counted twenty-six people in the garden, all of who looked to us for instructions.

Doug and Ben

During the winter, the small group of volunteers that (for want of a better term) refers to itself as the garden’s “steering committee” agreed to define formally three positions that would need to be filled each Saturday workday. The positions would rotate among the steering committee members so that we wouldn’t tire of them. I once described the positions as the Lover, the Foreman, and the Driver; word-besotted folk that most of us are, though, we already have a number of alternate names.

The Lover, or Der Spielmacher, serves as the guide to the garden and to gardening, giving the Ginkgo spiel to new volunteers—what the garden is, how it works, who it helps, what our yield is, etc. Aside from welcoming volunteers, the Spielmacher’s responsibilities teaching volunteers how to perform tasks like staking tomatoes and weeding correctly, as well as wearing the floppy garden hat and helping people to enjoy what they’re doing.

Spielmacher Dave and the April 2 volunteer crew

While the Spielmacher is helping volunteers grok the garden, the Foreman is running crews. The Foreman prepares the list of the day’s objectives and assigns groups of volunteers. The Foreman also maintains what little discipline we need, asking people to walk around instead of in the beds, pick up tools, etc.

pulling up last year's wildf

We won’t need someone to be a Driver for a few weeks. When we start harvesting, though, one of us will assume the responsibility of packing and delivery of produce to the pantry. The Driver winds up serving the additional role of liaison between the garden and the pantry.

On April 9, Dave Snyder was the Speilmacher and I acted as Foreman. Our volunteer group raked leaves, weeded beds, organized the shed, and cleaned up the garden. Because we had so many people, we needed only a couple of hours to make the garden neat and ready for the season.

raking in the front garden

weeding the dodecahedron

Stephanie's lemon cupcakes in their special purpose cupcake holder

On April 16, Susan and Evelyn worked with a group of eight volunteers. Sue summarized the day’s work in an email:

We did some more cleaning and weeding, smoothed out a big hump of compacted soil that I've tripped on right by the shed (it was a big job!), inventoried tools (to facilitate tool return at the end of the workdays....) and shelled various leftover seed pods in the shed to prepare for the new plantings.

The following Saturday, April 23, Dave led volunteers in unearthing the fig trees that we buried last fall to spend the winter underground. The figs look spindly right now after their hibernation, but should soon recover. One of the saplings produced small fruits last fall, so we might even be able to harvest figs this year.