18 April: a mound of work

On 17 April, Crosstown Tree Service delivered a huge mound of wood chips to Ginkgo. We welcome these chips: they help us to control weeds, to prevent the walkways from getting muddy, to mulch our fruit trees, and to keep the garden looking tidy.

The cherry tree

The following day, Evelyn, Ivy, Karen, and I were joined by a large group of volunteers: NJ, Alex, Stephen, Holly, Grant, and Jaboukie, students from Second City (a.k.a, the Hardest Working Volunteers in Show Business); Courtney, Patricia, and Eduardo from the Palmer House Hilton; and J.J., Clare, Griffon and his mom, and Taylor and his dad.

We set to work. While some of us distributed wood chips throughout the garden, others transferred to beds compost from both our compost bins and the former "dodecahedron" raised bed that will be the site of our new greenhouse. We cleaned up the front garden; tended our hoophouse-covered beds of radishes, peas, and lettuces; organized our seed library; and repaired a rain barrel.

The weather that day was exhilarating: clear and sunny, but with a chill wind. Our ornamental cherry tree was in its brief but dazzling flower. There are, I think, fewer ways better to spend such a day than to work hard, with like-minded people, on a project whose benefits one cannot contest. With all due respect to Mr. Nash, this is certainly cheaper.

At this point, the only things growing in our garden are overwintered garlic in one of our beds and flowers in the front.

Virginia Bluebell

Tulip

More tulip

Garlic

making the earth say beans instead of grass

A full month has passed since the last blog entry. In that hot month, the garden has waxed verdant and fecund. You can barely discern our claw foot tub now through its raiment of flowering potato plants, and the dodecahedron bed is a jungle of striving bean tendrils.



Although we've been remiss in our blogging, we have been steadily photographing the garden, and keeping records of our weekend harvests. We'll gradually bring the blog up to date.














For now, though, a few pictures, and an excerpt from Thoreau's essay "The Bean Field":

Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass—this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.