pictures from June 22 workday

In late June, our harvests are in all shades of green.

June 3-7

This week in Gardening!  It was a big week for beans.  Although the cool weather has given us a tremendous season for peas, the yields are starting to taper off just in time for beans to start producing.  We have a lot of varieties this year ranging from the historic Cherokee Trail, to Purple Bush, and Scarlet Runners.  The Scarlett Runner Beans have been planted in the dodecahedron as part of our attempt at the 3 sisters (corn, beans, and squash), and they will look beautiful.

Ivy uses her Cat's Cradle skills to make trellis for our climbing beans

While the Scarlett Runners will be a big show with lots of flowers and delicious beans, I am most excited for the Milk and Cider beans that were planted in the hay bales on the north side of the garden.  Months ago volunteers built a trellis out of pruned fruit wood with a beautiful aesthetic. Last weekend a team punched holes in the bales at the base of the trellis, filled them with fresh compost and planted Milk and Cider beans to grow up the trellis.  These beans are an enticing cider color with mottled splashes of white.  The goal is to allow these beans to grow and dry on the plant rather than be picked as "green beans".  The beans will be an impressive addition to every dinner plate they touch.

Dario sifts compost to be stuffed into hay bales for bean planting

Hay bales stuffed with Milk and Cider beans and compost

John offers a drink to the newly planted beans

And beans are amazing and a magical fruit and fix nitrogen and are just one of the healthiest things you can eat, but... they simply don't have the swagger of raspberries.  Melville identified the lack of sex appeal in beans when he wrote, "In this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim)."

This was our first substantial raspberry harvest of the year and more substantial harvests will come.  It's hard to pick the delicate Rubus idaeus without sampling every few for quality, but well disciplined volunteers are responsible for this bounty.

 

And what's this?  Our first Black Raspberries have appeared.  Rubus occidentalis is not to be confused with Blackberries, which are not actually berries at all (we don't grow blackberries, so I'll leave that alone), but instead are just a cultural shift from their red raspberry cousins.  The brambles are dense and need better trellising, but they are healthy and volunteers who wade in to get the fruit are not begrudged for replenishing themselves.

This week also brought another large harvest of leafy greens, which, it turns out, solve every problem your body can imagine.  Some of the greens are varieties of Kale, and some are Collards, but growing underneath some greens are beets!  Golden beets (pictured) and Bull's Blood beets and Chioggia beets.  Under some of the other greens are radishes, French Breakfast, Crimson Giant, and Easter Egg (I think).  Some of the radishes look bizarre (pictured).

Under other leaves are Potatoes, but those are not edible greens and the potatoes aren't ready to harvest yet, so we will save that post.

Thanks to all the volunteers who did such hard work harvesting, planting, transplanting and maintaining so that the garden get's to show off its good side.

Berry Bounty

The big news 'round Ginkgo this week was the bumper crop of raspberries. Between the black and red raspberries, we plucked six pounds off our canes (note: this weight doesn't count those berries that might have accidentally wound up in our mouths whilst picking.) Of course, the folks up at the pantry were as pleased as we were proud.

Steering committee member Susan shows off the bounty:


Even though we're still mostly harvesting greens the summer vegetables are growing fast. Sweet potatoes, squashes, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and tomatillos are all going gang busters. We even pulled an eggplant this week!

After taking care of the harvest (50 lbs!), we got to work on the summertime nitty-gritty. A fantastic group of volunteers from Chicago Cares did a yeoman's job (or yeoperson, rather, and several of 'em) of weeding, watering, cutting, tying, and tending the garden. It was hot out but the volunteers chipped in without complaint.

Good work if you can get it:


This season has been very productive but the insect world has noticed too. Chicago Cares volunteers Sam and David addressed our aphids while the rest of us peeked fearfully at some wasp condominiums going up under the eaves of the shed. Just when we were about to curse their entire subphylum, who should show up on the milkweed but a monarch butterfly caterpillar?

What a charmer:


This tyke and her friends are welcome in our garden. As are you! Come visit Thursday evenings or Saturday mornings to see how we're doing.

Holiday Roads

As the Fourth of July fell on a Saturday this year, Vital Bridges was closed and we at Ginkgo cancelled our volunteer day, favoring (if for one day only) grilling over gardening. Instead, Doug, Dave and Katie headed over to the garden early on Friday the third to harvest and deliver the produce. It was Katie's last day at Ginkgo (she's off to Chapel Hill via Guatemala) and we had another good yield of greens, beets, turnips, and herbs but we were also excited to see this year's first raspberries!

Summertime goodness:



On our way up Broadway, we talked about gardening and the good ol' US of A, from the vast produce plots at Monticello and Mount Vernon, to the Victory Gardens during the world wars; from the back-to-the-landers of the 70's, to the Guerilla gardeners and seed bombers of today. Unloading our pounds and pounds of greens we suddenly felt very patriotic.

Gardeners of America, we salute you!

Speedy collards

A quick drop in for Wednesday watering today. Everything's looking pretty happy, as much as bare circles of earth can do. When we were putting the trays back after bottom-watering them all, we noticed a few collard sprouts peeking out—just four days from sowing to germination.

We also had a chance to sow one more tray of plugs with those seeds we somehow overlooked at the weekend. These were:

Vegetables

• Japanese Pickling Eggplant
• Black Eggplant (two rows)
• Green Globe Artichoke
• Siskiyou Sweet Onion

Greens

• Lettuce (seed collected from garden)
• Mustard (seed collected from garden)

Herbs

• Lime Basil
• Cumin
• Oregano
• Italian Flat-Leaf Parsley
• Mexican Tarragon

New season, new beginnings

Ginkgo’s 2009 growing season kicked off on Saturday, March 14, with a frenzy of sowing. This year we’re hoping to get much more momentum at the start of the year by starting off many of our seedlings in one of the greenhouses at Kilbourn Park.

Kirsten Akre, who runs the three all-organic greenhouses and a host of associated programs for the Chicago Park District, has very kindly agreed to let us use some bench space to germinate and raise trays of seedlings to get a head start on spring. In recent years, Ginkgo has had to make do with raising seedlings in spare corners of living rooms and on windowsills. The result has been a limited stock of rather spindly plants.

We felt these restrictions badly last May, when having toiled one Saturday to plant two beds with our full inventory of carefully raised tomato plants, almost all of them were destroyed in a storm two days later. Although the plants probably hated the cold temperatures, we think the worst damage came from the strong winds and driving rain. We’re hoping that two changes this year can reduce this risk. One is to grow our seedlings at Kilbourn where the better conditions should make for more sturdy young plants. The other improvement we’re planning is to construct some improvised cold frames at Ginkgo to allow us to harden off the young plants outdoors, so that they will be tough enough to withstand the Chicago weather once we’re ready to plant them.

We decided to focus our early efforts on three main areas: tomatoes, peppers and greens. The tomato and pepper crops are a mainstay of Ginkgo’s summer production, and getting an early start could allow us to begin harvesting much earlier. Greens, particularly collards, were a big hit with people at Vital Bridges last year; again, we hope that starting these off under glass will mean bigger yields from earlier in the summer.

Our first batch of seeds were planted in plug trays, so that we can easily transplant the small plants into larger pots when they’re big enough. So far we have sown the following:

Sweet Bell Peppers

• Bull Nose
• Chocolate
• King of the North
• Wisconsin Lakes

Medium Peppers

• Poblano
• Jalapeño
• Serrano

Hot Peppers

• Red Rocoto (a Peruvian variety)
• Aji Cristal
• Thai Hot
• Rooster Spur
• Yellow and Red Mushroom

Slicing Tomatoes

• Moskvich
• Amish Paste
• Roma
• Orange Oxheart
• Old German
• Oregon Star
• Brandywine
• Stupice
• Cherokee Purple
• Purple Calabash
• Priden’s Purple
• Orange Banana

Cherry Tomatoes

• Koralik
• Fruity Cherry (seeds collected from garden)

Tomatillos

• Mexican Strain

Greens

• Georgia (Southern) Collards
• Rhubarb Swiss Chard (red)
• Rainbow Swiss Chard (mixed colors)
• Red Russian Kale
• Dwarf Siberian Kale
• Winningstadt Cabbage

Herbs

• Cilantro
• Genovese Basil
• Dark Purple Opal Basil

Now the watering, watching and waiting begins.