june 11 2011: packing problems

On the morning of June 11, I approached the day’s plan with some anxiety. Entire beds were empty, their rows of earlier sown seeds stillborn, victims of poor watering and unseasonable chill. We seemed to be behind schedule. I voiced my concern to Dave, who diagnosed me with having the early season anxieties that beset almost all gardeners, even professional ones such as he. He thought that we had planned well enough, and then recommended that I coordinate the day’s planting of seedlings.

When I reviewed the flats that were arranged in the shade of the plum trees, I understood the reason for Dave’s confidence. There were at least two full flats of kale, three flats of peppers, a flat of basil, and another donation of tomato starts from Slow Food Chicago.

I started to lay out seed pots in the empty beds. As I have been doing with tomato starts, I arranged the pots of pepper and kale plants in a triangular grid pattern in the beds. Matrice and Ian next transplanted the starts to the beds and watered them in.

This year, we avoided mixing sweet and hot varieties of peppers. Most of our nearly four beds of peppers are of sweet varieties: Chocolate; Red and Orange Bell; Beaver Dam; and Bullnose. The hot varieties that we planted should be sufficient, though. We have a half-bed of rare Rooster Spurs, as well as a half-dozen Fatali peppers—with a heat rating range of 125,000-350,000, the sixth hottest pepper in the Periodic Table of Scoville Units.

We soon filled empty beds of stillborn spinach and mustard with kale and peppers. We wound up with a few stray pots of each. We also still had the tomatoes and basil to plant. I had a new anxiety: where to put the rest of our seedlings. Our packing problem was complicated by the need to respect the growing habits of the current occupants of beds. It would not, for example, make sense to plant kale starts in the dodecahedron bed, where they would be overtaken by the butternut squash.

We planted the remainder of the kale plants next to our bunching onions. The Fatalis went between rows of radishes and turnips in this year’s beet bed (14). We planted a tomato start in each space in the dodecahedron bed where a planting of Bloomsdale spinach had failed to germinate. We stuck a few tomatoes in large pots that we arranged at the feet of raised beds.

When we had finished, almost every bed in the garden had been planted. We kept a small section of bed 14 open for sweet potato slips that Dave Short is growing in his kitchen.

While we fit seedlings into available nooks, Dave made the first delivery of the season to Vital Bridges: radishes and herbs. When he returned, he and Annie removed flowers from the radish plants and weeded.

After all of the seedlings were in, we started to put up fences. Thinking that we were out of fencing, John and I went to the nearby Ace Hardware and purchased what turned out to be two surprisingly expensive lengths of chicken wire. It didn’t help that I later found two rolls of wire hidden in the ferns behind the shed.

Transporticulture

Saturday afternoon the Active Transportation Alliance brought a whole slew of bicyclers for their annual Veggie Bike and Dine.

Veloship:


Folks were effusive about how great the garden looked – which, although we appreciated the sentiment, surprised us. We thought it looked awfully defoliated since earlier that day we'd harvested another 117.2 pounds for donation! Tomatoes and peppers are definitely coming in, but the big bumper crops were cucumbers and squashes. We also harvested swiss chard, kale, collards, beets, radishes, broad beans, bush beans, potatoes, basil, and handful of daikon.

Reviewing the data:


Late August and early September is the time of year with the biggest harvests! Come by and see how we're doing!

Note: Photos are courtesy and copyright of Arline Welty (top) and Katie Schuering (bottom).

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.

Planting out the tomatoes and weeding (again)

Saturday, May 16 was a lovely day at the garden. It was perfect weather for finally planting the tomatoes in their new beds. So far, we’ve set aside two beds for tomatoes and two beds for hot peppers and sweet peppers.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite warm enough to plant the hot peppers or the sweet peppers, so they went back into the cold frame for another week. One group of volunteers weeded (yet again) the tomato beds and then planted about 40 long-legged tomatoes, securing them to stakes and surrounding the beds with chicken wire to keep the rabbits out. The temperature was predicted to drop Saturday and Sunday nights, so we were hoping for the best.

Another small group weeded the flower beds just inside the gate, in preparation for planting cosmos, zinnias and calendulas. The native echinacea (purple coneflower) and rudbekia (black-eyed Susan) plants will be coming along later. (We're starting them from seed.)

Meanwhile, the rhubarb (beautiful big leaves in front of photo) and the raspberries continue to flourish.

As do the beans (on the right) and radishes (on the left) in the dodecagonal bed (you can see the two newly planted tomato beds in the background). The beets are still struggling along.


The daikon are looking leafy and there are a few carrot tops sprouting too.



The wine-cap stropharia mushrooms have been ordered. Mushrooms will be a new crop at Ginkgo this year. But...we’re still waiting to find out from the city when they will be able to deliver wood chips...

We've also started trying to ferment some comfrey leaves into fertilizer. We've got to make use of that ineradicable plant somehow. We dug out all the leaves we could find and put them into a container with a lid, and a spout at the bottom. Apparently, they are supposed to rot down quickly into a (possibly foul-smelling) liquid that is especially good for tomatoes.

Sunday's Chicago Cares crew got to work weeding (again!) and re-seeding the spinach bed, potting up the remainder of the plants that were brought over from the greenhouse at Kilbourn, seeding onions and more beets, and planting sweet potatoes!

Many thanks to Evelyn Y. for the photos this week.

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.