The Ginkgo Greenhouse

Ginkgo Organic Gardens now has a greenhouse!

At 9 feet wide, 14.5 feet long, and 7 feet high, the Ginkgo Greenhouse (GG) should be large enough to house a variety of plants and equipment. Framed in aluminum and sporting polycarbonate panels and roof vents, GG will allow us to start plants like tomatoes and peppers on site. No longer will we need to rely on windowsills and other bits of sunny space borrowed during the late winter, or worry over transporting fragile flats of seedlings to the garden.

Construction of GG required almost the entire 2015 season. Work was done mostly on Saturdays after harvest and Sundays, but we worked on a few evenings, too. We started to prepare the site in May and finished (more or less; I suspect that there will always be things to tweak or repair) in early October.

Many people and organizations contributed to the financing and construction of the GG. If you volunteered during the 2015 growing season, I probably asked you to help me with some greenhouse-related task.

I'd like to name everyone who helped, but I'm certain to forget someone--after all, the project did require six months. I offer what I hope are pre-emptive apologies to anyone whose name I left out.

Thanks to the following:

1. The Culinary Trust--whose funds from its 2014 Richard Sax Food Action Grant made the greenhouse possible.
2. Dave Snyder--farmer, poet, networker, and Ginkgo emeritus--who wrote the original grant application.
3. Britt Willey, Joe Zarrow, and Ben Helphand of NeighborSpace, who contributed a testimonial for the grant application.
4. Lori Cannon of Vital Bridges, who contributed a testimonial for the application.
5. Tim Iteen, Treasurer for the Ginkgo Steering Committee, who managed the accounting for our purchases of the greenhouse, concrete, and gravel.
6. Eduardo Castillo of Palmer House Hilton, who built GG's foundation. This involved doing things like removing from post-holes enormous blocks of concrete left over from the building that originally occupied the garden site.
7. Eric Chapman and Bryan Helpert, who along with Ginkgo Steering Committee member Ivy Czekanski are the reason why the GG is upright at all, because they figured out how to connect the side panels to the back and front (something that eluded me completely).
8. Johanna Luks and Stephanie Salant, who contributed both individually and as volunteer coordinators for groups from Chicago Cares. Chicago Cares volunteers did things like help break down the old "dodecahedron" bed that was where GG is today and grade the site.
9. Volunteers from the Second City Dream Team, who helped prepare the GG site.
10. Jordan Grossman, who helped me to make sense of the more infuriating assembly diagrams in the multilingual instruction manual, which I am sure is responsible for bursts of umlaut-larded invective all over the Western gardening world.
11. Griffin Grossman, who helped connect the frame to the foundation, when he was not designing our ornamental beds.
12. John Cahill, who did everything from wrangling massive boxes of greenhouse components from the delivery truck to wielding a 50-lb breaker bar to bust up buried concrete blocks to fashioning replacement fittings for window panels from clothes hangers.
13. Karen Poulson, Evelyn Yang, and Dave Short of the Ginkgo Steering Committee, who in addition to helping with delivery and construction managed volunteers on Saturday workdays so that I could obsess over my green whale.

Here's to seedlings on site in 2016.

The view from inside

Part of the disassembled greenhouse. They were delivered too late in 2014 for us to start construction that year.

Ed lays out the metal base on the old site of the dodecahedron bed.

John ponders the huge blocks of concrete underground that impede construction of the foundation.

the completed base,  filled with pea gravel flooring

the multi-lingual, cryptic, and exasperating instruction manual

Eric, Bryan, and Ivy wrestle frame panels together, using techniques not covered at all in the instruction manual.

the completed frame

The last panel was installed (the first time, anyway) late on a Sunday evening.

cross town seedlings

Kilbourn Organic Greenhouse is on the other side of town from where many of the Ginkgo gardeners live. Because most of us either have day jobs or use alternate forms of transportation (or both), it has been difficult for us to schedule visits to tend to our seedlings while the greenhouse is open.

Annie and I saw the results of our scheduling issues on Sunday, when we met at the greenhouse to prepare the seedlings for their move to Ginkgo. Our young seedlings had suffered much in their first few weeks. The seedlings were pale, parched, and leggy—weak from their efforts to escape their cramped seed pots. Worse, though, were the tomato seedlings with broken stems—victims of a hail storm that pelted them while they were outside the walls of the greenhouse, being “hardened off”, or gradually exposed to the outdoor climate. No amount of hardening off can prepare a tomato seedling for a hailstorm.

We composted the broken seedlings, potted up what we could of the rest, and set everything outside again. The forecast called for warm and clear weather for the following week, so the seedlings would have some time to strengthen before we moved them to the garden.

I had thought that we still had a couple of weeks before we needed to move our seedlings. That was, for example, why we had sown radish seeds only a couple of weeks before in the beds that we planned for the tomatoes: we figured that we had time enough for one round of radishes. After witnessing firsthand the state of the seedlings at the greenhouse, though, I realized that it would be good to transport the seedlings by the next weekend.

The following Friday, I took the day off from work and rented a pickup truck from iGo. I drove to Kilbourn, loaded the truck bed with seedlings, and drove everything over to Ginkgo. Moving the seedlings required two trips across town and five hours because of traffic. Driving with a truck full of young plants broiling in the noonday sun, moving at a snail’s pace in a traffic jam caused by a road construction crew, and knowing that I was going to have to extend my iGo rental by yet another hour, I realized the following:

1. I still loathed driving in general, and driving in Chicago in particular.
2. Ginkgo needed its own greenhouse. 

After returning the truck, I biked back to the garden, glad to be free of the internal combustion engine. I arranged the seedlings in the shade of the fruit trees to protect the plants from the sun and installed temporary fencing to protect them from rabbits.

 Before I left for the day, I conducted an informal seedling inventory. I was relieved to learn that even after losing so much to hail damage, we still had over 150 tomato plants. We also had seedlings for eggplant, peppers, collards, and even a single beet. In retrospect, I realized that we had started so many tomato seedlings back in February that the hail storm might have done us a service: we no longer had to agonize over finding homes for a large number of extra plants.

seedlings

Kilbourn Organic Greenhouse

Around a month ago, we started seedlings that we hope will become this season’s crop of tomatoes, peppers, kale, and herbs. A couple of weeks later, Dave and I left the garden a bit early and biked across town to the Kilbourn Organic Greenhouse, where our seedlings grow until they are hardy enough to be transplanted into beds in the garden.

 Our flats of seedlings, or starts, occupied a small space on a counter in the back of the greenhouse, dwarfed by the huge inventory of seedlings that Kilbourn was growing for its annual garden sale. Some of our tomato starts were “leggy”: having grown too quickly because of untimely exposure to heat, they were not yet strong enough to support the new length of their stems. Our peppers and kale, though, were upright and sturdy, even a little stubby—evidence of controlled and even growth.



We transplanted our starts from their tiny cells in the seedling flats to larger pots. Transplanting is delicate work: the soil around the seedlings is loose and can fall away to expose fragile roots, which risks shocking or even killing the seedling.

To protect a start during transplantation, we work with pointed sticks, or dibbles. We first push a dibble down into the cell near the stem of a seedling; using a combination of squeezing the cell’s walls from the outside and digging around the start with the dibble, we eventually ease it from its home.

We next prepare the start’s new home. After using the dibble to hollow out a cavity in the soil in a small pot, we align the dibble beside the start’s stem and guide the start into the soil ”like a lineman making way for the fullback”, according to Dave.

(Sporting similes are rare among the Ginkgo crowd. We occasionally hear the crowds roar at Wrigley, but we’re usually doing something else at the time, like staking tomatoes or spraying aphid soap on kale leaves.)

tubs of tempered water

After filling in the remainder of the pot’s cavity with soil, we add the pot to a flat. When a flat is full of small pots, we water it. As is every other activity involving seedlings, watering is a delicate activity. Pouring water directly over a start in a pot could either compact the soil around the start’s roots or—just as bad—wash soil away from the roots. There is also the chance that the water will not penetrate the soil down to the roots.

A better way to water seedlings is to submerge the entire flat of pots into a basin of water. The water wicks up from the bottom of the pot. When the soil at the top is moist, the pot is thoroughly irrigated. It is also good to use water that has been sitting around for some time. This “tempered water” won’t be so cold as to shock the seedlings; and if the water was drawn from a municipal tap, letting it sit allows some of the chlorine to vaporize. We avail ourselves of the tempered water that Kilbourn keeps in huge tubs next to its seed-watering stations.

Dave with Kilbourn's Kirsten Akre

Ours are truly coddled seedlings, thanks to the Kilbourn Organic Greenhouse: started in controlled conditions of heat and light; oxygenated by the breezes of air-circulating fans; and irrigated through capillary action using tempered water. All that they need to be like Kobe beef is to receive regular massages.

May 7, 2011

May 14, 2011

The idea of massaging seedlings seemed absurd until I read of the practice of brushing, in which one manipulates seedlings to encourage stronger stem growth. If we continue down this path, we’ll soon be wafting sage smoke in the greenhouse and playing Mozart to our tomato starts while performing tiny acts of horticultural Rolfing on them.

Tomato planting at the greenhouse

Dave Sny and Megan and Michael biked and bused it over to the greenhouse to make sure the tomatoes got planted. Somehow, the rest of us wimped out. Thanks for picking up the slack, y'all.

They planted a bumper crop of heirloom tomatoes (which means we'll be able to save seeds from this year's crop to plant next year).

To check out what these gorgeous tomatoes look like, see our earlier post.

• Oxheart
• Japanese black truffle
• Orange banana
• Brandywine
• Fireworks
• Oregon star
• Koralik
• Amish paste
• Fruity cherry
• Rutger
• Dad's sunset
• Fox cherry
• Cherokee purple
  
• Pearly pink cherry
• Purple calabash (a garden favorite)