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!

october 16, 2010 – cover crop and new gloves

After a late start on October 16, 2010, I did not arrive at the garden until almost 11:00 AM. The other volunteers had just finished packing and weighing the harvest, so I turned around and headed back north, towards the pantry.

 When I returned to the garden, the others were busy preparing beds for winter. Unfortunately, we ran out of cover crop seed midway through one of the beds. We probably overseeded the dodecahedron bed in our concern over its rehabilitation. We agreed to wait until early spring to plant more cover crop, as it would probably be too cold for any seed that we ordered now to germinate by winter.

Evelyn surprised us with a dozen new pairs of latex-dipped canvas gardening gloves. Our current inventory of gloves had become threadbare and mildewed, so the new gloves were welcome.

sept 25 2010 - baby Ben makes a visit

September 25, 2010 started bright, clear, and unseasonably warm—a giddy resumption of summer. If it wasn’t for unavoidable reminders of the actual season, like the bed of dead cucumber plants, you could almost imagine that summer was not yet over.








The vegetable plants even seemed fooled: carrots pushed up out of their bed, chard glimmered in the sunlight, and a line of radish seedlings wandered across the soil. 

 

Doug and Debbie surprised us by bringing their newborn son to the garden. Many of us downed tools and gathered round to greet little Ben.

While some of us dandled, others speculated as to what Doug read to Ben while he was still in utero: A Sand County Almanac? Doug’s PhD thesis?

Eventually, we returned to harvesting and packing: Ben was too young to notice Dave’s beard, so there was not going to be any the hair-grabbing entertainment. (There will be plenty of time for that later.)

Doug then brought out his other garden delivery: a large bag of mixed seed for our green manure cover crop. A couple of weeks previously, Doug had measured the area of the raised beds to determine the amount of seed to purchase.

At a point towards the end of each growing season, we usually have to decide when to stop harvesting crops and pull plants from the beds so that we can start the winter cover crop. It is a question of timing for us: the longer we wait, the greater our harvest yield; however, if we wait too late, until after the City turns off our water connection, we may not have enough time to establish our cover crop before winter comes. Although the crops resume growth as soon as the snows clear in the early spring, we still need to give them sufficient time to amend the soil.

Our timing quandary applies this year to all beds but the dodecahedron—the bed in the back of the garden where we tried to grow beets and green beans this year. As mentioned previously, because of numerous crop failures in that bed this season, we decided to start resting and amending it early. A few weeks previously, we cultivated the bed with our garden fork and applied various amendments, including kelp meal. Although we can’t vouch for whether the kelp meal actually had the “mystical powers” that its container purported, we do hope that it will add minerals and other nutrient to the depleted soil of the dodecahedron bed.

While I made the delivery, other volunteers pulled up the cucumber bed and sowed much of the cover crop seed. We will continue to sow the cover crop as we pull up the plants in the other beds, protecting the seeds from pigeons using row cover.

 

Sneaking into the garden

We sneakily opened the garden a week early for some wonderful volunteers from Chicago Cares. Our favorite volunteer coordinator, Stephanie, was back despite suffering from a terrible cold. And Doug made some lovely muffins for snacking on.

The weather was amazing: warm and sunny and conducive to spending time outdoors. The cover crop, planted at the end of last season, was lush and green in most (but not all) of the beds. The cover crop includes rye, alfalfa and field peas. The alfalfa and field peas are legumes. As they grow, they take nitrogen from the atmosphere during the winter and "fix" the nitrogen into the soil to feed our crops during the growing season. Also, at sowing, the cover crop was inoculated with bacteria known as Rhizobium. These bacteria do the actual nitrogen "fixing". So, as the cover crop grows it replenishes nutrients depleted from the soil during the last growing season.

During our first day back in the garden, the primary mission was to get the beds ready for planting. To do this we trimmed down the cover crop – in some of the beds the crop was about 4 or 6 inches tall! After trimming, volunteers helped turnover the beds, working the crop back into the soil where it will decompose, adding additional nutrients to help support this year’s crops.



Thanks to the hardworking volunteers and the wonderful weather, we were able to sow three beds of spinach (which will be able to tolerate a cold snap, should one come along) and a bed of snow peas (which always do well).



The rhubarb, lovage and sorrell are already growing strong. The raspberries are getting leaves.

This kind soul went out and got water for us to drink as the day proved unexpectedly warm. We’d collected water in the rainbarrel, but that is definitely unsuitable for drinking. And the city hasn’t yet turned on the water for the season.

And these two braved the compost piles, probably turning them for the first time since we put the garden to bed last November (unless someone snuck in over the winter or earlier in the spring, which is a possibility knowing some of our volunteers).




We’re looking forward to preparing more beds next week, although the weather isn’t predicted to be quite as beautiful.

Stretching out the harvest, bedding in the prairie

As fall dangles its chilly tentacles across the city, we're struggling to balance our optimism against our pragmatism.

Our optimism encourages us to eke out the most from the crops we have coddled all summer. Surely there's enough sun left for some of those green tomatoes to turn red/orange/yellow/purple.

Our pragmatism senses the first frosts approaching, and tells us that if we want to get our cover crop solidly established, we'll need to get beds cleared and re-sown pronto.

Saturday October 3rd gave us a chance to engage this dramatic tension. Though the forecast was for clouds and drizzle, we were lucky to get mostly calm and sun. Encouraged by this, we decided to give our prolific bean plantings a while longer to show their true strength. However, most of the cucurbits are looking pretty sad, and we pulled up the pumpkins and cucumbers, and re-seeded those beds with our cover crop mix.

This week was almost the last for pumpkins, and acorn and butternut squash:



One pumpkin eluded the hunt by hiding at waist height in a tomato plant:




We're also running into the legacy of various hurried planting decisions throughout the year. Several beds now have a weird mix of crops, and we're faced with pulling both the exhausted plants and the still-thriving ones, or leaving our cover crop with less time to get established.

Harvests are definitely winding down, and although peppers are still producing well, the tomatoes are starting to seem a little spent. We still have some potatoes and a whole bed of sweet potatoes in reserve, so there may yet be another bumper week.

Our radishes couldn't care less that it's fall:



With food production sorted for the week, around mid-morning we turned to some long-planned work to liven up the public garden that faces onto Kenmore Ave. Lots of work has been put into this area over the years, and while the paths, benches, trees and bulbs have stood up quite well, shrubs and flowering plants haven't survived as easily. The area is quite a challenge: it gets a lot of foot and dog traffic, being right next to the pavement, and when there's work to be done on the vegetable crops it's easy for us to overlook maintaining this little plot.

One thing we are going to try is to plant more prairie native plants in this area. Once they're established, they should be self-maintaining -- after all they're what grew here before the city lots were drawn up. Also, having more prairie plants around will help us educate ourselves and visitors about native NE Illinois ecosystems. We started a few prairie plants earlier in the year, and on Saturday we supplemented these with some 3" starter pots from Prairie Nursery in Westfield, WI.

Our new native plantings were:

• Baptisia lactea (white false indigo)
  
• Liatris aspera (rough blazingstar)
  
• Erygium yuccifolium (rattlesnake master)
  
• Sorghastrum nutans (indiangrass)
  
• 2 Hystrix patula (bottlebrush grass)
  
• Andropogon gerardi (big bluestem grass)
  
• Aster laevis (smooth aster)
  
• Asclepias incarnata (red milkweed)
  
• 2 Geum triflorum (prairie smoke)
  

Along with these new arrivals from central Wisconsin, we were glad to recieve black-eyed susans (Rudbeckia) and Sedums from a generous neighbor just across the street, and a wide assortment of mostly unnamed specimens from the city's Great Perennial Divide.

Thanks to the great crew of enthusiastic volunteers who helped give all these plants new homes and, most importantly, built an obstacle course of poultry fencing to keep out local dogs and kids while the plants settle in.

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.