16 May 2015: It's a Garden!

Saturday, May 16th was that first day of the season when I really felt like we transitioned from starting the season to being in the season.  Of course the rhubarb and mint and oregano have been up for weeks, but they do that on their own.  On the sixteenth, we had harvestable heads of lettuce and radishes popping up out of the soil like the instant thermometer on a butterball (only the total opposite of an instant read thermometer on a butterball).  The lettuce and radish are from seeds sown by our volunteers.  Raise your hand if you planted Black Seeded Simpson lettuce! Oh, not you?  What about Red Sails? Surely, you are responsible for the Cherry Belle radishes?  Meanwhile, the Shirz and Penelope peas are making their way up trellises and our greens are looking great!



With regulars and volunteer groups from Second City and Northwestern University Gives Back, we got a tremendous amount of work done on this extended day.  We planted cucumbers. And sure, we planted your regular old slice it in a salad cause you need something crunchy cucumber (yawn), but we also planted Lemon cukes, which look like yellow tennis balls, and Armenian cucumbers (hubba hubba).  We also planted beans (Royal Burgundy and Milk & Cider), watermelon, Patty Pan squash, and a succession of lettuce. 

And that's just the stuff you can eat!  Don't get me started on the geraniums and Inky Fingers coleus.

The season is under way.  Unless we really screw something up, we will bring a harvest to Vital Bridges every week starting this upcoming Saturday and continuing into the late fall. 

i love a parade (September through October)

The parade continues:

September 7 - Cabbage, chard, and surprising lemon cucumbers, though plentiful, are dwarfed by amount of tomatoes and tree fruit that we bring.

September 14 - The peak harvest of this season. For the first time, I have to make two trips to the pantry--one just for apples and pears.

September 21 - A huge day, but we can tell that we're on the other side of the peak. We are happy to bring a small basket of plums. Our trees survived a spring attack of aphids, thanks to the John and Ivy's assiduous applications of Dr. Bronner's soap.

September 28 - Another phenomenal harvest. Thanks to the many volunteers that helped, we managed to pull 63 pounds of pears. I had to go to a backup cart at the pantry.

October 5 - The last hurrah of the sweet peppers. We're starting to pull up plants, seeding their beds with cover crop for the winter.

October 12 -Throughout all of the colorful weeks of late summer, the kale and collards continue to produce.

October 19 - Suddenly, it seems, the end of the season arrives. We harvest the remaining tomatoes and hot peppers before composting the plants. The smaller fig tree's fruit ripens all at once. We're down to our greens, which may not produce enough to justify a delivery next week.

The first freeze of the year is predicted to occur this week. The City is set to shut off our tap water supply at any time.

We'll probably still be out at the garden for a few more weekends, until our knuckles start to bleed from the wind and cold. We still need to bury the fig trees and prepare the garden for winter.

que jardiner c’est apprendre á philosopher

Saturday, July 24 started dewy and overcast, but was sunny and bright by the afternoon. We harvested our first handfuls of cherry tomatoes and a couple of sweet peppers. We pulled a dozen or so turnips, a clutch of carrots, a bucket of cucumber, and a bunch of yellow summer squash. However, the bulk of the day’s harvest—as is usual this time of year—came from our beds of greens: collards, kale, and Swiss chard.




We await ripening cabbages, potatoes, and apples; based on the number of cucumber flowers, we'll soon be awash in gherkins.

While I delivered our produce to the pantry, the others tended the garden. Our pea and wax bean plants had finished for the year, so we composted the plants and prepared the beds for fall crops. We also turned the compost bins and weeded.

Earlier that morning, some of us discussed the garden’s yield to date. Our harvests seem to be smaller than they were the same time last year; in fact, we are concerned that our raised beds may have gradually declined over the last few years. We’re not sure whether the soil in the beds needs amending, whether our seeds were too old, or whether it has been too dry.

Because we have been recording our weekly harvests over the years, we have a body of data that we can interrogate to determine whether our garden’s fertility has, in fact, diminished. I am almost finished with a set of KPI (key performance indicator) charts that we can use for analysis, and which I plan to publish in the blog.

The fact that I use an acronym like KPI hints as to the day job that I generally strive to keep separate from my gardening avocation: compost is compost, and Excel is Excel, and the twain usually don’t meet. However, there is no need to rely on anecdotes when you have three years of data.

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Je veux…que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux, mais nonchalant d’elle, et encore plus de mon jardin imparfait. —Montaigne, "Que philosopher c’est apprendre á mourir", Essais