consider the cherry tree

October 30, 2010

November 20, 20

Consider the cherry tree: thousands of blossoms create fruit for birds, humans, and other animals, in order that one pit might eventually fall onto the ground, take root, and grow.






Who would look at the ground littered with cherry blossoms and complain, "How inefficient and wasteful!" The tree makes copious blossoms and fruit without depleting its environment. Once they fall on the ground, their materials decompose and break down into nutrients that nourish microorganisms, insects, plant, animals, and soil.





 

March 21, 2011

April 30, 2011

Although the tree actually makes more of its "product" than it needs for its own success in an ecosystem, this abundance has evolved (through millions of years of success and failure, or in business terms, R&D), to serve rich and varied purposes. In fact, the tree's fecundity nourishes just about everything around it.

What might the human-built world look like if a cherry tree had produced it?












—William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

garden map, May 7, 2011

The following image represents the state of the garden as of May 7, 2011. Crops in red are planned; crops in light green and black have been planted.

A Planting We Will Go

A cloudy morning did not stop more planting at Ginkgo on our first Saturday in May. A solid group of new and returning volunteers sprinkled wildflower seeds in the front beds along the sidewalk while Dave, Annie, Susan, and Alan sketched out our morning plans. We will be looking for marigolds, alyssums, sunflowers, and more in the upcoming weeks!

weeding and seeding the flower beds in front

The potatoes and turnips sowed the week before received some TLC next. John planted more alyssum flowers around the potato plants to naturally ward off any Colorado potato beetles. Rounds of watering the seedlings followed. Many thanks to our rain barrel for stepping up while our hose remains out of commission for a few more weeks!

planting pea seeds

Cucumbers, beans, squash, and peas were next on the agenda. First, teams split up to weed and set up trellises for our spindling plants. Through a collaborative group effort, new seeds were sown before any rain could fall.

planting pole bean seeds

planting summer squash seeds in mounds

Cosimo was good at pruning and charged little.

- Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

Our fruit trees were not left neglected this weekend either. Dave climbed up our pear tree with ease to prune vertical branches that will not bear fruit.

Its white blossoms are open and have us crossing our fingers for a bountiful fruit harvest this year from all of our trees!

three weekends in April

Julie and Nick pull up kale stalks

The morning of April 2 started cool and overcast, with clouds that eventually made good on their threats to rain on the trio of us that gathered at the garden to prepare the garden for spring. Julie, Nick, and I cleared the kale beds of old stalks, removed wire fencing, and picked up trash.

Meanwhile, a few miles to the west of the garden, Dave Snyder started our seedlings in the greenhouse at Kilbourn Organic Garden. Kilbourn grants us greenhouse space each spring, so garden volunteers do not have to crowd narrow apartment windowsills with precariously balanced rows of pots of seedlings.

April 9 was the first volunteer day of the season. A group from Chicago Cares joined us, as did a group from DePaul Oxfam. At one point, I counted twenty-six people in the garden, all of who looked to us for instructions.

Doug and Ben

During the winter, the small group of volunteers that (for want of a better term) refers to itself as the garden’s “steering committee” agreed to define formally three positions that would need to be filled each Saturday workday. The positions would rotate among the steering committee members so that we wouldn’t tire of them. I once described the positions as the Lover, the Foreman, and the Driver; word-besotted folk that most of us are, though, we already have a number of alternate names.

The Lover, or Der Spielmacher, serves as the guide to the garden and to gardening, giving the Ginkgo spiel to new volunteers—what the garden is, how it works, who it helps, what our yield is, etc. Aside from welcoming volunteers, the Spielmacher’s responsibilities teaching volunteers how to perform tasks like staking tomatoes and weeding correctly, as well as wearing the floppy garden hat and helping people to enjoy what they’re doing.

Spielmacher Dave and the April 2 volunteer crew

While the Spielmacher is helping volunteers grok the garden, the Foreman is running crews. The Foreman prepares the list of the day’s objectives and assigns groups of volunteers. The Foreman also maintains what little discipline we need, asking people to walk around instead of in the beds, pick up tools, etc.

pulling up last year's wildf

We won’t need someone to be a Driver for a few weeks. When we start harvesting, though, one of us will assume the responsibility of packing and delivery of produce to the pantry. The Driver winds up serving the additional role of liaison between the garden and the pantry.

On April 9, Dave Snyder was the Speilmacher and I acted as Foreman. Our volunteer group raked leaves, weeded beds, organized the shed, and cleaned up the garden. Because we had so many people, we needed only a couple of hours to make the garden neat and ready for the season.

raking in the front garden

weeding the dodecahedron

Stephanie's lemon cupcakes in their special purpose cupcake holder

On April 16, Susan and Evelyn worked with a group of eight volunteers. Sue summarized the day’s work in an email:

We did some more cleaning and weeding, smoothed out a big hump of compacted soil that I've tripped on right by the shed (it was a big job!), inventoried tools (to facilitate tool return at the end of the workdays....) and shelled various leftover seed pods in the shed to prepare for the new plantings.

The following Saturday, April 23, Dave led volunteers in unearthing the fig trees that we buried last fall to spend the winter underground. The figs look spindly right now after their hibernation, but should soon recover. One of the saplings produced small fruits last fall, so we might even be able to harvest figs this year.

good neighbors fix bad fences

In late March, I visited the garden after an absence of a few weeks to see how it had weathered the end of winter. In addition to stray bits of windblown trash and the desiccated stalks of last season’s kale plants, I discovered a plastic bin full of branches that we had left uncovered over the winter. The malodorous ferment of snowmelt and rotting vegetation inside was a pungent reminder of the need to store buckets upside down at the end of autumn.
 

not the branch water I prefer

Usually, a few fetid buckets of sludgy compost are the worst of what awaits me in spring. This year, though, I found that a section of the garden fence had collapsed over the winter, probably as the result of the heavy snowfalls that we experienced in January. The extent of the damage to the fence was not apparent until the snow melted; when it finally receded, the snow revealed a serious problem. A six-foot section had ripped away from its supporting posts and completely separated from the rest of the fence. Only the gate to the neighboring property’s fence protected our garden from someone being able to walk in from the alley.

fallen fence section

After volleys of emails, we found someone to help. Chris Salus, the brother of Eric Salus, one of Ginkgo’s founders, agreed to look at the fence and see what he could do. Chris wound up fixing the entire thing himself over the next couple of weeks, working during on his days off from his job as a fireman.

repairs after first week

Chris told us that the fence posts, constructed of cedar instead of pine, had rotted; what’s more, they had not been set in concrete. Chris set the posts in concrete and reattached the fence section with longer screws.

repaired fence

Thanks to Chris’s efforts, our fence is now whole again. We can turn our focus to the 2011 growing season.

winter

In the depth of winter, I crunch through dirty snow on the way to work and wince at the bleeding cracks in my knuckles. I use “deliverables” to refer to pieces of paper instead of boxes of tomatoes. I catch myself describing other people as “resources”. I paint my bathroom and stream Netflix and nurse single malts and peruse seed manuals.

Once a week or so, I set all of that aside and visit the dormant garden. I curse and yank and bang on the frozen lock until it opens. I deposit a few scraps in the compost bin (my ambitions to set up winter composting were thwarted by the frigid weeks of December) and walk around the empty beds, following the tracks of rabbits and squirrels in the snow.

I am not melancholy, nor do I pine for summer: to everything its season. I do, however, enjoy visiting the garden in winter and performing little tasks that maintain my connection to this plot of land. I pick up trash and gather up pots that have been blown around. I inspect the fruit trees. I stand on the small porch and think about projects for next year. Then I lock everything up and return home.

final results for 2010 and yield comparisons

The garden is an unhappy place for a perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing that we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe….It’s easy to get discouraged, unless…you are happier to garden in time rather than in space; unless, that is, your heart is in the verb.

—Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education

While scratching the start of my winter beard, I read Pollan and remember the 2010 season of the Ginkgo Organic Gardens. My memory is aided by the analysis that I recently completed of the garden’s yield, and which I now share.

2010 featured bumper crops of tomatoes, collards, and cucumbers, surprising harvests of potatoes, but poor yields of tree fruits, beets, and spinach. It was the first year of human-powered delivery and fig trees. It was a year relatively free of impediments such as powdery mildew and aphids, but pestered with crop failures. The year’s yield was higher than that of 2008, but lower than that of 2009.

Method

Ginkgo volunteers respect data. We might occasionally hang an unscraped hoe in the shed; we may leave stray tomatoes to rot on the weighing table; but we never fail to record the results of each weekend’s harvest in our garden log.

This year, I decided to analyze the harvest data with three objectives:

1. to compare the season’s yield with that of the years for which I had readily available data
2. to describe the changing composition of our harvests
3. to estimate the dollar value of what we donated

Yield Graphs

The following graphs compare the yields of various classes of produce throughout the growing seasons of 2008, 2009, and 2010. Each growing season is described with two charts: a bar chart that shows the yield for each week of the year, and a line chart that tracks the cumulative yield to date. Yields are in pounds.

Total Yield

The total yield for 2010 was 1291 pounds—enough to where we can continue to describe ourselves as a “half ton garden”, and more than 2008’s yield of 1141 pounds, but much less than 2009’s yield of 1607 pounds, which we now recognize as possibly being a record.

Vegetables

Although tomatoes are botanically a fruit, I included them as vegetables in the analysis. Regardless of how I class tomatoes, we grew a lot of them in 2010: 377 pounds, 75 pounds of which we harvested in one weekend. We also grew 172 pounds of cucumbers and 150 pounds of collards, more than we had grown in the prior two years. On the other hand, our yield of 33 pounds of green beans was a third of that of 2009—when, because of the One Seed Chicago campaign, we were awash in free packets of Blue Lake Pole Bean seeds, which proved to be prolific that year, but not in 2010. Our relatively low yield of 44 pounds of sweet peppers resulted from a decision to plant fewer beds of peppers than tomatoes. Our 2010 yield was also lower than that of 2009 both because of failures of spinach and beet crops and because we decided, after two years of battling powdery mildew and cutworms, not to grow winter squash.

The following stacked bar graphs compare the composition of vegetable crops for the last three years. The graphs are dense because of the number of crops that we grew, but certain trends are evident, such as the relative contributions of tomatoes, collards, and cucumbers to our yields.

Fruits

2010’s yield of fruit was 68 pounds—a little more than the 59 pounds from 2008, but only 40% of 2009’s yield of 153 pounds. Most of the difference between the yields of 2010 and 2009 can be attributed to 2009’s bumper crop of plums—64 pounds, of which 60 pounds we shook out of the trees in one weekend. In contrast, we only obtained 6 pounds of plums in 2010. Although the plum trees appeared to promise another great harvest for 2010, we lost most of the fruit to high winds in late spring and early summer. The apple trees yielded almost no fruit this year (in fact, almost every apple that survived theft and windfall is featured somewhere in the blog), nor we did get much from our grape vines.

Herbs

Our 2010 yield of 25 pounds is only 3 pounds less than that of 2009. We had slightly less success with basil this year, but slightly more success with sage.

 

Estimated monetary value

How much would our produce have fetched if we had sold it instead of donated it? Or as I prefer to ask: how much would clients of the Vital Bridges pantry have had to pay to obtain produce of quality comparable to what Ginkgo offered?

To arrive at an estimate, I used prices for produce that I recorded at the Whole Foods at 3640 N. Halsted during a visit on December 4, 2010. I used prices for what I deemed to be representative organic equivalents to our produce when possible. Although Ginkgo is not a USDA certified organic garden, I think that our produce would compare favorably in both purity and quality to vegetables from certified growers, so I feel justified in using prices for certified organic produce in my estimate. For produce for which I could not find an equivalent at Whole Foods, I used what appeared to be the default unit price of $2.49/lb.

Because the bulk of our produce was in tomatoes, the price that I used for equivalent Whole Foods tomatoes affects the estimate greatly. On the day of my visit, the Whole Foods did not have organic heirloom tomatoes; however, it did offer both heirloom tomatoes and organic grape tomatoes, so I used a price that was the average of the two.

Based on the Whole Foods prices for equivalent produce, the monetary value of the vegetables, fruits, and herbs that the Ginkgo Organic Gardens grew in 2010 was $4188.00.

Crop	2010 yield (lb)	Whole Foods Equivalent	$/lb (Dec 4 2010)	Total (2010)
Arugula	0	n/a		$-
Beans - Green & Yellow	32.75	green beans	$2.49	$81.55
Beans - Fava, Flat Italian	0	n/a		$-
Beets	19.75	organic gold	$2.49	$49.18
Cabbage	10	organic	$1.49	$14.90
Carrots	26	organic bulk	$0.99	$25.74
Collards	149.5	not in store; using equivalent	$2.49	$372.26
Cucumbers	171.65	organic	$1.99	$341.58
Eggplant	0	n/a		$-
Kale	58.2	organic green leaf	$2.49	$144.92
Lettuce - Leaf/Head	3.5	packaged mixed baby greens	$7.96	$27.86
Lovage	0.75	not in store; using equivalent	$2.49	$1.87
Mushrooms	0	n/a		$-
Mustard greens	0.25	not in store; using equivalent	$2.49	$0.62
Onions	0	n/a		$-
Peas - Snap/Snowpeas	11	conventional	$3.99	$43.89
Peppers - Hot	11.25	jalapeno - conventional?	$2.99	$33.64
Peppers - Sweet	44.25	organic - average of green and red	$3.84	$169.92
Potatoes - White	62.25	organic white	$1.99	$123.88
Potatoes - Sweet	15	yams - conventional?	$1.69	$25.35
Pumpkin	0	n/a		$-
Radish - Daikon	5	organic	$1.99	$9.95
Radish - Red	19.5	organic	$4.00	$78.00
Scallions	0.85	not in store; using chives	$3.99	$3.39
Sorrel	1.75	not in store; using equivalent	$2.49	$4.36
Spinach	0.5	organic baby	$5.99	$3.00
Squash - Acorn / Fall	0	n/a		$-
Squash - Summer	50.25	organic	$1.99	$100.00
Squash - Zucchini	19	organic	$2.49	$47.31
Swiss Chard	60.5	organic red	$2.49	$150.65
Tomatoes	376.5	average of conventional heirloom and organic grape	$4.99	$1,878.74
Tomatillo	15.75		$1.99	$31.34
Turnips w/ greens	28	organic	$2.49	$69.72
Apples	0	n/a
Grapes	0	n/a
Gooseberries	1.5	not in store
Pears	45	organic Bartlett	$2.49	$112.05
Plums	6.25	not in store; use pears	$2.49	$15.56
Raspberries	15.5		$9.33	$144.67
Basil	4.1	packaged organic	$3.32	$13.61
Chives	7.65	packaged organic	$3.32	$25.40
Dill	0.1	packaged organic	$3.32	$0.33
Garlic / Garlic scapes	1.35	packaged organic	$3.32	$4.48
Marjoram	0	packaged organic	$3.32	$-
Mint	3.3	packaged organic	$3.32	$10.96
Oregano	3.05	packaged organic	$3.32	$10.13
Parsley	0.1	packaged organic	$3.32	$0.33
Rosemary	0.4	packaged organic	$3.32	$1.33
Sage	3.45	packaged organic	$3.32	$11.45
Tarragon	1.05	packaged organic	$3.32	$3.49
Thyme	0.1	packaged organic	$3.32	$0.33
TOTAL				$4,187.70