Thursday evenings are back

Starting May 26, the Garden will be open from around 6:30 PM until it either gets too dark or we tire of weeding. Come out and dig up some purslane.

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.

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.