Transplants Begin!

I arrived at the garden on Saturday morning to find these beauties inside the fence.  Such a lovely treat.  These kale, collards, broccoli and tomatoes are the first transplants that Ginkgo has planted this season.

 

A special shout out is in order for the awesome team from the Palmer House Hilton.  These transplant gurus snapped to work by divvying up the labor.  One person to place the plants evenly on the soil, one to dig a hole, one to loosen the roots and pop the transplant in.  I've never seen such a coordinated effort at Ginkgo and I tried to assure them that we weren't task masters, but the team indicated that tight deadlines were their specialty.  Hard working, efficient, and you couldn't ask for a friendlier bunch.  Thanks and thanks!

We missed Chris on round 1 of the group photo, but his efforts shouldn't go unmentioned.  Before embarking on back to back trips around the country to split sides with his improv and responsibly celebrate, Chris added to his track record as a weed annihilation machine and helped to get those transplants in and fences up.

Bobbi-Lee cleaned out our earth machine which was full of the lightest fluffiest compost I've ever handled.  We usually just ignore the bins and focus more on our managed 3 bin systems, but this passive approach broke some high quality trimmings down into the definition of loamy.


Here we are using kale as a border crop to maximize output per bed.  There should be plenty of space to reach in and handle the tomatoes and all we need now are some marigolds to ward off flea beetles.  I can't wait to see these beds all grown up. 

We Like-us a Ficus

If you've been to Ginkgo or have followed the blog, you know how excited we are about our fig trees.  Folks constantly tell us, "I've never seen a fresh fig" or ask, "How do they survive the Chicago winter?" Of all the fruits and vegetables that we grow, the figs are undoubtedly the most bizarre (sorry gooseberries).  I'm careful in picking the superlative because all of our produce is interesting–carrots have a deep (pun intended) history; the cruciferous plants (kale, broccoli, cabbage, radish, turnips, etc.), all relatives of the same original plant, can call to each other from bed to bed to catch up on family news; the Mammoth Sunflowers produce extraordinary growth; the tomatoes... THE TOMATOES! But the figs are just bizarre.

Each year we dig a large trench in the ground, swaddle the trees, and tip them into the holes. We cover the holes with plywood, then mound soil and straw on top to insulate the trees for the winter.  In the spring we resurrect them and stand in astonishment by how much they grow.

This year one of our trees, is already underground, but the other, dubbed Persephone, is too large to bury.  We have been looking for solutions and have considered wrapping the tree above ground. The other plan, and our likely choice, is to divide the tree.

Our trees are from divisions. A gentleman, Mario, gave us these divisions and they have rooted and grown tremendously at Ginkgo. Essentially, we would cut Persephone in half, giving each half plenty of root structure. One half would go into a pot of soil and eventually be given to a friend.  The other half would be buried for the winter.

This surgery is common, but we would be taking a chance and we don't have much experience with the procedure. I had come to believe that these trees really enjoy growing and that they will forgive us for errant cuts.

This is what we did last Saturday, and we hope you can come out this Saturday to help with Persephone.

Lids for the compost bins being constructed by an awesome team of volunteers

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.

composting and seeding

On the weekend of April 22, we were joined by a number of volunteers, including a group of young women from the Young Women Warriors program of the Chinese Mutual Aid Society and students from the DePaul Oxfam Association. The day’s focus was on making the best use of our imported compost, and trying to get something in the ground. The risk of frost seems low. In the few weeks before the seedlings at the greenhouse are ready to transplant, we may have time to grow a quick crop of peas, greens, and radishes.

We started by piling up compost in shallow berms between our fruit trees, taking care not to get the soil too near the tree’s roots.











We next worked a few barrows’ worth of compost into the beds in the northwest corner of the garden, into which we planned to direct-sow seed. We worked sand and compost into the carrot bed in the middle of the plot, leavening the soil so that our carrots would grow straight.

[The Friday before the workday, I had worried that we did not have enough seeds for cool-weather crops, so I went to Gethsemane Garden Center. (There are three types of stores that enable ambitions of agency in the susceptible: book stores, hardware stores, and garden-supply stores.) After a sustained impulse buy, I walked out of Gethsemane with a paper sack full of seminal potential.]

Once the beds had been prepared, a number of us planted. We alternated rows of peas (Cascadian and Super Sugar Snap) with those of radishes (Crimson Giant), spinach (Lavewa and Bloomsdale), and lettuce (Bronze Arrowhead and Freckles). We also planted a variety of carrots in the carrot bed.


Other volunteers tied back the rose bushes and layered compost in the bins. With the aid of our new compost thermometer (another gift from Chicago Cares), we could see that our bins are still too cold. Our bins need a proper layering of carbonaceous (brown) and nitrogenous (green) materials to achieve an environment that encourages the microbial activity that turns detritus into dirt.

Finally, we watered our freshly-sown beds from the rain barrels and covered the beds with new sheets of row cover.

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!

schwinnbuster

The last couple of work days have seemed slightly Sisyphean, with a lot of moving around of heavy things that we suspect will just have to be moved around again later. Two weekends back, we reconfigured our rain barrels: we elevated one on an additional level of cinder block supports to increase the pressure at the spigot and daisy-chained it to the second. Because our downspout was a little short, we rigged an extending sluice using a board and rope; we’re not sure how this will work.

We should have increased our use of rainwater long ago, solely because conserving resources was the right thing to do. It took a notice that the City plans to charge non-profits for their use of municipal water to provide a final incentive. We may purchase additional barrels and rig up a new gutter to collect even more rainwater from the roof of the garden shed.

Last week, we were joined by the Hardest Working Volunteers in Show Business—folks who all seemed to be in the local comedy and screenwriting scene, and who had no qualms with tearing into substantial tasks like digging out the back fence and turning over the contents of our compost bins.

At the request of our neighbors in Buena Park, we cleared a clogged storm drain in the front area. John found a twenty-dollar bill at the bottom of the pile of reeking muck; he immediately promised to spend the filthy lucre on refreshments next week.

We finished with the annual Bringing Out of Everything From the Garden Shed, followed by the annual Putting Everything Back into the Garden Shed, Only in a Slightly Different Configuration. Because we were in the middle of installing new shelves, we’ll have to reshuffle everything later.

Next weekend will feature more hauling about. We have scheduled a delivery of wood chips that we’ll spread throughout the garden to keep weeds down. We are fortunate in that the front garden will offer aromatic respite from our labors: when we need a break, we can sit on a bench and bask in the perfumed refulgence of our flowering trees and bushes. It’s as good as finding a schwinnbuster in the gutter.