the promise of plums, apples, and figs

While we sow and worry the soil in our raised beds, we sometimes forget what is happening around us in our small orchard of fruit trees. We performed a light spring pruning on our apples a few weeks ago, and unearthed the fig trees that we had buried for the winter; however, the trees had been dormant when we worked on them.

At the end of yesterday’s work day, I walked around the perimeter of the garden, looking at the fruit trees. I was pleasantly surprised to see that our Stanley plum tree is full of beginning fruit. Last year,  after suffering through a windstorm that happened at a critical point in the season, the plum tree lost most of its fruit, yielding only six pounds at harvest. If only a portion of the tiny plums that are on the tree make it to autumn, we could have a bumper crop.

Our apple trees are also loaded with bundles of potential fruit. It is a long time from flowering to picking, however; many things can conspire to keep the yield low, as it was last year. It is, nevertheless, heartening to witness what is literally perennial optimism, as apples start to blossom

The combination of an early thaw and a late freeze a few weeks ago may have damaged our pear trees. We’ll know for sure in a couple of weeks.

Even Persephone, our larger fig tree, has started fruiting. Last year, the then two-year old tree produced a handful of small, mild fruit late in the season. This year, we may get more, and earlier.

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.

october 9, 2010 - spa day

Some of the tomato plants have not yet received the memo about fall.

October 9 was unseasonably warm. The combination of the clear, angled light of autumn and the warmth of early summer was exhilarating. People spilled outside, wearing the light clothing that they had yet to pack away: pleasantly betwixt, taking nothing for granted.

A large number of volunteers visited the garden on this morning. A group from Chicago Cares joined our regular group of DePaul volunteers. With so many willing workers around, the garden enjoyed the horticultural equivalent of a spa day: a full mani/pedi, facial, seaweed wrap—and even a little Rolfing.

The harvest took little time to collect, weigh, and package. I delivered our produce to the pantry, dazzled by stark combinations of gold and azure along the bike path.

The other volunteers threw themselves into a variety of gardening tasks. Some worked on the beds in which we grew this year’s crop of carrots, squash, and eggplant, composting spent plants and turning the soil with our large garden fork. Some saved seeds from daikon radishes, while others thinned seedlings from our final crop of French Breakfast radishes.

The soil in the northeast corner of the carrot bed did not yield easily to the fork.

Saving daikon seed can be tedious-even with cookies.

Plastic kitty-litter boxes make for surprisingly good weeding buckets.

We were surprised this year by the growth of one of our young fig trees, especially when the sapling bore fruit. The fruit appeared too late in the season, so we were unable to harvest them. Dave explained that a fig fruit is actually a modified flower cluster called an inflorescence. We cut open one of the fruit/stems and examined the tiny flowers that lined the inner chamber. 

Cross section of pre-Newtonian fig, showing peduncular tissue surrounding stamens. It's not every day that one gets to make a physics joke in a botanical note--probably a good thing. It's probably also good not to have many occasions to use the word "peduncular".

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.

Photo album, May 8, 2010

The fig trees that were planted the previous week seem to be very happy in their new locations. This one was planted at the foot of the herb bed. Before the tree was planted, a trench was dug out in front of it and then covered over.

Our fig trees came from Italy by way of a friendly gardener. In the winter, the trees will be put to bed in their trenches and covered over with dirt and plywood to keep them warm. Being Mediterranean plants, they can't tolerate Chicago-style winters. We've been assured that this method will work.

Check back with us next spring to see how the trees do.