The Dig-It-Yourself Garden

Eco-Friendly Gardening Blog Series Starts Here

2011-08-10T10:38:00.001-07:00

Recently I was asked to do a presentation on eco-friendly gardening at a local farmer's market. I've decided to expand on that presentation to produce a series of blog posts regarding eco-friendly gardening. I'll be focusing largely on edible gardens, since that's what I know the most about. There will be several Volumes, each on a new topic including:

sourcing seeds
starting seeds
buying plants
soil health and conditioning
fertilizer
pest control
using water wisely
reusing and recycling in the garden
seed saving
....and a few more that will probably come to mind between now and the end of this project.

Disclaimer: The first thing you need to know about environmentally friendly gardening is: it’s not always a clear cut topic. When gardening, there are many opportunities to make environmentally friendly choices in the products you buy, methods you use, and even the plants you grow. Many times these decisions are not easy to make. Even the most educated gardeners disagree on what is the most eco-friendly choice. The purpose of this guide is to share with you a few things I’ve learned and the choices I’ve made on my journey to becoming a more eco-friendly gardener. When dealing with this topic, its easy to veer off the path of providing information onto the much more dangerous and I believe ultimately much less productive path of preaching / judging. I intend to stay on the informational path as much as possible and relay on my own personal experiences and research I've done on a particular topic to form the content of these posts. In the end, I hope you'll take the info I offer here and use it, along with other sources, to decide what's best for you and your garden.

First Tomato of the Year! - July 31st 2011

2011-08-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

A week ago I harvested my first tomatoes of the year. This year the winner is: Sungold! I purchased my one and only Sungold plant from the farmer's market in early June. The plant was already 12-16 inches tall when I bought it, so it definitely had a head start.

Its funny, because I almost didn't buy the Sungold. I kinda have a love-hate relationship with this variety. They are very tasty and have skyrocketed in popularity throughout the last few years. Also, they are a hybrid which means you can't save seeds from year

to year. The part of me that dislikes the Sungold is the same part of me that disliked the pretty, popular, cheer leader types in high school... I dislike them for their seemingly effortless success. However, I guess its time for me to put aside childish jealousies, and instead offer gratitude and appreciation to my Sungold this year.

Touché, Sungold, touché.

Here's a salad I made with the surprisingly tender leaves of one of my spigerello varieties, herbs, and (of course) the Sungolds!

2011 Garden Pics Vol. 1

2011-08-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

I haven't taken tons of pictures of the garden this year, and most of the one's I've taken have been with my camera phone posted to Twitpic. I was having a good time going through my Twipic history looking at my garden pictures from this year, so I thought I'd re-post them here all in one place. My phone camera is crap, so some of these pictures are crap too. You have been warned.

squash and melon vine trellises Aug 4th

Rutabaga- July 31st

Kale gonna take to my boss July 26th

Garden harvest July 20th (carrots, broccoli, kohlrabi, kale kale kale!)

Kale for me July 12th

Sugar Snap Peas July 7th

More strawberries June 21st

Clematis 'fro June 21st

Garden June 12th

Lilies June 21st

Strawberries June 10th

baby apples on the apple tree!!! June 1st

Clematis June 1st

spring veg (beets, turnips, radishes, spinach, lettuce) June 1st

Spring veg (kohlrabi, kale, broccoli, cabbage) June 1st
Blooming apple tree May 5th

First spring salad from the greenhouse! April 7th! (the earliest salad I've ever harvested yay!)

The Dog Poo Answer

2011-03-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday while attending the Family Farmed Expo I had the opportunity to meet a University of Illinois Extension soil expert who's been researching soil for over two decades! I took the opportunity to ask her a question that's been a point of controversy on the internets recently.

The question is: Is it safe to plant a garden on land that was recently used as a dog toilet? If its not safe, how long does the danger last? What remedy is available for gardeners who want to garden now?

The answer from the soil expert (as I remember it from our conversation yesterday) is as follows:

The danger with dog poo (and the poo of any carnivorous mammal) is in the potential for pathogens and parasites that might be living in the gut of the animal and therefore in their poo. These dangers can be transferred to human gardeners via direct contact with the poo, with soil where the poo was deposited, or with vegetables that have been splashed with contaminated soil or water. The biggest risk lies with planting and eating root crops, since they come into closest contact with the soil and potential dangers. These dangerous pathogens and parasites tend not to move through the soil on their own and they will not permeate the surface of vegetables. In other words, intestinal "worms" aren't going to burrow into your carrot crop. The danger is typically only on the surface of the plant.

The remedy: While the parasites and pathogens will eventually be remediated by the "good" organisms in the soil, this could take a few years. If you want to plant your garden now, raised beds are the way to go. Since danger lies in direct contact with poo or contaminated soil, the easiest remedy is to set up your garden so that your veggies, and you, wont come into contact with the potentially contaminated soil. First, of course, clean up the poo. Then, build raised beds. Cover the ground at the bottom of the raised bed with a couple layers of "geo-tech" fabric, which will prevent the roots of your plants form reaching the contaminated soil. Fill the raised bed with clean soil / compost. Then, cover the ground around the outside of the bed with a tick layer of wood chips or other mulch. This will prevent the gardener with coming into contact with that potentially contaminated soil. It will also prevent the contaminated soil from being kicked up (by wind, water spray, animals, or gardeners themselves) onto your new raised bed garden. Now that your garden is set up, give the dogs somewhere else to do their business. And you're all set!

Watering My Seedlings Just Got a Lot Easier

2011-03-10T08:53:00.000-08:00

Last year I upgraded from a milk jug to an actual watering can to use to water my seedlings in the basement. But, that still meant I had to lug water back and forth from the utility sink in the other room several times to complete the job. Also, the watering can couldn't fit under the lights so I had to take each tray down, water it, and put it back. By the ends I had a huge puddle of water I had to soak up with a sham-wow. Sob story, right?

Well this year, I was in search of an easier way to water. I ended up purchasing an indoor garden hose and watering wand (the Rumford Gardener 40 foot coil hose from amazon.) While its not perfect (I wish the mist was a bit less aggressive, I wish the mister head pointed more at a 90 degree angle down, I wish the handle wasn't quite as long etc), generally I am very happy with this purchase. I attached it to my utility sink using a hose splitter which is attached to a regular garden hose which is then attached to the coil hose and wand. (my sink is more than 40 feet away so I had to go with the linking-hoses-together option.)

So yeah, there y'a go. Just thought I'd share. Just an FYI: Since many bloggers are given products to review I should probably note that this was NOT the case for me. I chose this product cuz it looked like it would do the job and I bought it on amazon cuz it was easy. I've never been asked to review a product (cuz I have like four people who read this blog), but if I ever am asked to review a product I'll be sure to let you know.

Finally, sorry for the poor video quality. I'll do better next time, promise.

Greenhouse Tour Feb 2011

2011-02-19T12:44:00.000-08:00

Restaurant Garden Crop List 2011

2011-02-11T14:11:00.001-08:00

We've reflected on our experiences from last year's garden, made our plan, and placed seed orders. I've even already started a couple flats of parsley and pansies.

The major thing we learned last year, beyond which varieties just didn't work for us, is that having fewer varieties of crops but more production of the ones we do grow is better. Thus, this year's list is smaller than last years... I think. LOL

Here's a complete list of everything we'll be growing in the restaurant garden this year. I'll give the variety and/or latin name as I have them available right now.

Broccoli Spigariello (new)

Kale - Red Ursa (favorite)

Kale - Lacinato (new)

Arugula (Roquet) (new- tried Wild Arugula last year but it was too spicy)

Mustard - Red Giant (new- tried Purple Wave last year but it was too spicy)

Parsley - flat leaf (new)

Sugar Snap Peas (new- tried "blue podded" peas last year but performed poorly and weren't that tasty)

Broccoli Raab - brassica rapa (favorite from last year!)

French Breakfast Radish (another favorite from last year)

Thyme - lemon and regular (favorite)

Sage - assorted (favorite)

Chocolate Mint (favorite, grows like a freak'n weed. WATCH OUT)

Apple Mint (also favorite from last year; also grows like a weed)

pansies - Historic Florist mix (bought nursery pansies last year; growing these from seed this year)

Dill - Buquet (new)

Dill- Tetra (favorite)

Purslaine - green erect leaf (favorite from last year until something ate it down to nubs)

Tomato - Brandywine (new, but one of my favorites in my home garden)

Tomato - Marvel Stripe (new, but one of my favorites in my home garden)

Tomato - yellow pear (favorite)

Tomato - Black cherry (favorite)

Hot Peppers - Bulgarian carrot (new)

Hot Pepper - aji colorado (new)

Green basil - Genovese Italian (favorite)

Purple basil - Opal (favorite, slow to bolt. went all season long, as long as you cut it back regularly)

Green Beans - Blue Lake (new, but tried and true variety I expect to do well)

lemongrass (favorite, grew easily (although not all that quickly, from direct seeding)

red shiso (favorite! grew VERY easily from seed)

Lemon Verbena (favorite)

nasturtium - Fiesta blend (did Mahogany nasturtium last year which were great but wanted to try a new color this year)

marigolds - orange gem (did lemon gems last year which were good)

climbing nasturtium - tall climbing mix (new)

Red Scarlet Runner Beans (new)

lavender - variety TBD

My Favorite Plants of 2010 Vol. 2

2011-02-10T08:09:00.000-08:00

Ok so here's another batch of my Favorite Plants of 2010 (to read Volume 1, gohere). This list of favorites is a combination of plants that worked well for me in my home garden, in the restaurant garden, or at the community garden.

Dad's Sunset Tomato-

I found these seeds on major discount (fro

m the previous season) which is pretty much the entire reason i bought them. I like to have different colors of tomatoes in my garden so the

se fulfilled the Orange quota. They ended up being one of my favorite tomatoes EVER! In addition to growing them in raised beds in my backyard, I also grew them in raised beds at the community garden where the soil is worse and they were neglected on a semi-regular basis

. They seemed to do BETTER under the poorer soil / partial neglect conditions! They produce big round meaty tomatoes that turn bright orange when ripe. I collected seeds from mine and definitely plan to grow them again this year. I can't find a picture from my garden right now, so here's a picture from rareseeds which is the source of my seeds.

Black Krim Tomato-

This is a picture of the Black Krim from Seeds of Change, although I think I got my seeds from Baker Creek. This was the first purple/black variety I have ever grown and I must say it was a hit! These plants produced more tomatoes than any of my other plants, by far. The toughest thing with these guys is finding them when they are ripe (before they rot). They are a dull brown-ish color until the moment they are ripe (when they turn glossy deep crimson). They are good slicers, but probably have slightly more juice and seeds than a brandywine. The flavor is great.... lot more complex than your typical red tomato.. I'd describe it as sorta smokey. For 2011 I will be trying Cherokee Purple, but I'll probably also grow one or two Black Krim, just to be safe.

Broccoli Raab (Brassica rapa)-

I had never grown Broccoli Raab before, or eaten it really. I'm not really sure that I even knew what it was, that is until the restaurant asked me to grow it for them. I grew this as an early spring crop; I started the plants indoors in the middle of February which was TOO SOON! This year I will start my raab about four weeks before transplant outside. They are frost tolerant and can go out a few weeks before last frost date. I've also head from my fellow Zone 5b gardeners that you can direct sow the seeds once the soil can be worked and that they still have plenty of time to mature before it gets too hot. The restaurant got several (probably 2-3 per plant) harvests out of them between the first and third weeks of May. We just harvested all but a couple leaves as well as the shoots. Within two weeks the plants were ready for another harvest. Chef LOVED this plant. Consequently we'll be doing 10 rows of it this year. The shoots go from being barely there to fully open (into their little yellow flowers) within the blink of an eye, but don't worry! The yellow shoots are entirely edible and yummy! Once June begins though, the weather is just too hot and the plants will stop producing leaves all together, at which point its time to compost them.

Zinia Giant Scarlet-

That's right! I grew stuff that's NOT even edible! My mantra often is "if you can't eat it, I don't know anything about it", but I do love me some Zinias! I bought these on a whim off the Burpee display at home depot. The picture on the package lead me to believe that they were going to be more of a fuchsia than a red, but in fact that turned out to be the most beautiful scarlet red color EVER! I'm telling you, I had a bit of a love affair with these flowers. I planted them along a walkway I frequented and every time I passed by I couldn't help but stop and tell the flowers just how pretty they are! The blooms are about the size of my palm and last for weeks and weeks! Another reason I love Zinias of any variety is they are SO FLIPPIN' EASY to grow! All I do is wait for that last frost date, then I sow them directly into the soil where they will grow. Usually I grow them in a crappy shallow sandy soil area, which they seem to love. These grow to about 2-3 feet high and the bees love them! Just thinking about these now is getting me all a'twitter! PS: I didn't take that picture. That's from the Johnnyseeds site, who I assume will be less likely to sue me for using their picture than Burpee would be.

and so ends Volume 2 of My Favorite Plants of 2010!

Thanks for reading.

My Favorite Cookbooks

2010-11-11T07:07:00.000-08:00

To bad I didn't come up with this idea last night when I needed a blog for NaBloPoMo but couldn't think of anything and feel asleep on the couch instead. So I guess I'm technically disqualified from NaBloPoMo now, but, oh well. I'll keep writing and see how many posts I can get in this month.

Hello garden blog readers. Allow me to take a slight diversion from gardening today to tel you about my favorite cookbooks. Even though I own a few dozen cookbooks, I am by no means an expert on everything that's out there. I just buy cookbooks that look to be me, and their true usefulness in my kitchen is proven (or disproven) over time. I am vegetarian, but some of my favorite books include carnivorous info too, so hopefully this list will be useful for everyone despite your eating habits. In no particular order:

The Compassionate Cook: Please don't Eat the Animals [Paperback] By Ingrid Newkirk

Ok folks, don't bail on me already! Yes, this book is authored by the current Director of PETA. Despite what you make think of them as an organization, don't discount this book based on its source. In case its not already obvious, this is a vegan cookbook. It has a casual feel, as many of the recipes come from PETA members' old family favorite vegan dishes. It covers a range of cuisines, and the recipes are usually simple with relatively few ingredients. Its got a lot of comfort food favorites done vegan style. There's a baked bean recipe that's one of my favorites! This was one of the first cookbooks I ever bought--got it when I first went vegan--and its still my go-to book when I'm looking for a quick no frills recipe.

The Joy of Cooking 75th Anniversary Addition By Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker

On practically the opposite side of the cookbook pendulum from The Compassionate Cook, you'll find the Joy of Cooking. The copy I have is the 75th anniversary addition that was published in 2006, so that tells you something about how old and classic this book is. Its over 1,000 pages and its an all-purpose encyclopedia of knowledge on how to cook, well, everything! Since I'm vegetarian I have delved into the "dead things" sections at all. But I do frequently use the chapters on bread-making and baking. Not just a collection of recipes, each section has an introduction that explains the theory and history behind the food. For instance, if you want to know what the difference is between focaccia and baguette, the into to the bread section will tell you. Last night I used this book to finally once and for all figure out what the real difference is between southern-style cornbread and other styles (but I goofed while mixing the ingredients and ended up using flour instead of cornmeal but that's a whole other story.) Joy of Cooking also typically has hints on how to make something vegetarian, if its not already. Their baking section even has a couple actual vegan cake recipes.

Jamie at Home by Jamie Oliver

Ok full disclosure. I have a huge ongoing crush (intellectual and otherwise) on Jamie Oliver. I own several of his books (and boy does he crank out those books, usually one or two a year) but this is probably my favorite and definitely the most relevant to this blog. This book covers many recipes from the "Jamie at Home" TV series that's now airing in reruns on the Cooking Network. The whole concept of Jamie at Home is fresh (as in, from Jamie's garden) ingredients put together to make simple but joyful dishes. Warning to vegetarians and the like, there's a lot of dead stuff in this book (but he's a big advocate of buying organic products from animals who lived happy healthy lives, if that helps). But the reason I love this book is because it features gardening unlike most other books I have. The book is organized roughly by season and each vegetable has its own little mini-chapter with an introduction where Jamie tells you how he grows each crop in his garden and what varieties he likes. For me, this book is more of a fun read than it is an indispensable kitchen tool, but I still wouldn't want to part with it. PS: I really wanted to list a second Jamie book here but I decided that was a bit much so I'll just mention here that Jamie's new book "Jamie's Food Revolution" is a great resource for beginning cooks that's got step by step instructions with tons of pictures that makes learning easy!

The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters

long the same lines of Jamie at Home, this book is all about using fresh ingredients and simple preparations to make tasty fresh food. Its also an omnivore book, but again I can't tell you much about the meat chapters as I have not used them. Alice Waters is a bit of a polarizing character in the food scene. I know many see her as an elitist who prizes local organic food above, well pretty much everything, and has no idea what its like to be a family on a budget. On the other hand, she's also been a major advocate for getting school gardens going in California. I saw her interviewed recently and despite the fact that I really wanted to like her, I do think she's a bit out of touch. So, make of her what you will. BUT if you're looking for a book that explains a simple preparation for something like, say, turnips (butter, salt and pepper YUM), this might be what you're looking for.

Very Vegetarian by Jannequin Bennet and Carl Lewis

By "very vegetarian" they pretty much mean Vegan. This was another one of the books I bought when I first stopped eating meat and had to figure out how to cook for myself. The thing I really like about this cookbook, is practically ever recipe I've tried out of it turns out really well. Most of my favorite cookbooks--even some of the ones on this list--tend to have some recipes that just aren't all that great. This book is where I got the recipe for what are now known among my college friends as "Totally Awesome Earth Voice Bake Sale Cookies." (Earth Voice was the name of the bleeding heart student environmental group I was involved in during college. These vegan chocolate chip cookies turned out to be one of the best chocolate chip recipes I've ever used, which is quite remarkable. So this book is a keeper for sure! Dude... now I want a cookie!

Thanks for reading.

PlanGarden

2010-11-09T19:52:00.001-08:00

Ok. I'll admit this from the beginning. This is a throw-away post that I'm forcing myself to write due to not wanting to fail NaBloPoMo.

So I follow way too many people on twitter, like so many people that I tend to just spaceout and ignore it for days. The reason I don't just delete 75% of the people I'm following is because every once in a while I come across an invaluable piece of gardening information. I wont go so far as to say that this particular bit of info is indeed "invaluable" but it is at least intriguing enough that I wanted to tell you about it... in case you didn't already know... which you problem do but anyway...

Someone tweeted about this web based application called PlanGarden that's designed to help vegetable gardeners plan and keep track of their garden(s). First, a disclaimer. PlanGarden hasn't asked me to do a review of their product (bwuahha as if I have anything remotely near that kind of readership), its just something I came across and wanted to tell you about. So anyway its sort of what you would get if you combined a low-level version of Adobe Illustrator and a spreadsheet program like Excel. Basically it allows you to draw out your garden spaces and place crops, as individual plants or as rows, in each of your garden plots. It allows you to have up to four different garden layouts, in case you're like me and have several garden spaces you'd like to keep track of.

The application costs about $20, but I signed up for the 2 month trial version. I have to admit I haven't spent a lot of time on it, but I feel able to give a preliminary review. Basically, I think its a cool little gadget and, while the interface definitely trades a lot of functionality for what I think is supposed to be a user-friendly interface, I think I like it and will probably sign up for the year membership. I like that it will help me create organized and relatively pretty pictures of my garden plan. I've never been a very good artist of my own accord, so clip-art style veggies is probably better than anything I could put together on my own. Also, it lets you print your garden layout, or save it as a picture file, at any time so once I get everything all set I can have a paper copy to refer to away from the computer.

So I guess the bottom line is, if you haven't checked out PlanGarden, you might want to. As I continue to work with it, I'll let you know what I think. Thanks for reading. Talk to you tomorrow!

My Gardening History: After

2010-11-08T11:03:00.000-08:00

This is part two of the My Gardening History: Before post from a few days ago. Its kind of ridiculous that i'm writing this series of posts since I believe everyone who actually reads this blog already knows all of this stuff. Oh well. :)

My Gardening History: After (I figured out I might be into this gardening thing)

I moved to Chicago in 2004 to pursue a Master's degree in urban planning. For my first couple of years I lived in a lovely neighborhood called Printer's Row immediately south of the downtown Loop area. My apartments where converted industrial loft buildings, which at the time was exactly what I wanted. The fact that they didn't have any outside space for gardening didn't even occur to me as being a problem. It wasn't until I'd been dating my soon-to-be #1 gardener's helper and husband Nick and realized that he had a backyard sitting there all unused that I finally for the first time in my life started my first actual garden plot. It just sort of seemed obvious to me. If you have a yard that has nice rich soil and good sun, having a veggie garden is required.

Nick and I had only been dating for six months when spring rolled around and I announced my plans for digging up part of his yard for a garden. Although he had no garden experience, he was game. Our first garden was about 8x16 feet. It was a patch we just dug out of the yard, first removing the grass and then adding a few bags of topsoil for enrichment (really needed compost but at the time I didn't realize that). We planted melon, broccoli, greens, zucchini, squash, and tomatoes. I remember that something ate my melon vines before they even had their second set of leaves. I remember that the zucchini plants grew wonderfully and produced several massive fruits until they died practically overnight due to what I can only assume to be squash vine borer. all in all, that first garden was a great experience, but I still didn't really identify as a "gardener."

The next year we had another veggie garden in Nick's backyard. The crops were mostly the same although I did try potatoes, which didn't do very well. (I have yet to discover a way of growing potatoes that works well for me.) I started many seedlings that year in the south facing windowsill of my Printer's Row apartment.

After the second year of gardening in Nick's yard we started talking about getting a place together. I was still very much a fan of apartment living, and while I would have preferred to have outside space for gardening, it still wasn't a priority. We spent a year casually looking at apartments and thinking about if we could handle living in a one bedroom apartment with two dogs and two cats and no outside space. We came really close to buying a condo in a not-yet-existing building downtown. It would have had a 800 sq. foot apartment and a 1200 sq ft (but probably mostly shady) terrace. But that place didn't work out (and by the way, four years after we decided not to buy the place, the building is STILL not built! Actually its still a hole in the ground.)

Our realtor who had been helping us look at apartments for the last year kept telling us that we should look in the near western suburbs, telling us that we could have a house AND a yard AND a garage for less than the price of a one bedroom downtown apartment. Finally we took her advice and soon discovered the house we eventually bought and now live in. The house was by far the nicest inside and had the biggest yard we had seen in the area (of places that were remotely in our price range.) When we looked at the house I was already thinking about where to put the garden, so the mental switch had apparently been made between non-gardener and gardener. The fall after we purchased the house I had already cleared a spot in the backyard for my raised bed kitchen garden... which turned out to only be the beginning in my gardening ambitions. This is what the yard looked like when we bought the house.

That winter I took the Master Gardener class for my area and also met Gina, my garden neighbor (btw, we met through our gardening blogs which was extra crazy since we live so close to each other and actually both grew up in Tennessee), who would eventually be my partner in crime in our efforts to start a community garden in our neighborhood.

It is at this point I think it officially occurred to me that I indeed could call myself a "gardener." And I've really never looked back.

Its hilarious (but also kind of disconcerting) to think back now to what would have happened if we had bought the downtown condo with no outdoor garden space. Would I just have never discovered my love for gardening? Or, would I have discovered it and soon become unhappy with the apartment living? Or maybe I would have just become an awesome windowsill gardener or perhaps taken on a community garden plot somewhere? Who knows. Its funny how things work out, isn't it?

Soon I hope to do a post where I give you a tour of my backyard garden and how its evolved in the past three years (and my plans for the future bwwuuahhahhhahaa!) Thanks for reading.

About That Greenhouse...

2010-11-07T19:22:00.000-08:00

So I think I"m mentioned a few times on here that I"m getting a greenhouse. Its sort of an ongoing project (isn't everything?) but I thought I"d go ahead and give you the full scoop.

So I've been wanting a greenhouse for the last year or two. I'd like to have some place to extend the season for container grown veggies, to overwinter my more tender (but still hardy) perennials, and a place to start seedlings. For the past two years i've started seeds indoors in my basement, which has worked okay except for this past year where I grew not only seedlings ut also a colony of mold on my basement walls due to all the heat and humidity from the plant set-up. Yeah, um OOPS.

The problem with greenhouse is that they're pretty expensive, depending on size, insullative factor, and aesthetic appeal. I'd already spent so much money on gardening and the farmer's market this year that I had pretty much decided that getting a greenhouse was going to have to be a more long-term type goal. But then I found an add on craigslist for a used (as in, still attached to someone else's house) sun porch measuring 12x15 and made of double layer polycarbonate. It also includes ceiling vents and replacement screens for all the windows. They guy on craigslist only wanted $500 for the whole thing, as long as we came and disassembled it ourselves. After some research I also found out that a brand new model of the same size as this one would cost about $11K. Since the thing is probably work more than $500 for the scrap metal alone, we decided to jump on this opportunity, so my trusty gardener's helper Nick and one of his work friends spent 6 hours taking it apart... in the pouring rain. Yep.

Because its a sun porch and not a greenhouse it only had three walls. You're supposed to attach it to a wall of your house, but due to our skinny urban lot and positioning relative to the sun, we've decided to attach it to the south face of the garage Here's a picture of where it will be placed. .

As you can tell, there are a LOT of plants currently located on the ground where the greenhouse will go. There are four very established roses, a japanese maple (albeit half dead), a ton of phlox, lilies, yarrow, and other random bulbs as well as two blueberry bushes and a Star Magnolia which aren't technically in the way of the greenhouse but that we've decided to move to make the yard more manageable. So while the gardener's helper and his friend were taking the greenhouse apart, I was at home digging a huge hole for the magnolia and moving blueberries and roses. This all took place about a month ago.

As of right now, the thing is still in pieces in our garage. We knew we'd have to build a foundation for it and maybe get a building permit, but its taken a while to get those details ironed out. Basically, yes we do need a permit, and we are not allowed to place the greenhouse any closer than 4 feet to our property line, even though we already have a privacy fence that sits right on the property line. We'll also have to dig several post holes at a minimum of 42 inches which will then be filled with concrete and then act as supports for 6x5 treated lumber which is what the greenhouse itself with attach to. Being the "Dig It Yourself" garden, we've decided to dig the holes and then pay a contractor to do the concrete and footings. ;-) We'll start, and hopefully finish, the digging next weekend and then the install with move forward as long as the weather is ok, but we are working against the clock. Its most likely due to left over stress about the farmer's market, but I've had a few second thoughts about this project... about the extra $1500 its going to cost to get the thing installed, the uncertainties I have about how this thing may or may not maintain its temperature, or how much it will cost to add a heat source. Also, its a major part of the yard that's being taken up but yet another garden extravaganza. Hopefully it will be built within the month and my stress and second guessing will be replaced by feelings of just how awesome it is. I'll keep you informed as the project moves forward.

Thanks for reading! :)

PS: I just got back from a great weekend trip but am exhausted so I hope this post is comprehensible.

PPS: The fact that I haven't thrown in the towel on NaBloPoMo is miraculous, as I usually only last two or three days. yay for that!

Wordless Weekend

2010-11-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

Attack of the Evil Black Bean Aphids!!

2010-11-05T01:11:00.000-07:00

I guess you could say we lucked out at the restaurant garden because we only had one actualy pest problem this year. But OMG was it a quite impressive problem. Take a look at this:

OMG!!!!!

AACKKKKK!!!!

Smile for your close-up little buggies!

Dude. Ok. So I get easily grossed out at pictures of bugs. Its hard for me to do research about pest problems because it usually constitutes looking at lots of pictures of bugs. I've got to say that the only thing that saved me from TOTALLY FREAKING OUT at these guys was the fact that they are absolutely tiny. Basically they are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Well, maybe a little bigger but still TINY. At a passing glance you might just assume that your plant is developing freckles in the sun, but, alas, you are wrong.

These bugs were all over my Chinese Red Noodle beans around the mid part of august, just as the beans were staring to set fruit. After taking the pictures above, I narrowed down the culprit list to the Black Bean Aphid which is apparently known for attacking beans around the mid summer part of the season. I wont try to explain their full lifespan, but what I remember about it is pretty crazy. They have a ten life states and they look completely different at east stage. They even develop wings eventually.

The good news is, like all aphids I' familiar with, these guys are quite susceptible to insecticidal soap and mechanical removal (wash them off with a strong stream of water from the hose). I gotta say, the spray them off with a strong stream of water thing really saved us. Now, it took us about an hour to spray off approximately 30 row feet of plants, but we only really had to do it one good time and then the problem was gone.

Washing bugs off seems kinda like a wimpy solution to a problem, but in the case of aphids, it really works well. We only had one more occurrence of the aphids about three weeks later at which time we just removed the bugs by hand and all was well and we ended up getting a pretty good crop in the end. Here are four bunches I sold at one of the early fall markets.

So, the moral of the story is, before you freak out and throw away your bean crop or spray chemicals, get out the garden hose and give them a very thorough spray off first. Maybe that will just do the trick.

My Gardening History: Before

2010-11-04T13:08:00.000-07:00

As I continue to live under the delusion that NaBloPoMo might bring me some new readers (and just for the record, that's not why I'm doing NaBloPoMo; I'm doing NaBloPoMo because structure helps me get things done and writing blogs is something I tend to neglect most of the time.), I thought I'd do a post introducing myself, my gardens, and my blog. I touched on a bit of this in a previous post, but let me go ahead and start at the beginning.

Before (I became a complete garden obsessed freak-a-zoid)

I grew up in a small town in Tennessee. I was an outdoor kind of kid. I remember summers of bike riding, mud pie making, and chasing baby rabbits through the woods behind my house (sounds kind of evil doesn't it). I was also, after my parents got divorced when I was 6 and my dad who always had a vegetable garden moved out, the resident gardener of the household. My mom was definitely in favor of having pretty flowers on the back porch, but I was usually the one who picked out the plants at the Wal-Mart and planted them, although I'm sure I lost interest eventually and she took over the care duties from there. We liked geraniums, petunias, and marigolds. We bought all our plants as plants from either a box store or a local greenhouse. I can't remember growing much from seed (although I did plant many bulbs), and I also can't remember ever growing an edible crop.

Just recently I came upon the memory of being in about 3rd grade and my teacher doing one of those craft projects where you make something to give your parent for a holiday. The teacher provided dixie cups of soil and a mixture of flower seeds. We planted the seeds and returned to the library every day to watch them grow. Eventually we would give them to our mothers for mothers day. Its so weird that I remember this project so vividly. I don't remember any of the other projects I'm sure we did (glue the pasta on the cigar box, make an ash tray out of tiles, make a Christmas ornament out of construction paper and a picture of myself). I remember taking the cup of overcrowded plants home and separating and re-potting them all. I also remember that eventually some marigolds bloomed. Its easy to look back to the past and say "oh wow that was such a sign of what was to come" but I'm not entirely sure I believe that. But, on the other hand, I've heard it said that one way to find happiness as an adult is to return to activities that you enjoyed as a child. Like, if you liked to draw as a kid, you'd probably find some drawing related hobby very rewarding. Who knows...

Anyway! my interest in gardening wained in my high school days but when I went vegan in College I started to get more interested in vegetables and organics. During college I moved to the city where my dad and step mom live. Dad still had his veggie garden and step mom was really into flowers and herbs. She'd often implore my younger sister and I to come to the garden with her for some "dirt therapy." Of course, being obstinate teenagers, we had no interest in it. But when I decided out of the blue one day to become vegan, I had to give myself a crash course on food and cooking. It took a while, but eventually I tried enough new veggies and learned enough recipes that I didn't miss the animal products at all. As a matter of fact, becoming vegan actually broadened the richness of my food experience, since it forced me to eat veggies I had always just ignored. After that, I went from being completey apathetic to my dad and step mom's gardens to being slightly curious. I definitely liked the compost pile, as it played into my college hippie environmentalist tendencies.

When I graduated from college one of my roomates gave me a tray of herb seedlings she bought at the farmer's market. I remember her saying something to the effect of "You like gardening, right? Well you like to cook vegetables and you like trees and the environment, so you must like gardening... right?"

When I got my first apartment after college I remember trying a small herb garden on the terrace using painted coffee cans. If I'm remembering correctly, I think I forgot to water the plants and they quickly died. (watering things is STILL a problem for me.)

Fast forward another year or two when I found myself moving to "the big city" Chicago to go to grad school to study urban planning. It was here in Chicago that everything changed.

In my next installment I'll have to tell you about what happened After (I became a complete garden freak).

(to be continued)

My Favorite Plants 2010 Vol. 1

2010-11-03T23:36:00.000-07:00

Note: Blogger is annoying and didn't show this post as being published in Nov 3rd until I told it to manually. Please don't kick me out of NaBloPoMo (or at least wait until I just stop posting because I get lazy which is usually what happenes) :)

So the gardening season is wrapping up, and I wanted to document the experiences I had with all the new crops I grew this year. I meant to do this in one big post, but that was taking forever to put together, so instead I'm gonna do a bit at a time. Here you have My Favorite Plants 2010 volume 1 (plants listed in no particular order):

Red Ursa Kale (brassica napus)

Seeds of Change describes this as a cross between Red Russian and Siberian kales and notes its beauty as well as extreme resistance to bolt. Having never grown Red Russian or Siberian kale before, I can't really comment on how this compares, but I can definitely vouch for the beauty and bolt resistance factor. I grew this at the One Sixtyblue restaurant garden. We planted in the first week of April (direct sow), and although germination in the cold soil took about two weeks longer than I expected, the kale finally came up and we were harvesting it from early June all the way through summer and we're continuing the harvest it well into October. The Chef really loves its flavor and texture AND the fact that its been such a constant producer that he's been able to keep it on the menu all season! This plant was also a good seller at market; people really loved its moderately spicy taste and beautiful purple-green leaves. We harvested it by cutting the outer leaves when they reached desired size (anywhere from 6 to 12 inches). During the heat of the summer the leaves did tend to toughen more quickly and sometimes start to brown on the ends. But, there were few to no pest problems. The restaurant has put this on the "definitely" list for next year's garden. Next year I may try starting these plants under lights three or four weeks prior to setting them out the first week of April in order to get an earlier harvest.

Yellow Pear Tomatoes

Black Cherry Tomatoes

When I was choosing seeds for the restaurant garden my primary objectives where to find something I thought would grow well, taste good, and would be hard to find from another veggie vendor. Chef decided he wanted to concentrate on cherry tomato varieties so we ended up going with these Yellow Pear and Black Cherry tomatoes, both heirloom types that I perceived as being pretty unique. I planted approximately 18 of each variety for a total of 36 plants. By the middle of August we were practically drowning in little 'maters. Chef said he had way more than he could find uses for. They were also pretty good sellers for me at market, especially the yellow pears I think mostly because of their shape. It turned out that these weren't quite as unique and unheard of as I had hoped. I actually saw them being sold by many vendors at my farmer's market. Nevertheless, they were strong producers and tasted great too. I did have some problem with what I think was a fungus on the yellow fruits. Also, sometimes the yellow pears didn't form a pear but just turned out round. All in all I'd give them a collective B+.

French Breakfast Radishes

Speaking of crops that worked REALLY well for the restaurant garden, I think these french breakfast radishes take the cake! They grew almost perfectly without fail starting in the early spring until about mid June and then from mid Sept and on. They seemed to love the semi-crappy soil we have in the raised beds, and their short days to maturity window (I think its like 28 days) was just what we needed in the early spring and late fall when everything else was slowing down. Now, I've never been much of a radish fan, personally. But Chef LOVES them and did some really spectacular stuff with them. Did you know you can roast radishes? What about braise them and then puree them? Pickled? Did you know you can eat the radish leaves? Yep, its all true, and Chef actually developed a single dish that featured the radishes in all these forms. Raw they are probably one of the mildest radishes I've ever had, which is another reason I like them. These will DEFINITELY be a feature in the restaurant garden next year.

Nasturtium Mahogany

I had never grown nasturtiums before this year, but I was looking for an edible flower for the restaurant garden and these looked, well.. pretty! I tried to start them in cell trays a couple weeks before the last frost (was trying to get a head start on growing them), but a combination of my neglect and their persnickety nature regarding being transplanted lead to an across the board failure of my first round of seedlings. I had one more seed packet left and direct sowed those seeds after the last frost date. These seeds germinated quickly and eventually became quite large. One day mid season I asked Chef how he liked the nasturtium and if they were finding uses for the flowers (usually the pastry chef had the most use for edible flowers) when he told me that he was enjoying serving the leaves in salads. Huh? I didn't know you could do that. But indeed you CAN! They have a spicy taste and slightly fuzzy texture. I don't know if I"d eat a salad of nothing but nasturtium leaves, but they definitely work well in a salad mix. You can also add in the flowers for some color! I've got the say that I was surprised by how beautiful the leaves themselves where. The flowers are great, don't get me wrong, but something about round-ish shape of the leaves and the white spot in the center really caught my eye. They are beautiful and completely edible. For these reasons, I have now added them to my list of favorite flowers and look forward to including them in both the restaurant garden and my home garden next year.

Happy Anniversary to my #1 Gardener's Helper

2010-11-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

Warning: What follows is a sappy post about how awesome my husband is and how I could not accomplish half of what I do in the garden without his help. Today is our six year anniversary of our first date, and so I thought this tribute to my #1 Gardener's Helper (a title he has given himself) would be fitting. If you've stumbled upon my blog for the first time due to NaBloPoMo, please know that my posts usually have more actual content in them, rather than the sappy love fest that follows.

So, dear husband of mine, I need you to crawl inside this rain barrel that used to have cooking oil in it and re-attach the spigot, ok?

When I met my husband Nick back in 2004 I wasn't even that into gardening. I was living in an apartment in the Printer's Row neighborhood of Chicago. I soon discovered that Nick had a yard and during our first spring together I hatched a plan to dig up a portion of the yard and plant veggies. My dad always had a garden when I was growing up, and it was based upon those memories that I planned my takeover of Nick's yard. Thankfully, Nick is a pretty easy going guy and didn't question my plans. He even helped me construct a shaky fence we hoped would keep out the rabbits. When we harvested zucchini the size of his forearm, he was duly impressed (at that time, being novices, we didn't know that huge zucchini is actually not that desirable.)

Over the next two years the garden kept growing. I tried potatoes grown in tires we found around the neighborhood. I planted bulbs and tried to coax morning glories to climb the chain link fence. By the time we were thinking of getting a place together I already knew that I wanted space for a garden. At first we wanted a city apartment with an outside terrace or rooftop, but once we figured out we could get a whole house and backyard in a neighborhood further out from downtown for the same price as a city apartment, our decision was made.

Despite the fact that the previous owner had obviously paid someone to landscape the backyard, I was making plans to change everything before we even moved in, and Nick was pretty much on board the whole time. When I thought it was a great idea to cover 1/4 of the yard with raised garden beds and to fill in the space between each bed with river rock I found for free on craigslist, he was the one who helped me shovel literally TONS of rock from some guy's backyard into our truck and then into our garden. We both had colds which, combined with the cold November weekend we chose to take on this task, made it nothing less than miserable. Now, in retrospect, I hate that river rock and we never should have added it to the yard. But, the point is Nick aka Gardener's Helper was totally game the whole time.

When I complained the next year that my compost bin was too small, he built me this huge replacement 2-bay composter.

When I asked him if I could git up more of the yard to plant stuff, he didn't complain.

When, I decided to take the Master Gardner class a couple years ago, he supported me.

When Gina from MySkinnyGarden and I decided to start a community garden in our neighborhood, Nick understood that that meant that HE'D be helping too.

When last year I decided to start gardening for a restaurant, he supported me, even though once again he knew that the implication would be that he'd be helping me.

When I decided to sell produce at a farmer's market this season, he didn't want to divorce me, even though it meant we'd both be at market EVERY SUNDAY from the beginning of June through the end of November. Not only were our leisurely Sundays gone for the whole summer, it also meant we couldn't leave Chicago for the whole marke t season. No more Michigan vacations in August for us! Out of all of the crazy ideas I've had and the crazy things I've gotten us into, the farmer's market was by far the winner. It cost us our time and our money. I became a raving b-i-t-c-h at times due to all the stress of a full time job plus the market plus the community garden plus the restaurant garden. The fact that we survived the summer, is a miracle. And the truth is, through all that, my loyal Gardeners Helper was always there to help and hardly ever complained and got mad or said "what the F have you gotten us into NOW?" And this is just one of the many reasons why he's the best Gardner's Helper in the world and why I love him just as much now as I ever have.

Hey Babe- Would you mind shucking these bazillion ears of steaming hot corn so that I can freeze it and live out my homesteading fantasy?

Hey Babe- I know you're trying to finish a Ph-D but surely you wouldn't mind standing at a farmer's market booth for a large portion of your Sunday.

Hey Babe- So the good news is we got a lot of dirt for the community garden. The bad news is, we have to move 2- yards of soil from over there to over here using only wheel barrows and shovels in the 90 degree heat. Are you game?

Hey Babe- Its like a wind chill of 20 degrees outside, but do you mind helping me install landscape fabric in a bunch of raised beds at the restaurant?

Happy 6th anniversary babe!

And to the rest of you, thanks for putting up with that. I'll be back to regular programming tomorrow!

Goodbye Farmer's Market Hello NaBloPoMo!

2010-11-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

Today is the first day of November, which is frankly CRAZY (how did the year go by so fast) and AWESOME (I'm excited for the end of the garden this year and the beginning of the Holiday season) which combine to be one of my favorite idioms CrazyAwesome! The Farmer's Market is officially OVER now! I bow down to all farmers and food producers everywhere who made it through another season. This year I've gained such a HUGE appreciation for what you do. Its SUCH hard work, and I know I only got a tiny taste of that this year. To my vendor friends at the Logan Square Market, thanks for all your help, advice, and friendship. I will miss you and although I'm happy with my decision to not do the market next year, I will miss you guys!

Being the first day of November, today is also the first day of National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) wherein intrepid bloggers everywhere commit to making one blog post every day for the whole month of this month. I've tried to do NaBloPoMo before and usually I don't get past the first two days. But, never being one to be discouraged by actual evidence and past experience, I am again going to attempt NaBloPoMo this year. So, stay tuned to the blog for a month long blogopalluza.. or at least until I run out of steam which could be as soon as tomorrow. Time will tell.

But for today my optimism is winning and my head is full with and semingly endless list of posts I have planned for you. They include:

-a final wrap-up of the Farmer's Market experience

-everything I know about raised beds

-my favorite plants of 2010

-my least favorite plants of 2010

-I'm getting a greenhouse!

-my (neverending) garden makeover

-restaurant garden wrap-up

-Chicago community garden tours

-Forest Park Community Garden 2010 update

-Toronto rooftop garden tour

and that's JUST the BEGINNING ... actually that's all I can think of right now which is enough to last for a week. Um, yeah. Here we go!

Farmer's Market 5 Weeks Left

2010-09-29T07:28:00.000-07:00

Its getting colder here. Some of our evening temps have hit the high 40's, and I know that garden's life expectancy is limited. If you are a gardener, you will probably understand when I say that I'm SO happy to see fall approach. By this time of year the garden is a done deal. You can look back now and see how your garden dreams back in January with the seed catalog in hand panned out. As usual, there are some things that didn't work out as well as I had planned, but (also as usual) there are other things that did way better than I hoped and have become my new favorite plants. This time of year I also start to look forward to putting the garden to bed and getting a clean start for next year.

The garden is starting to look ragged and yields are starting to decline, so the fact that there are only 5 farmer's markets left in the summer market season (my market actually moves indoors during the winter months, but I will not be participating in that one). To be honest, I'm actually kind of worried about my ability to have any crops to sell come the last couple of weeks. If its a mild October, the fall-sown kale, spinach, radishes, cabbage, lettuce, and chard will hopefully sustain my market stand, but only time will tell.

As has become painfully obvious on this blog (and on Facebook, twitter, or to anyone who's talked to me in person about my marketing experience) I am DEFINITELY looking FORWARD to the END of this market season! Doing the market was a great experience and I'm glad I did it for a number of reasons: 1) the idea here was to try something out to find out if I enjoyed doing it enough to try to make it a larger part of my life in the future and I definitely got my answer; 2) its allowed me to view the marke

t from the vendor's perspective especially all the hard work it takes to produce for market and then show up and try to sell it 3) strangely enough this experiment has lead me to a new found appreciation for my day job and I probably haven't been as happy at this job as I am now.

So now that the end is in sight, I'm actually find it easier to enjoy being a market grower. Placing beautiful produce on my market table that I grew myself and having people complement me on how beautiful / tasty it is, is a really good feeling. Talking with customers about how they use my produce or about their own gardens is also a real pleasure. Finally, the other market vendors I've met are just wonderful people and it makes me happy to share their company.

I think last week's market saw my best display of produce yet. Take a look:

From bottom to top that's: Yellow Pear tomatoes, Black Cherry tomatoes, Lavendar baby eggplant, Yellow Crook Neck scquash, Thai hot peppers, Black Pineapple tomatoes, French Breakfast radish, Rosa Binaca eggplant, Red Noodle beans, bags of baby greens salad mix, edible Lemon Gem marigolds, Trombetta squash, Black Krim tomatoes, Dad's Sweet tomatoes, and then of course my normal quota of herbs. I know I only have a couple (in some cases just one) pack of each crop (most vendors have like 50 units of each crop), but the table just looks so full and beautiful that I really don't care how it compares.

More pics from Sunday's market:

Trombetta climbing summer squash... yeah its coming in really late, but I'm excited to get any at all.

I thought this container of Red Shiso, Dill, and Lemongrass was just so pretty!

This is my Purple Sage plant which I really like (I think the flavor is pretty much the same as "normal" sage but the green/silver/purple leaves are SO pretty). No one bought any though! People like things they are familiar with so anyone who bought Sage lwent for the "normal" green variety this week.

Here are the Yard Long Red Noodle beans... you cook them just like regular green beans. I know one bunch isn't a lot, but considering the great black bean aphid infestation of 2010 that took place at the restaurant garden, I'm just happy to get any crop this year.

I've sort of become known as the Herb Lady, since most of what I offer are herbs. Here are all my pre-cut bunched herbs. I'm still also doing the cut-to-order thing where I drag my herb plants to market and cut stems upon request. Maybe not the best business decision, since doing it this way allows ppl to buy very small quantities of herbs for very small prices (instead of forcing them to buy a big bunch for $3/ea.) But the customers just LOVe the cut-to-order thing as many of them have no need for a huge bunch of basil.

OK well that's it for today. Thanks for reading! Happy autumn. Go have some hot apple cider!

If I Break My Leg Does That Mean I Can Quit The Market?

2010-09-02T13:43:00.000-07:00

This is the question I asked via twitter on Saturday. Well, on Monday I experienced unexpected difficulty crossing the street and managed to sprain my left ankle. It didn't hurt all that much and I could put weight on it, but I still went to the doctor to make sure it wasn't broken. It was only while sitting in the waiting room that I remembered what I had said on Saturday about breaking my leg.

Thankfully nothing is broken, but this thought process did put a spotlight on how I'm feeling about the garden these days. I think after publishing the previous blog post, I kind of turned a corner and gained a fair amount of certainty regarding my plans for next year.

So I guess what I'm getting at is, I've pretty much decided not to do the Farmer's Market again next year. I just can't hack it from a schedule and stress standpoint. While there are aspects of the market that I really love and will miss, its just turning out to be too much. My fall that lead to the ankle sprain this week was only the latest in a surprising number of recent clumsiness that I think is a direct result of being tired and stressed this summer. Also, I'm seeing myself turn into a not-so-nice person at times, also because of stress and exhaustion. Therefore, next year the only farmer's market in my life will be the one(s) I visit for FUN in my FREE TIME. Fwew!

I do plan to stay with the restaurant garden next year, but I'll no longer be harvesting half of the veggies to sell at market. My on-the-ground involvement with the restaurant garden should be minimal, but it will still allow me to be something in addition to just an at-home gardeners. Note: There's nothing wrong with being an at-home gardener, its just that I'm afflicted with a pretty constant since of ambition, and I hope that maintaining the restaurant garden project will keep my ambition busy.

And here ends the "big announcement." Maybe one of these days I'll actually do an update post to tel you how all those tomatoes did or about all of the new and interesting crops (and some new and uninteresting ones) I've discovered.

OMG and we plan on building some cold frames before it gets too cold so maybe I'll have an ACTUAL D-I-Y project for you.... shocking.

Thanks for reading y'alls. :) Jessica

Farmer's Market: At the Midpoint Week 11

2010-08-17T18:55:00.000-07:00

Hello patient blog readers! I know its been a LONG time since I posted about the Farmer's Market (or about anything come to think of it) but, as usual, I blame this delinquency on being too busy actually doing the gardening to have time to blog about it. This time, I've also been waiting for may feelings regarding this venture to ballance out before I felt comfortable telling you how I REALLY feel about this little project of mine. Currently, I'm still pretty undecided how I REALLY feel, but I got tired of waiting on some potentially unobtainable feeling of certainty. I go through mood swings on a daily basis regarding my feelings toward this venture. So.. here goes!

Many of you have asked me "How's the market going?" So here's the answer. The market is going well in the sense that I somehow manage to come up with something to fill my table every week. Also, my sales numbers are on a steady increase. Last week was my best week so far when I made about twice the income as I did at my worst market back in June. At each market I keep a tab of what I sell and how much I'm making, and I have to say that I'm surprised how motivating the numbers are. I'm not doing this to get rich. In fact, if I can just re-coop my expenses from this year (the market fee, the tent and tables, the banners and business cards, the small business registration, the income tax etc) then I'll be more than happy (aka: surprised) from the financial standpoint. In other words, I don't do this because I'm motivated by money, but nevertheless I do enjoy seeing that little "what I've made today" number going up. So, by this measurement (money) the market is going better than I expected.

But earnings is not the only consideration here. When I decided to to this market I knew that I was basically signing away my (really, our) summer--our weekends from June through October--and would be busier and working harder than I ever have before. I don't mean to imply that I work harder than ANYONE on the PLANET or anyone in farming for that matter. What i do isn't even farming. I still have my day job and am not outside 14 hours a day every day no matter the weather. I'm also not under the financial stress of having to feed myself and pay my mortgage entirely based on my farming income. I've actually got it really good when it comes to the restaurant garden in that the staff do all the watering for me so I only have to show up for a few hours on Saturdays to harvest and plant. BUT, for me, in the terms that I'm used to, this is turning into a long hot hard summer. My week basically works like this: I do 8 hours a day at my urban planning job, with an hour commute each way. I get home with about an hours worth of good gardening time, although this window of opportunity often gets squandered before I ever get anything done. I have an ever increasing long to-do list for the garden, the restaurant garden, AND the community garden. I feel like I'm always behind on several tasks in all three gardens.

On the weekends, Nick and I typically go to the restaurant for between 2 and 4 hours to harvest, plant, weed, and take care of whatever other maintenance needs to happen (staking tomatoes, tying squash to the trellis etc.) Then I come home and spend another 2 hours washing and preparing everything for market. Sometimes I don't have time to do that on Saturday so I get up at 5am on Sunday before the market to do it. We leave for the market between 8 and 8:30 and are there until 3pm. By the time we get home its 4pm. We're pretty much exhausted and can barely even unload the truck. We buy cheap tacos from the taco place down the street and I usually fall asleep around 7pm. Then I wake up and its Monday all over again and I have to go back to my day job. Sometimes I feel like there's no relief.

A friend of hours who has an elementary school aged child told us that our experience doing this market farming business sounds a lot like having a kid, except probably not QUITE as bad as having a kid. Parents, you win this contest. But, they are similar in their relentlessness, their incompatibility with sleeping in, and cause for near constant worry.

So, here we are half way through at week 11 of the market, and I find myself yearning for the days where all I had to worry about was my home garden and the community garden. I didn't have to feel guilty eating tomatoes from my garden (instead of taking them to market) or frustrated at the long list of overdue garden tasks that I just can't get to. I miss having weekends to RELAX. One of our favorite activities last summer was getting up every Saturday morning to go to the Oak Park Farmer's Market. We'd often bike over (we haven't ridden the bike AT ALL this year) or walk over with the dog. I'd find so much joy in all the beautiful veggies and fruits and feel so happy when I got my purchases home and planned how they would be featured in our meals. This year on Saturday mornings we're usually headed over to the restaurant to harvest, but even if we weren't I can't say that I'm too excited about visiting other markets. I spend all Sunday at the Logan Square market. I an buy anything I need there (and often get a discount since I"m a vendor).

What I seem to have found is that phenomenon when you take a hobby that you find joy in, turn it into a business, and then ruin it with stress and overwork and various other pressures.

At this point I feel I must tell you what I DO enjoy about this market/restaurant farming endeavor of mine. I do enjoy actually being at the market, talking to my customers, and having people admire the crops I've grown. A couple weeks ago I decided to "feature" Opal Basil as my spotlight product of the week. This meant that I brought more of it than I usually would have. I made a sign talking about the basil, and I made recipe cards showing people how to cook with it. The basil looked absolutely beautiful that day and my table looked fuller than it had previously. So many people came up and told me how beautiful the basil was. This felt REALLY good. Now, I must also mention that I didn't sell out of the basil. Most people who told me how beautiful it was didn't actually buy any despite my attempts to convince them to. I ended up taking six bunches home which I made into pesto and froze. Here's a picture of the Basilpalooza week:

Another thing I enjoy about doing the restaurant and market gardening thing is that it makes me feel like I'm actually PARTICIPATING in the urban agriculture movement, something that I am very excited about. If I gave it all up I fear that I'd miss being a part of the urban ag scene.

Having a business name, a restaurant behind me, and a booth at the market makes me feel legitimate. It makes me feel like I really know what I'm doing. Like I have a skill that is worth something. In my head "hobby farmer" seems much less cool than "actual selling for market / growing for a cool restaurant farmer."

I like the strides I've made this year and the people I've met and networking I've done. If I do want to continue down this path, I'm definitely setting up a good foundation for myself. I've got a few regular customers now. I've got a fancy restaurant who seems pleased with what I'm doing. I really think my business model, after some further development, could really work.

But the question I've been struggling with is, do I actually WANT to develop this venture further. Do I want to try to cut back hours at my day job to persue urban ag? Am I OK with the fact that those moments of joy in the garden and shopping at the market seem to be fewer now that I'm doing this as a job? Maybe I could get that joy back, but what if I don't? Would it be a mistake to continue to distract myself from my day job (a career that I went to school for and really truly do find satisfying, not to mention stable, respectable, and with long-term promise?). If I give up market and restaurant farming and go back to leisurely Sunday mornings puttering around my garden, will the same ambition that spurred me to start this whole thing in the first place come back to haunt me?

These are the questions I've been contemplating and will continue to comtenplate as the as I move through the second half of the season. I hope by the end of the year I'll find answers that I can live with.

So, there it is, a not-so-brief synopsis of what this experience has been like. If you actually made it this far, thanks for reading and please excuse this self-absorbed post.

Farmer's Market Recap June 19th 2010

2010-06-21T07:34:00.001-07:00

Today was a good day! The weather was decent (only rained a bit during set-up; got a bit hot toward the end and caused me to write "need solar powered fan" twice in my notes). People were nice (I'm starting to recognize repeat customers and am continuing to enjoy talking to my fellow vendors, most of whom have been doing this way longer than me); and to top it off, we had the best sales numbers of the season! (don't get too excited, we're still making peanuts--well more like crumbs of peanuts--at this endeavor. If we somehow manage to break even by the end of the year, I'll be surprised but happy.)

Here are some pics.

Its funny when I look at the table and think that we actually made more $ this week than we did the first week, when the table looked a lot more full. This week we had

rainbow chard 2 bunches (my garden)
red ursa kale 2 bunches (One Sixtyblue garden)
bagged lettuce mix 9 bags (mixture of both gardens)
bagged wild arugula 2 bags (One Sixtyblue garden)
mustard greens 1 bunch (my garden) although i screwed up and left these at home so Nick and I will get to eat them this week
chocolate mint 3 large bags (One Sixtyblue garden)
texas tarragon 3 small bags (One Sixtyblue garden)
lemon thume 2 small bags (One Sixtyblue garden)
herbs cut fresh to order: sweet basil, oregano, mint, marjoram, catnip, rosemary, and stevia

By the end of the market, the only thing we had left was two bags of chocolate mint, one swiss chard, and the pots of cutting herbs (although we did totally obliterate the basil AGAIN so I have to remember to bring more basil next time!)

This was the second week of the Herbs Cut Fresh to Order idea, and its still going quite well. About 1/3 of my total income for the day came from the fresh cut herbs. I think people like that they can buy very small quantities of herbs and that they can mix and match (if they want, they can get a couple stems of each plant for the same price as one big bunch of a single kind of herb). I'm charging 50 cents per stem of most herbs (50 cents gets you two stems of oregano and marjoram since those stems are so small). This week I added rosebary, oregano, and marjoram to my offerings. Out of these three, the rosemary was probably the most popular. I offered Stevia again this week, but unlike last week, I actually sold a few stems of it. I've discovered that people don't know what it is but if I can get them to taste it (I give them a leaf or two to sample) they're much more likely to buy it. Most people are really shocked by how sweet it tastes.

Here's a picture taken from my vantage point behind the table.

Nick's been helping me so much with the garden(s) that he's not had a lot of time to work on his dissertation, so this week we decided that I"d run the booth by myself and he can go hide in the truck or under a tree somewhere and get work done during market time.

So the market itself takes up most of our Sunday. Market starts at 10am so we're up by 7, loaded and on our way to the market by 8 (hopefully). Market is over at 3 and if we come straight home we're probably home by 4 (although yesterday we ran more gardening related errands).

But that's just half the job. I have to harvest everything I plan to sell from my garden and from the ONe Sixtyblue garden and have time to wash and pack it (and hopefully refrigerate it to keep it from wilting during market). Its most ideal to harvest in the coolest part of the day, either early morning or late evening. I've taken to harvesting on Saturday morning and then washing and packing during the afternoon. Some things are more labor intensive than others. For example, with the chard all I have to do is cut it, wash it, and wrap a twist tie around it and its done. But with the lettuce mixes and arugula, I have to harvest it, wash it, pick through every leaf individually to make sure there are no weeds, spin it dry, weigh it, and bag it. For these reasons, the bagged salad, spinach, and arugula quickly became the bane of my existence. This process seemed to take FOREVER the first weeks of market, but this week I felt like I was getting the hang of it. I set up my washing station (two or three large plastic tote buckets on a table with the salad spinner, bags, scale, and the garden hose for water) in the shade, turn on my ipod (this week I'm listening to the book Second Nature by Michael Pollan) and get to washing. The whole process only took me about an hour and fifteen minutes this week. Its a good thing too, because these bagged products are the ones that sell the best at market, so I'm kinda HAVE to offer them.

Here are a couple pics of the salad mix, chard, and kale getting washed for market.

Finally, my notes from this market are as follows:

I got a couple requests for live basil plants
the arugula is always the first thing to sell out, I should definitely plant some more
got a request for cut parsely, maybe I should add this to my cut to order herb section
It got hot under the tent, I wonder if someone makes solar powered fans?
I was practically sold out of basil by 11:30. I should definitely bring two pots of it next time.
also maybe add the texas tarragon to the fresh cut herbs section; I sold out of the small bags of this pretty quick
I need more small ziplock bags (for the pre-packaged herbs) and more small brown sandwich bags (for the cut to order herbs). Costco here I come!
my final note to myself was "This is awesome! I totally want to be a farmer!" I was delirious from the heat, what can I say? ;-)

So that's it for week three! Thanks for reading, and thanks to all of you for your support, kind words, and comments. I've linked my "official" Purple Leaf Farms website to this one, so some of my customers may end up reading these blog posts sometime. If that's you, make sure to leave a comment and say Hello!

Still Joy In Gardening

2010-06-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

On Monday night I came home right after work, changed clothes, grabbed a beer and my several boxes of seeds and went out to the garden. Its been several weeks since I've been able to spend quality, non-stressed, uninterrupted time in MY OWN GARDEN! Between my responsibilities at the restaurantt garden and at the community garden, I was neglecting my own garden. I had flats of seeds covering the patio with seedlings barely hanging on in dixie cups while waiting for their permanent home.

So last night I spent a wonderful three full hours in the garden. I planted cabbage, kohlrobi, yellow squash (one of my little seedlings even has a baby squash on it which I know isn't that great for the plant, but still I find exciting!), red noodle chinese beans, trobetta climbing summer squash, sweet corn, japanese cukes, climbing spinach, rattlesnake pole beans, watermelon, chiogia winter squash, blue lake pole beans, kentucky blue pole beans, purple bush beans.... and that's all I can remember off the top of my head. I also (finally) got around to mulching/hilling the potatoes. This year I'm growing potatoes in garbage cans and 55 gallon barrels sawed in half. I planted the seed potatoes in compost and now that they're about a foot tall (and thinking about flowering) I mulched them heavily with straw and covered the straw with a layer of topsoil. This is my own improvisation on a couple different potato growing techniques I've heard about. I'll let you know how it goes. While I was doing all this planting, Nick was kind enough to cover the grape, raspberry, blueberry, blackberry, and kiwis with bird netting. This is the first year we're going to try to keep the birds off the berries, so I'm excited that we'll (hopefully) have a good fruit harvest this year. While we were working, we talked about the garden. Nick said he doesn't mind if I till up what's left of the grass in our backyard. The idea is, we'll till up the rest of the grass, put down stepping stones and plant catnip and maybe creeping thyme between the stones, then the rest of the area will be available for veggies and ornamentals. Here's a picture from last year of the area I'm talking about.

Imagine this with NO GRASS! stepping stones with herbs, and MORE PLANTS YAY! This year the area with the teepee now has blueberry bushes and sweet corn.. and will most likely have a bunch more veggies I don't know what else to do with.

Anyway, the point of this post is for me to document the fact that I had experienced three hours of joy in the garden last night. I'll need to remember this moment during those times when I doubt myself and all the time and money I'm committing to this crazy idea of being an urban farmer.

Thanks for reading.

Farmer's Market Recap June 13th 2010

2010-06-14T07:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the second week of the Logan Square Farmer's Market. There were a few upgrades made to our set-up and products this week. First off, our banner and business cards from greenerprinter.com and designed by evilducky arrived so the office-papper-and-duct-tape banner from last week is gone. I put out the business cards and was surprised by how many people actually took one. I even met a chef who's restaurant may be interested in installing an on-site garden. He took my card and said he'd call. This is the first lead for new clients I've gained through the market, so its very exciting!

After going to the restaurant to harvest product early on Saturday morning (once again we managed to get there, harvest, and plant seedlings JUST before the rain started) we ran around town looking for decor/display items to use at the booth. I got a couple baskets from Michaels to use to pile bagged greens and herbs in. I also got two dry erase boards that I'll use to list the products we have each week. I also wasted probably two ours in Michaels trying to figure out how to make small signs that I can prop up next to each product listing the product and the price. I came up with a ghetto fabulous cardboard + wooden dowel + duct tape + aluminum foil scheme that turned out to be a total failure. Nick asked me, why can't we just BUY something that looks decent and works well like the wire sign holder thingies that the restaurants use to put the table numbers or dessert menus in. Its strange how readily I'll spend $150 at a garden center on stuff I don't necessarily "need" but how I feel compelled to do-it-myself when it comes to $3-a-pop table top signs. *shrug*

So this week I offered for sale the following:

2 bags of spinach (my garden)
3 bags of salad mix (my garden and One Sixty garden)
3 bags of arugula (One Sixty garden)
3 bunches scallions (One Sixty garden)
3 bunches turnip greens (my garden)
1 bunch red mustard greens (my garden)
2 rather sad bunches of radishes (One Sixty Garden)
4 bags texas tarragon (One Sixty garden)
3 bags chocolate mint (One Sixty garden)
1 bag rosemary (my7 garden)
"cut to order" herbs basil, mint, catnip, and stevia (my garden)
seedlings: chinese red noodle beans, trombetta climbing squash, catnip, and tomatoes (my garden)

The "cut to order" herbs was a new idea I tried. The idea is, I bring large pots of herbs, still growing in their soil, and if you want some basil I'll cut it for you fresh right then and there. I charged 50 cents a stem, which most people seemed to think was fine. Its great because a) it allowed me to display herbs that weren't wilted (which happened with the basil last week despite the fact that I cut it the morning of the market and put it into water immediately) and b) allows me to save what I don't sell for next week's market. I sold about 20 stems of basil (all I had pretty much), 4 stems of stevia, and 8 stems of mint. Despite the fact that several people asked me for catnip last week, no one bought it this week. I know that only adds up to about $16, but for something that took little to no effort on my part (i didn't have to pre cut , wash , and / or bag any of it) I'd say it was a success and I plan to offer it again. The idea is, I'll have about 4 different pots of basil. Each week I"ll bring the most mature pot with me, cut from it, and then leave it alone to regrow the following weeks while I harvest from the other 3 pots. By the time I'm back to pot #1 hopefully it will be ready for another harvest.

That was the exciting part of the market. The less exciting part of the market was that I didn't sell ANY of my turnip greens!!! Several people asked me what they were and asked why they didn't have turnips on them. I explained that they're a type of turnip that's been bred for the edible greens, so the plant doesn't make turnips. I told people how to prepare them, but ultimately no one bought any. I guess Nick and I will be eating turnip greens this week, which is fine with me! I also had scallions and radishes left over, along with one bag of lettuce mix.

Things that sold really well were the bagged spinach and bagged arugula. Those were gone within the first our of the market.

Next week I hope to have my table product lables ready. I'll definitely be bringing back my cut-to-order herbs. I'll be adding marjoram and oregano to my line up of offerings. I'll probably bring more turnip greens, because I have a lot coming in right now, but this time I'll post a simple recipe on how to cook them and try to be more proactive about selling them.

First Farmers Market Ever!

2010-06-07T12:34:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was my VERY FIRST day selling at the farmer's market in Logan Square. Relatively speaking, my offerings were few and my booth was kinda ghetto-fabulous in several ways (my banner had not arrived yet so I was using one printed on normal office paper taped together with duct tape, for instance). The fact that I'm just starting out and don't have tons to sell or all the spiffy equiptment just yet is something I'm going to have to get used to. It rained, twice, but our tent from Costco worked like a champ. We stepped in dog poop, probably more than twice. Nick lost the keys to the truck for about a four hour period, but a nosy dog eventually sniffed them out on the ground next to our booth. Our booth is located next to Vo, an AWESOME food vendor that sells freshly made Vietnamese style spring rolls, which came in handy around lunch time. The market was WAY more crowded than I ever expected. Despite the random rain showers, the majority of the time was beautiful weather. People came out with blankets and had picnics in the grass next all the market tents. There were SO MANY DOGS at the market. Generally, I'm in favor of markets allowing dogs. Its fun to see all the pups, and it probably helps to boost market attendance when pet owners feel they can visit the market while taking their pooch for a walk. However, I gotta say that by the end it got a little nutz. With the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of people plus the fact that like one in four people had a dog, it was verging on out of control. Once we figured out that dogs were allowed at the market, we briefly discussed maybe bringing our dog Maggie next week, but once the crowds reached their peak, we decided that Mags would probably hit stimulation overlaod if we were to bring her. So, for now, sorry Mags, but you'll be staying at home.

So, about the business aspect of this endevor. I had a surprising number of products to offer (more than I had anticipated). These included: 5 bunches radishes, 3 bunches red scallions, 2 bunches green garlic, 4 bags spinach, several bunches of herbs (rosemary, lemon type, basil, mint, catmint, chocolate mint, texas tarragon, and chives). I also brought several toatmo, basil, and marigold seedlings. I hadn't planned on being able to sell the seedlings, but I was happy to find out on Friday night that I was indeed allowed to bring them. I ALMOST sold out completely of the fresh veggies and herbs. I went home with one bag of lettuce, one scallion, one green garlic, and a couple herbs. I also sold a few seedlings, although not as many as I had expected. I think the new grow-it-yourself craze, which (don't get me wrong) is awesome, means that more peole are starting more seeds at home, so they don't need to buy seedlings. There were also several other vendors who were selling seedlings that were bigger than mine, so that probably has something else to do with it. Here's what the spread looked like:

Check out the tape Nick used to add a "Purple Leaf Farms" sign to cover up the "ESPN" logo on his apron. Remember what I was saying about ghetto-fabulous?

Anyway, we arrived two hours early to set up. Since its my first day at a market and the first day of this market this year, I wanted to make sure we had time to contend with any snags we might run into. This means we were at the market from 8AM to 3PM. I wont lie. By the end it felt like a long day. However, I am surprised at how much I enjoyed talking to customers, especially when they asked me questions about my products or about gardening in general. It was quite a rush!

I took notes throughout the day so that I can keep track of what products people ask for and what worked and what didn't work. Here are some of the notes from yesterday:

Things that people asked for that I didn't have:

potted catnip
sorrel
cucumber seedlings
pepper seedlings
lemon basil
sage plants
edible marigolds
rosemary plant
oregano plant

Supplies we should be sure to bring to the market next time:

chairs
dog treats
dog water bowl
our dog? probably not
a dry erase board or chalk board to list products on
alternative product labeling scheme (plain paper didn't work so well)

Things that worked well:

spinach pre-chilled and sealed in zip lock bags kept very well
woody herbs pre-packed in zip lock bags
posting a sign that listed all our products at the front of the tent so people could read what we had

Things that didn't work so well:

homemade price signs (aka: pieces of paper) didn't work so well or look so good
despite the fact that I picked it right before I left for the market and put it into water immediately, the basil wilted before the market had even begun.
mints also started to wilt before the market was ove

Ideas I'll consider for the future:

I think I may plant all my basil plants into several small containers that are easy to transport. Instead of cutting the basil from the plant the morning before the market, I'll bring the container of basil with me to the market and cut it on demand. This way maybe the basil will be less likely to wilt (although on a really hot day it may wilt anyway) and also I don't cut basil that I end up not selling.

I leave you with a couple other pictures of my table at the market.

TOMATOES!

2010-05-18T07:27:00.000-07:00

Note: thanks to the internets and the Baker Creek Seeds website from whom I borrowed these pictures.

Monday night I finally was able to plant my hundreds--ok it was actually more like 40--tomato seedlings. I've got 9+ varieties going on this year. I didn't realize it until I uploaded the pictures for this post, but only 2 of these varieties produce red tomatoes. The rest are orange, white, purple, or rainbow! They are:

White Current (smaller than cherry tomatoes, white/cream color

San Marzano- a typical paste tomato. I grew these last year and they did very well and made great canning.

Persimmon- Thanks to Snarkyvegan for hooking me up with one of these plants. I got a taste of the ones she grew last year and they were so sweet and tangy. I can't wait!

Marvel Stripe- These are huge slicer tomatoes that have orange to red stripes throughout. These currently hold the record of being my favorite tomato in the world (to date).

This is a variety that Burpee came up with back in the 1970's called Long Keeper. The idea is, you harvest it before its ripe, you store it in a cool dark place and it will slowly ripen so that you have ripe tomatoes in December. We'll see how this one goes. I sort of worry that these might taste the same as the tomatoes at the grocery stores do around here in December.

Great White- This is an heirloom I got from Baker Creek Seeds last year. Its big, mild to fruity in flavor, and white!

Dad's Sunset (aka: Dad's Sweet)- these are a large orange heirloom tomato

Purple Krim- All I really know about these is that they're a big slicer, an heirloom, and PURPLE!

Ananas Noir aka: Black Pineapple- These are another seed I got from Baker Creek. I bought them because they look cool. I have no idea what they taste like.

I'm also growing a "ruffle" style tomato (instead of being smooth globes, they have lots of ridges) but I can't remember what its called. I probably still have the seed packet for it floating around somewhere.

And finally, I'll be growing two varieties of cherry tomatoes at the restaurant this year: Black Cherry and Yellow Pear. I've never grown either of these before but I chose them because they are a) they look cool (if you haven't gathered already, I'm a sucker for uniquely colored food) and b) are supposed to be some of the tastiest cherry tomatoes around.

So that's the tomato round-up. It will be a while, but you can bet I'll report my first tomato harvest as soon as it happens. Thanks for reading!

5 Weeks In

2010-05-11T09:34:00.000-07:00

This week is the fifth week of the restaurant garden at One Sixtyblue. The planting / harvesting schedule I made in exel tells me that this week, it should be time to harvest radishes and rabe. I was out at the restaurant over the weekend stringing up more pea trellis and it looks like we should actually be on track! The radishes are almost ready and the rabe is starting to get REALLY pushy, as its been trying to go to seed for the last three weeks but I've been cutting off its flowers trying to get more leaves. So, I guess you could say things are going pretty good... for now. I plan to take pictures of the first harvest and post them here later in the week. Oh, yeah, I've also created a new page on the blog called "Crop Journal 2010" where I'll be keeping notes of what worked, what didn't, and how much harvest I get. That's all for now. :)

Garden Updates May 3rd 2010

2010-05-02T20:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a few pictures of what's going on in the garden (and the restaurant garden) as of today.

First, here's the Star Magnolia and the Bleeding Heart. Both of these plants has grown much bigger from last year. (You can also see our new roof in the background. They just finished the shingles on Friday. Still waiting on the gutters, sofits, and downspouts.)

I planted potatoes today. As most people have probably figured out already, I'm drawn to things in the garden that are odd colors. So this year I'm doing Adirondack Blue and Adirondack Red potatoes. I'm using the garbage can potato method, and am placing fewer seeds per can this year. I think I've crowded them in the past leading to underwhelming harvest. This year I planted about eight seeds per can (which are about 24 inches in diameter). We'll see how things go.

Here are some tulips that I moved from the front yard to the back yard last fall. These tulips came with the house, the previous owner had planted them. I don't think I would have ever picked these out of a catalog... green just isn't that interesting for me... at least that's what I thought. But, I LOVE these tulips and am so glad they're doing well this year.

Here's a shot from the restaurant garden. This is my do-it-yourself pea trellis. Basically, I've strung twine vertically between the nails I drove into the back of the raised bed and an iron support beam that's holding up the billboard above the loading dock. I'm a bit worried that the string isn't located close enough to the pea seedlings... they're about three inches away... so I'll give them a week to see if they grow enough to reach the twine. While we were at the restaurant garden today we also planted over 100 lettuce seedlings as well as 120 scallions. The radishes are looking good.. they're starting to show signs of producing radishes... and the broccoli rabe is also looking great. Go restaurant garden go!

This is a great shot of Alium from my yard. I LOVE Alium!!! This is by far the best picture of Alium I've ever taken and I can't quit staring at it.

Restaurant Garden Update

2010-04-28T19:37:00.000-07:00

We're in the third week of the restaurant garden and I wanted to finally show you some pictures of things actually GROWING as opposed to just dirt. So far, the peas, radishes, and broccoli rabe seem to doing well. Half of the scallions are also ok... while the other half are limp and white-ish and I'm not sure if they're going to bounce back. I bought some onion transplants as a back up though. The lettuce, arugula, and spinach is slow to germinate. During the first week of the garden, before we had the mulch, it took us a while to figure out how much water was needed to keep the seeds moist. I think some emerging seedlings may have dried up and died. Its also proven to be extremely windy at the garden. I think the wind may have been a major factor in the smack-down that left my first planting of scallions looking so bad. Its becoming obvious that this year is going to be a trial and error situation. We'll have to learn the quirks of the location and the soil we're working with and how different varieties of plants respond. Kale is also being really slow. Finally, I addition to the seeds and seedlings I've started, I've also planted plants from the garden center... mostly perennial herbs that I couldn't find seeds for / figured it was just easier to start with plants. So... here's how things look.

These are the good looking scallions I started from seed.

These are some French Breakfast radishes planted about two weeks ago.

Container Garden FAIL

2010-04-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

Since I've begun my market / restaurant gardening endeavor, usually about once a day I have a crisis of some sort and I think to myself "WTF was I thinking trying to do this?" Last night was probably the worst such occasion I've experienced so far. Here's the scoop:

In an effort to expand the amount of growing space I have, I decided to do a container garden in my neighbor's parkway. I got the landlord's approval, bought cheap barrels on craigslist, sawed them in half, and filled them with compost... those last two things I did IN THE RAIN. (poor me! lol) Anyway... last night my neighbors, who I've never met before, came over and told me, in an amazingly polite way, that my barrels look like either "a trash dump" or "a trailer park" and that they wanted me to either move them or camouflage them somehow.

I explained to her that I was planning to mulch around the barrels, so no one would have to try to mow between them and that I was also going to do a flower boarder around the whole group of barrels. See nifty design below.

I offered her free veggies, which did not persuade her at all. We talked about alternate locations where the barrels would not be as visible (but would also get no light) as well as the idea of painting them or covering them in bamboo rolled fencing. The neighbors also said that they had called the Village and found out that you have to have a permit to put anything in the parkway. I said we should all think about it for a couple days and that I'd come by on Thursday and we could discuss the solution. Then I went home and cried for about an hour... while doing other things... multi task! In case you haven't noticed, I tend to emotionally overreact to things. I know this, and I knew my freak out would pass. It did. But, later in the evening I went to the Village website and discovered that it is AGAINST CODE to plant ANYTHING EDIBLE in the parkway! Also, if you want to plant some ornamentals in the parkway, you have to get a $15 village permit and also you must keep a minimum of 40% turf grass at all times. There goes my idea of planting prarie plants in my front parkway which floods every time it rains.

So, to make a long story short, this morning at 5AM Nick and I got up and moved all twenty barrels to our yard. They were pretty heavy so we had to use the appliance dolly or the garden cart to move them. Also, I had already planted seeds in eight of the barrels so we had to be extra careful not to spill those. This task was expecially annoying considering we are in the middle of getting our roof replaced and our garage, parking area, and yard are full with construction materials, construction debris, and a huge dumpster. We'll probably have to move the barrels around in the yard to their final locations again once the construction is over. By the time the neighbors woke up at 6AM all the barrels were in our yard. I hope they are happy.

This morning I'm feeling much less dramatic about the whole deal. You win some, you loose some.

Spring = Tulips in chicago

2010-04-27T06:03:00.000-07:00

One of the springtime things I look forward to most in Chicago is the tulips along Michigan Ave. and State St. and in the parks. I took a lovely walk at lunch last week and took these pictures of this year's tulip displays.

These sort of "short and fat" tulips are new this year... or at least they're new to me. I dunno what variety they are, but they are definitely cool! The fact that they're purple is an extra plus in my book! Every year the Park District gives away tulip bulbs to community gardens. When you get the free bulbs, you never know what color or variety you're getting. While I think its unlikely, I'm hoping that we get these tulips in our bag this year!

More of the "short and fat" tulips...

Beautiful striped tulips
Here's a shot looking north on Michigan.

Near Chicago Ave, they've installed some water features among the plantings.

They've given some of the bus shelters what I will call floral crowns.

I don't know that I've ever seen lilac in the Michigan Ave. displays. I approve! Lilac smells SO GOOD!

And finally, as they've done as long as I've been paying attention, they've used white tulips in the Water Tower park. Apparently the guy who designed the park gave very specific instructions that all flowers should be white. I like this shot cuz I managed to get Hancock and Water Tower together. (Sidenote: A few days ago I saw someone letting their golden retriever poop on the grass there... I don't think you're supposed to do that... )

My tulip walk today reminded me why I love this city so much. While I don't know where the future will ultimately lead (do I want to move to a farm or not?), today I definitely feel I could never leave this place.

Project: Compost Bin

2010-04-26T18:05:00.000-07:00

Note: I found this post in my drafts folder. Dunno why I never posted it. This compost bin was built about a year ago, and I can say that its done a great job! Having the two bin system makes it much easier to turn the compost. Now all I need is a decent compost sifting method. I think this might be hubby's next project. Ok here's the original post:

This is our recycling bin. I bought it from Gardener's Supply ... no wait... maybe it was Composters.com... yes it was. I remember now.

Actually, I guess its more accurate to say that this WAS our composting bin, seeing as a couple weeks ago my totally awesome husband built this new two bin reycling system to replace it.

Yes it is rather large. And, yes, if you zoom in to the picture you can tell that its also a bit less than square, but I must say that in the couple of weeks since we switched over, its proven itself to be totally awesome.

The design is based off a diagram we found at the University of Missouri Extension site (here), although due to space constraints (not a joke) we opted for the two bin rather than three bin system. I must say I am very proud of Hubby for pulling this one off. All he did was build a frame out of 2x4's then covered the bottom, back, and two sides with hardware cloth, then built the lid which hinges to the frame, then finally added the four removable front pannels. These insure easy access for turning the pile.

For the sake of cost effectiveness, we used untreated framing lumber. Yeah, it probably wont last as long as treated lumber or cedar, but it fits out budget for now.

Little composter, get ready for your new enormous neighbor!

Despite its small size, the little compost did do a decent job of making compost. The problem was the sheer volume of material we needed to compost. It just kept filling up and would take a while to compost down. You did a good job little guy! Thanks for your two years of service in our yard.

Seedling Update

2010-04-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

Here's a short seedling update as of April 10 (yep, I'm back dating my posts).

Marigolds for the community garden

Tomato seedlings doing well.

Broccoli Rabe for the restaurant garden

scallions also for the restaurant garden

The plant shelves are starting to get full!

First Day of Restaurant Garden Planting!

2010-04-10T08:49:00.000-07:00

April 10th was the official first day of planting at the restaurant garden! Above is a picture of some of the chefs preparing the beds for planting radishes! Everybody came out of the kitchen to help. Good times.

Before heading to the restaurant for planting, I wanted to organize my seeds and count out how many seeds I'd need for each row. Here's a line of radish seeds. About five minutes after I took this picture, Keenan jumped into the table and scattered several of these rows. There was lots of yelling and unhappiness from me.

Finally, here's a picture of the bulbs we planted in the community garden last fall. They look great! Nick and I went to do a clean-up at the community garden (I've taken to calling it the "Commi-G" early in the morning. It was nice to get a winter's worth of accumulated trash out of the flower beds. This year, compared to the restaurant garden project, the Commi-G is like a piece of cake side project that I can do with one hand tied behind my back. At least that's how it feels. The magnitude and pressure of the restaurant garden is definitely overwhelming right now, but that's how the Commi-G felt last year, so hopefully by NEXT year the restaurant garden will by easy!

Time Travel Blog Style

2010-04-07T19:46:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am shamelessly back-dating this blog. One reason I like my blog is that it gives me a way to remember what happened from year to year in the garden. A big part of that is knowing when things happen. While I've been terrible about blogging over the past month, I've been pretty good about taking pictures. So, lets just pretend I was also good about blogging on a timely basis.

Ok so here's what was going on in the garden April 7th.

My garden empire is expanding! My neighbor has graciously agreed to let me do a container garden on her parkway. I chose to do containers instead of raised beds (or instead of digging right into the ground) because this way I can easily move the garden if the Village or AT&T decide they need to dig up the parkway to access utilities. I was going for an economical solution, so I ended up buying these food grade barrels which were used to transport shampoo. I got them off craigslist for about $12 a piece. I"ll saw them in half to make 2 25 gallon containers per barrel. That's a nice big container for $6. I haven't been able to beat that price anywhere else. I wish these barrels were more picturesque.. but.. what are you gonna do?

Here's the front yard.. or should I say the front "lack of" yard. We mulched over all the grass last year and planted a variety of perennials. Things are just starting to wake up (except the Forsythia which is very much awake already) and everything seems to have survived from last year, which is great!. I really don't like the Forsythia the rest of the year, but I let it stay because of the two weeks of yellow awesomeness it gives me this time of the year.

Here's the rest of the front "yard." The Serviceberry is also blooming!

(I accidentally imported this photo twice and now blogger wont let me get rid of it grr!)

Here's one variety of bulbs I bought from Flower Power last year. I can't remember what these are and I don't have the list in front of me right now so .... the mystery will have to continue for now.

The Redbud is also starting to bloom! Since the big tree in the neighbor's yard was cut last year, the Redbud is growing like crazy! Maggie says Hi as well.

Here are the violets I got at Costco last year. Did you know that the violet (i'm not sure what variety) is the Illinois state flower?

And finally, the rock star of my garden when it comes to spring flowering trees: the Star Magnolia. The Bleeding Hearts, Tulips, and Alium will arrive shortly!

Restaurant Garden: Done.

2010-03-27T18:42:00.000-07:00

All the beds are built and filled with dirt. Other than building the trellises and actually planting some seeds and seedlings (I think I'm going to wait another two weeks for that) the garden is pretty much done. Here are some pics.

I managed to snag this picture of the parking lot from the train. You can see all four corner bed clusters.

This is the loading dock on the other side of the building from the parking lot. It was supposed to be the garden location before they decided to move it. However, we decided to go ahead and do two beds up on the ledge.

Here are two 14 foot beds that will also feature trellises, yet to be constructed.

Here's a triangular bed mean tot make use of an unused area near the back door.

Here's the biggest of the beds, 4x28. I'm thinking of making this an herb garden.

Next steps for me are to finalize the planting and harvest plan. I'm also really looking forward to what will be my last vacation before garden season is over. We're going to Florida with two of my oldest friends from high school. When I get back, it will be time to plant the garden. The farmer's market season starts in June, and with a market every Sunday that's the point of no return for me. That's all for now. Thanks for reading.

Cross Cultural

2010-03-24T20:03:00.000-07:00

The garden build is going great. We should be done on Friday. YAY !!! There's not much news today on the garden.

Now for a quick story. So Nick and I were at the restaurant this evening installing more landscape fabric and a woman pulled into the parking lot and asked Nick "is this the lot for the restaurant. I don't want to get a ticket." The answer to this question is slightly complicated. It is the lot for the restaurant but its supposed to be a valet only lot so what you're supposed to do (I think) is stop at the door to the restaurant and give your keys to the valet and then they pull your car into the lot. So Nick was thinking about this, and wondering how best to explain to the woman when she shook her head and said "Si or No?" Apparently she thought Nick didn't answer her right away because HE DIDN'T SPEAK ENGLISH. I think I can reasonably assume that she thought he was from Mexico, the typical Mexican-doing-manual-labor-at-restaurant thing? We thought it was HILARIOUS. After the woman was gone we had a good long laugh over that. In addition to the stereotyping, this was most hilarious because Nick has blond/red-ish hair with blue eyes.

This interaction, combined with thje rats-as-big-as-cats story from yesterday leads me to believe that this project is going to be interesting in more ways that I was intending.

Restaurant Garden Build Update

2010-03-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

So today Nick and I started installing landscape fabric inside the raised beds. This is mostly to keep the dirt from seeping out from between the cracks between the boards. As I was doing this someone walking by stopped and said "are you building a vegetable garden?" I sort of got excited that someone had actually noticed what I was doing After I answered Yes, the person then said "do you know how many rats we have around here?" Hmm, ok maybe this conversation was not going to go how I had expected. I know there are rats. I've seen a couple dead ones around. I mean, this is URBAN agriculture after all. But I'm not too worried about them, since as far as I know other urban ag. sites haven't had major rat problems. I told the person that I'd get a cat then he said that the rats are as big as cats then walked away feeling triumphant I"m sure. I think he's wrong. I Hope he's wrong. I guess I'll find out sooner or later.

In other news, I learned something today. A parking lot that may appear to be "pretty much flat" can in fact be "not really flat at all." This can lead to problems when one is trying to build a raised bed and have that bed sit flat on the ground without a) rocking back and forth or b) having a big gap of several inches between the bottom of the bed and the ground. Shims wont come close to doing it. Instead, the carpenters have to cut extra 2x4's on an angle which is more work than they bargained for.

Um. Yeah. So. It looks like the carpenters are going to need an extra day to finish the job and probably some more wood too. I can't help but feel somewhat responsible for not foreseeing (and planning for) this problem. But the good news is, I don't think anyone is too terribly upset. I guess this is one of many live and learn experiences I'll have as I take on my first big garden project.

So here's how the beds look with landscape fabric in them.

On another note, here's whats going on in seed-starting-land. As you can see, I'm starting to fill up BOTH shelving unites. I'm out of flats and almost out of potting mix, AGAIN. Part of me wonders if I should keep a running total of how much I'm spending on this hobby/business experiment this year. Part of me thinks that would just be depressing. Anyway, I"ve got 4 flats of scallions, 6 flats of broccoli raab, and a BUNCH of seedlings currently sowed in flats that will need transplanting soon.

Here are cute little thai basil seedlings I planted last week.

Broccoli Raab

Thai Peppers

Restaurant Garden Build Day 1

2010-03-22T19:51:00.000-07:00

All things considered, day 1 of the restaurant build went very well. Here's the six beds that are almost done as of today. I ordered 24 cubic yards (that's like 215 wheel barrels worth) of soil today to be delivered on Wednesday once we have beds to put the soil in. For today, here's how things looked at the end of the day. OH, and thanks to my friend John at Prairieform landscape design for the shout outs on his blog regarding the restaurant garden recently.

We're using untreated cedar lumber to build the beds. The sides are 2''x4''s and we're using 4''x4''s at the corners. Since these beds are quite long (the ones in the above picture are 4'x15') we decided to add another set of 4''x4''s in the center with a 2''x4'' connecting them to keep the beds from bowing outward. Once the beds are complete I'm going to line them with heavy duty landscape fabric, mostly to keep the soil from washing away between the cracks of the wood. I've also built raised beds using 1''x4''s for the sides which also works and is cheaper, but a bit less sturdy. We're using 3'' coated screws that require pre-drilling, a PITA but much more secure than nails.

Ok that's all for tonight.

Spring!

2010-03-21T16:59:00.000-07:00

After the cold, wet, and depressing snow we had yesterday, the sun is now out and I'm unbelievably enchanted by these crocuses that opened up in the sunshine this afternoon. I planted these back by the garage two seasons ago and I swear they didn't bloom at all last year. That's ok, I forgive them!

During the mini blizzard yesterday, I got together with the garden girls and planted seeds for the community garden plant sale. We've got several varieties of tomatoes, eggplant, hot peppers, and sweet peppers, as well as some marigolds, calendula, columbine, asters, basil, and cilantro. Last year we made along $1,000 so we're hoping it will go just as well this year.

Finally, the restaurant garden build officially starts tomorrow. Nick and I went out this afternoon to do final measurements and to draw out on the parking lot where the raised beds will go. Hopefully by Wednesday, the beds will be built and filled with dirt and I can get planting this weekend. For now, here's a sneak peak.

I Love My Ugly Garden!!!

2010-03-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

I've decided to follow Gina's lead and post my own pictorial rebuttal to the recent Garden Rant post that, in my opinion. took a rather elitist and offensive (to me) argument by suggesting that vegetable gardens that aren't artistically designed, that don't use premium products, or that may be a little weedy, give all gardeners a bad name and shouldn't be allowed. To me, gardening is about many more things than just looking pretty. And for that matter, who gets to decide what is and isn't pretty anyway?

I went through pictures of my garden from the last couple years looking for some "ugly" pictures to show you here, which I found pretty difficult. I know I'm not an impartial party here--I have great affection for my garden after all and just like the proud mother of an ugly baby am apt to see beauty and love it anyway--but I've got to say that, I think my garden IS pretty, even with all the homemade tomato cages, the weeds I let stay, and the squash vines spilling out of their designated bed to take over the path. For example,

Here's a picture of my homemade tomato supports and trellises. I buy 6 foot galvonized fencing in 50 foot bundles (for 35 bucks y'alls) and use it instead of spending money on those beautiful and I'm sure totally awesome but expensive Texas Tomato Cages or the cool products sold in Gardener's Supply.

Here's a picture of a potato cage I built out of the galvanized
wire and landscape fabric.

Here's the tomato I should have entered in the ugly tomato contest last year. I grew through the wire fence so that the wire was actually embedded inside the tomato.

Here's a picture of the weed I let stay because it was so pretty. If anybody knows what this is, let me know. It bloomed in late spring.

And finally, here's what my yard looked like in August of last year. All the sunflowers you see were planted by the birds who got the seeds from the bird feeder. The bean teepee (minus the beans, never got around to that haha!) in the foreground is made from bamboo stake. The big pile of green leaves to the left of the stake is a squash plant that came up by itself and took over about a 6 foot circle in the middle of the yard.

I love my garden, even if some may call it messy or ghetto or whatever, and I think that's what really counts. Don't get me wrong, a artfully designed and meticulously maintained gardens are awesome and I congratulate and admire those who have them. But, they aren't necessary, and those less artsy of us with less free time and less funds to put toward the garden shouldn't be made to feel bad about our gardens either.

Blog Updates

2010-03-10T11:43:00.000-08:00

Hello blog. After ignoring you for a long LONG time, I've finally started to update the sidebar and put things where I think they make sense. Check out the "DIY Projects By Others" section. I found several good posts on Diggin' Food which I've now linked to. Also, while I'd like to give you a seed starting update, I'm waiting to receive a camera data cord in the mail to replace the one I lost. I've got about 12 flats going right now, but every day there's something new. I'm starting to worry that my seed starting area may not be big enough to hold all my flats. We'll see. Hopefully the camera cable will come in the mail today or tomorrow and I can show you what I mean. Tis' all for now. :)

Let the Seed Starting Begin!

2010-02-26T08:15:00.001-08:00

You guys... its kind of insane how happy I get about seeds and seed starting. I guess the reason is obvious: its a way to garden in the middle of winter. But I also think its about the excitement of untarnished expectations of this year's garden... aka: I'm starting the gardening season off with a clean slate. There haven't been any disasters (yet), so I'm free to visualize how awesome the garden will be this year. The garden I'm dreaming about now will be perfectly planned and organized, abundantly productive, and completely weed-free!

Of course, sooner or later I'll kill some seedlings or the rabbits will eat my lettuce or the weeds will start to overtake. But for now I'm just gonna sit over here and bask in the glory of my garden dreams and expectations.

Also, I wanted to show you a couple of the seedlings that are puttering along in my basement. This year I've more than doubled my seed starting area. I bought two heavy duty metal shelving units and enough florescent lights to have two on every shelf. I figure at the height of production these shelves will hold approximately 40 flats. I figure between my own garden, the restaurant garden, and seeds for the community garden plant sale, I'll have no trouble filling up all the space.

This is what it looks like when you buy 16 fixtures and 32 bulbs all at once at the Lowe's. Kinda insane. If there's some police list of people who buy inappropriate quantities of grow lights, I'm sure we're on it.

Here's one of the shelving units all put together with the lights. The shelves are approx: 4'x18'' so they hold four flats each.

Here's my new little plant babies! In the back are red scallion seedlings. In the front are broccoli raab (aka: rapini, rabe) seedlings that are just a mere five days old. These are growing so fast I'm wondering if I misunderstood the seed packet instructions. We'll see! Also, I gotta say that, yes I know these are planted EXTREMELY densely. I'm of course planning to transplant them into individual pots. But, I've got to say that if I had to do it over again, I'd half the amount of seed per tray. These are gonna be a real headache to transplant, and I hope the roots don't get too damaged. I'll let y'a know.

I've planted my seedlings in 100% coir (coco fiber that's like peat moss but more environmentally friendly). The trays I planted the seeds in are just take-out containers with holes punched in the bottom. I water everything from the bottom, by pouring water into the flat itself. The water will wick up through the holes into the trays and keep everything evenly moist. I keep the flats covered with clear dome lids while the seeds are germinating to keep things moist. Once the leaves are up, I remove the dome to prevent problems related to too much humidity.

Once the seedlings have their first set of true leaves, I'll transplant them into dixie cups (they're cheap (especially at costco) and they seem to compost pretty well) with organic potting mix amended with compost from my compost pile and maybe a bit of coir fiber to help with water retention.

A few other things to know about starting seeds indoors. Most seeds like warm soil for germination (like around 70 degrees). My basement is currently a "toasty" (not) 55 degrees, so I've placed the germinating seeds on seed heat mats. I used these last year and had great germination rates. Once the seeds have germinated you can move them off the mats. The second part of successful seed starting is the light. There are many different kinds of lights but I opt for plain ole cheap shop lights with plain ole cheap bulbs. I buy the bulbs with a high Kelvin number--I think mine are at least 5000 Kelvin. You can find the Kelvin number on the bulb package. They make special "grow light" bulbs but I think the regular shop lights, with a high kelvin number, are just fine.

One final thing, I've also started LABELING EVERYTHING I PLANT with the name of the plant and the date it was planted. I learned from experience last year that no matter how confident I feel that "there's no way I'll forget what I planted here and when" I totally WILL forget! I got a label maker for Christmas and I know how to use it!

I don't claim to be an expert, but this is my fourth year of seed starting so I can at least speak about my experiences during those four years.

Thanks for reading! :)

My Next Big Gardening Adventure!

2010-02-24T10:56:00.000-08:00

Note: I posted a version of this over on my personal blog so if you read it there, don't bother reading it here, unless you're into that.

Hello my blog! I know its been a long while since I posted last. Please forgive me. I've come out of the woodwork today to tell you about my next big gardening adventure!

Many of you already know about this, so I guess maybe I'm writing this down for more of journaling purposes rather than conveying info to you. So, forgive me if you've heard all this before... but here goes.

OMG Guess What???? A big time fancy pants restaurant in downtown Chicago wants me to be their gardener! How did this come about, you ask? Well, back in November, I was attending a get-together of people in Chicago who are interested in urban agriculture (aka: growing food in the city) and it was at that meeting that I found out that the restaurant was looking for someone to run a garden for them. I immediately went home and started doing my research. I googled to find out what cuisine the restaurant serves and what types of produce items they have on their menu. The next day I went down to the restaurant with a basket full of fresh produce, which was to serve as my resume. Despite all odds (despite my lack of years of experience or references), they seemed quite impressed with me and my basket of veg, and the project has taken off. Here's a pic of the "resume" I took with me that day.

So far, I've designed a garden space which will be built on top of a portion of their parking lot. The plan consists of several raised beds build from cedar boards and filled with organic soil and compost. I did a budget for materials, and, with the Chef's help, I decided what we'd grow in the garden and ordered seeds. Just this week I've finished (almost) a detailed planting and harvest schedule. We'll be building about eight 4x12 foot raised beds which I've divided into three rows each where I'll grow things like lettuce, scallions, carrots, chard, kale, mustard, purslane, shiso, broccoli raab, and a bunch more I'm forgetting. There will also be another four 2x12 beds built against the wall which will hold trellised plants such as yard long beans, Japanese cucumbers, and climbing summer squash. Finally, there are another four 2x12 beds devoted entirely to cherry tomatoes and various types of basil and edible flowers. All in all I've got about 50 individual rows of crops to schedule and keep track of. Thank GOD for Excel! I'm hoping to have harvest from the last week of April all the way through the first few weeks of November. That's the plan!

Despite the fact that nothing has been done to actually build the garden yet--that should get started in the next few weeks--I've already put in countless hours on this project and have been stressing out about it more than I've ever stressed about anything ever before! This reminds me of when I was stressing about getting the community garden started last year, except worse! What I've learned though is, if I can get through this stressful time, I'll come out of it feeling stronger and more capable. Here's hoping that next year, after having a full successful year of the restaurant garden under my belt, I'll feel like I can do this garden thing with my hands tied behind my back... no stress, no problem! Maybe someday this growing-for-restaurants thing will turn into a business, but for now I'm just happy to have the opportunity to be involved in such an awesome project.

So, that's the big news! As the project progresses I hope to make more regular blog entries. For now, here's a list of all the veggies, herbs, and flowers I plan to grow in the restaurant garden:

Wild Arugula

Purple Basil

Thai Basil

Yard Long Chinese Noodle Pole Beans

Borage (herb and edible flowers)

Broccoli Raab

Snow White Carrots

Suyo Long Japanese Cucumber

Chard, assorted colors

Apple Green Eggplant

Red Ursa Kale

Lemongrass

Lolla Rosa Lettuce

Marvel Butterhead Lettuce

Lettuce Mesclun mix

Baby Greens Mesclun mix

Mache Corn Salad (specialty salad green)

Tangerine Gem Marigolds (for edible flowers)

Mint (not sure what type yet)

Red Wave Mustard Greens

Mahogany Nasturtium (for edible flowers)

Blue Podded Peas

Purslane (specialty salad green)

French Breakfast Radishes

Red Meat Asian Radishes

Red Scallions

Tyee Spinach

Shiso (Asian herb)

Back Cherry Tomatoes

Yellow Pear Cherry Tomatoes

Orange Thyme

Trobetta Summer Squash

Vampires Be Ware!

2009-07-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

The soft-neck garlic harvest is in. I planted two cloves worth and got 46 cloves back! If only all my (nonexistent) investments were that good.

And the sunflowers are starting to do their thing too! Check it out.

Garden Update

2009-06-19T18:54:00.001-07:00

I love this time of year in the garden. Most of the really hard work is done (I say that probably because I don't weed enough), and instead I get to visit the garden and see what surprises its holding for me each day. The spring crops are wrapping up, but the summer crops are just getting started. Here are a few photos of what's going on right now in the garden:

The perinial flower garden is coming to life. A month ago we totally thought this rose was dead, but as you can, we were wrong! Also, look how tall the Phlox are! They'll be blooming before I know it.

Speaking of blooming, the radishes that did absolutely terribly this year (not very big, kinda stunted, not really even edible) have bolted. I don't want to save the seeds--I'm blaming this crop failure on picking the wrong variety--but once I figured out they were no good I ignored them for too long and before I knew it, they did this. After I took this picture I pulled up all the radishes and replaced them with some herbs I've been meaning to plant. Also check out the beautiful lettuces in the front of the bed. I should have salad for a while!

Speaking of bolting, these are some mustard greens that magically planted themselves 40 feet away from where I grew them last year. We've eating a lot of these already, and they are one of my favorite things to grow. So, I'm letting them to go to seed on purpose!

I bought this Mortgage Lifter tomato plant at the garden center about three weeks ago. Shortly after I planted it, I noticed that IT ALREADY HAS A TOMATO ON IT! I'm not sure if this is a good sign or a bad one.

My sugar snap peas finally decided to climb the trellis I put up for them. They're blooming now and you can even see some tiny little baby seed pots on there. It will probably be impossible for me not to eat all of these tasties right off the vine!

We've been eating a lot of fresh greens and onions out of the garden over the past couple of weeks. Here's a big bowl of mustard greens along with some green onions and various herbs (dill, basil, thyme, chives) that all came from the garden.

And here's a shot of the absolutely fabulous quiche I made using the above ingredients. I must say, I'll be using Dill in ALL my quiches from now on! So good!

And, finally, one of my favorite things in the garden: Clematis. This is the second full growing season for these plants, and I'm so impressed with their size and how much they are blooming. This trellis and the Clematis is probably one of the best things I ever decided to do in my garden!

Ok, that's it. Hope you enjoyed it, and hope your garden is growing as well as mine!

2009 Garden Plan

2009-06-04T19:58:00.000-07:00

I'm about the fall asleep, but I feel compelled to make a blog post, so this one is going to be short and sweet.

First, I want to say Hi to everyone I met at the Garden Bloggers Spring Fling here in Chicago last week. It was such a great weekend! While I didn't have spiffy business cards with my blog URL to give everyone, I hope that some of you will make it over here to the blog anyway, although I can tell you now that my blog posting history is a bit sparadic. I really enjoy blogging, but I also enjoy gardening and sometimes--ok, a LOT of times--I use all my energy in the garden and just don't have the will to blog afterward. I hope you will forgive me.

Also, I'd like to say THANK YOU to the Chicago bloggers who organized Spring Fling. You guys did a great job!

And now the "meat" of this post: As of this last weekend, I FINALLY have .. well.. I was about to say "ALL" but I think I'll error on the side of caution and say "MOST" of the veggie garden planted. This year I ordered so many seeds, I definitely had to write things down--what I wanted to plant and where it would go--if I was to have any hope of keeping things organized. I used Excel to make a simple diagram of my eight 4x4 raised beds. Here's what I ended up with:

Here's a picture of what my garden area looks like in real life. This was taken during the planting process, hence all the crap you can see laying around.

As you can probably tell, I've adopted a square foot gardening method where I've sectioned off each bed into square feet and planted accordingly. I didn't make note of the number of each plant per square foot in the chart, but obviously this varies depending on the size of the plant in each square.

I should also note that, this is not all of my garden. I've also got:

-two types of potatos in potato cages
-a new asperagus patch I just started this year
-rasberry, blueberry, kiwi, and two grape plants
-watermelon, honeydew melon, luffa, goard, and winter squash vines
-sweet corn
-sage, lemongrass, stevia, rosemerry, parseley, more bell and hot peppers, and cuban orregano in containers

I'm making this up as I go along, folks. I can hope that some of the stuff I've planted works out and produces some food. I guess I can be assured, however, that this is going to be a very exciting growing season. What I do know for sure is, I'm so excited!

Thanks for reading!

Spring Is In The Air! (a photo montage)

2009-05-12T19:17:00.000-07:00

world's tallest Alium (I don't actually know if its the world's tallest, but it's defenitly a LOT taller than last year ! That's a 6 foot fence behind it)

one of my new Bleeding Heart plants that I bought as a bare root back in March. I can't believe its already blooming!

tulips in the front are off the hook this year (a lot bigger than last year)

the Red Bud is also giving us an extraordinarily nice display this year

And finally, one of my favorite tulips. This was one of the tulip bulbs I got from the City of Chicago tulip give-away

Changes Are Afoot at the Circle K

2009-05-12T18:54:00.000-07:00

(note: I'm not going to spell check this post now (am too tired), might later though, until then, hope its ot too annoying).

I've always wanted to use that as a blog title, and if by "Circle K" you mean my backyard, then its an apt title for this post. What's going on, you ask? Well, many of you may have already followed this short-lived saga of ambivalence followed by sorrow followed by over-ambitious aspirations on Twitter, but in case you missed it:

While Hubs and I were enjoying a dinner on the back patio, the neighbors came over to ask what we would think if they were to have the huge tree between our two yards chopped down. It was damaging their foundation, they said. That sounded reasonable to mee--even from my side of the fence I can tell that its only about three feet between the 40 foot tree and the corner of the neighborh's house--so we told them to go for it. After all, I thought, I've from time to time secretly plotted the death and distruction of that tree... in favor of more sun for my garden.

After we agreed, they told us that the chopping down would be taking placein less than 12 hours and, oh by the way, could the tree trimming company park their bucket truck on our driveway? Yes. Just don't let the thing hit our house and we're all cool.

At least, that's what I thought, until I got home to find the tree .... gone. The void it left in the landscape was nothing short of shocking. We could see it was gone a block away, and by the time we went into the back yard to take a better look, I had decided that I was NOT into this idea anymore. I missed the tree and the cozy shadey ambiance it gave to our patio area. It was pretty sad. It immediately put me into a near stooper for the next 12 hours. Not only would the loss of shade totally change the type of plants I've been planing in my yard (I had just bought a fern the day before they told us the tree was going to come down) but after the tree was gone I also came to realize how good of a job it did acting as a screen between us and the neighbors. Without the tree I felt like they were WAY too close!

Luckily, by the next evening I was already getting used to seeing the sky rather than the big old tree. And by the third day I started making plans to build a pergola that could support grape and clematis vines to take the place of the tree. Unfortunately, the dog had an unexpected surgery which happened to cost us almost the exact amount that a nice cedar pergola would have cost. Oops. I guess that will have to wait for a while.

Mag dog is fine BTW.

and so am I.

Our bank account, however, will need some time to recuperate.

Project: Flower Box Shelf

2009-04-26T18:18:00.001-07:00

It will probably take me longer to write this post than it did to complete this project. Its nothing too special, but just a cool and money-saving idea we came up with that so far seems to be working quite well.

So, the problem was, I had an area on my patio that needed some jazzing up. The edge of the patio is only about 1.5 feet from the cedar fence which happens to be a favorite running area for the dog, so I've been reluctant to plant things directly into the soil there. I had thought about doing some containers and placing them on the edge of the patio, but I wanted big, preferably not butt-ugly containers that wouldn't cost a lot. I did some comparison shopping and really couldn't find anything cheaper than $35/per container. I knew I'd need 3 containers, and the idea of shelling out a total of $100-ish on JUST containers was not appealing to me.

Then I started thinking about what if I could hang window boxes from the fence itself. That would get rid of the dog-trampling-everything problem and would also bring the plants to eye leve, where I thought they should be anyway. However, upon further inspection, this was not going to be any cheaper, as I'd have to buy the planting box (usually around $8) AND the basket thing that would hold them to the fence (about $20/ each). Cheaper than option 1, but still not great. Also, I was worried about the structural ability of the fence to hold up widnow boxes that would have been attacked to the top edge of the vertical boards.

So, finally, while walking around the Home Depot, my hubby and I came up with an alternate plan: Why not build a shelf on which I could place any containers I wanted. We went to the garage storage section and found some braket things that we could screw directly into the posts. Then we found a 1 ' x 6'' x 10 ' board that we'd then place on the brackets to make the shelf. The board (treated lumber; not my favorite but much cheaper than cedar) cost $6 and the brackets cost about $10 total. Then I picked up three plastic (also not my favorite material, but I figured that plastic would weigh less and be safer if the boxes ever fell off the shelf) window boxes (30'' x 6) as well as some plants to partially fill them. And here's how it turned out:

In the containers I planted yelllow pansies, some nice tall flower that I've already forgotten the name of, and finally my NEW FAVORITE flower: Fuchsias!!! I bought a hanging basket of 3 fuchsia plants and then split them and replanted them in the 3 boxes. I love how they cascade over the side of the boxes, and I've got to say that I am totally emphatuated with how beautiful they are both in their structure (the double petal thing with the long stamen) as well as their color (purpole is my FAVORITE oclor!). So, these are my new muse. I have no experience growing them, however, so I've got to read up and make sure I don't kill them immediately.

I think I'll let the fuchsia end my post. Thanks for reading! If nothing else, I hope this post gives you some new ideas on how to dress up your backyard fence! Thanks for reading!

Project: Super Easy Row Covers

2009-03-26T17:49:00.001-07:00

Since I installed my raised beds last year, I've been planning to build some sort of cold frame or row cover to help extend our relatively short Chicago growing season. Finally, this weekend, the forces of motivation and inspiration aligned and I came up with this:

This project was so simple and so easy, I'm embarrassed that I didn't think of it sooner. There was a brief time during the winter when I thought that building a teepee structure out of bamboo stakes and covering it with row cover fabric thta I cut and sewed together... yeah um WAY too complicated. So here's what I did: I used what has become my #1 favorite material for garden projects--this sort of rolled utility fencing you can buy at any local home improvement store. I got 50 feet of the stuff at Menards for $30 and have used it build tomato cages and as trellises for my peas and cucumbers.

Basically all I did was pick a length of fence that would give me the verticle hieght that I wanted and cut it with the good ole wire cutters. The roll of fencing that I have is 5 feet wide, which is 1 foot too wide for my 4x4 raised beds, so I made the decision to cut the piece of wire in half to make two 2.5 feet wide pieces. Two for the price of one, WOOT!. So yeah, cut the wire, bend the sharp edges in so that you don't cut yourself (um, yeah, done that a LOT). Theb just get your fence panel and stick it right into the soil. I found that the natural curvature of the fence that it has from being rolled up helps to keep it firmly places in the soil up against the edges of your raised beds. The curve shape also is the perfect shape for a row over!

Then get your choice of row cover fabric--I used this stuff from Gardener's Supply--but it so that it covers your wire frame and leaves enough room on all sides to allow you to secure it down. To secure down the fabric I just used rocks and pieces of 2x4 that I could find around the yard. I'm glad to say that the covers have remained securely in place, even though we've had a few moderately windy days this week.

These row covers are a really good example of something really simple and not-THAT-exciting that makes me SO happy! I just love them! I've already planted spinach, lettuce and mustard greens, and radish seeds (taking pictures as I went so I didn't forgot what I was planting) so I'm hoping the relatively mild weather plus these row covers will mean I'll have a salad garden in no time.

Soil Blocks 3 Weeks Later

2009-03-08T16:37:00.000-07:00

So its been three weeks since I used my patented (ok, not really) home made soil blocker (for more info, see previous post) and planted my first flat of seeds this year. Here's how things looked today:
I can't even begin to tell you (but I probably don't have to tell you, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about) how exciting it was to see these little babies poke up through the soil! They germinated within about a week from sowing. Germination rate was very good and I only have a couple of soil blocks with no seedlings. The soil blocks themselves seem to be doing well, except for two in the middle of the right most rows which feel apart the day I made them.

However, I can't help but worry. Having never started onions or leeks from seed, I have no idea what they're supposed to look like tat this stage. To my unaccustomed eyes, they look a bit wimpy... all flopped over and not very rigid. Is this how they're supposed to be or am I doing something wrong?

In other seed starting news, last week I made another tray of soil blocks and started one seed packet worth (40 blocks) of Snapdragon seeds. Today I started another packet of Snapdragons as well as two packets of Impatients, which I must say are the smallest seeds I've EVER tried to sow. I ended up sowing them by scattering them in a small container of soil, instead of trying to separate them into individual soil blocks. My plan is, when they germinate and get their first set of true leaves I'll separate them into individual cells at that point. If anyone out there has stories / hints about successful Impatient propagation, I'd love to her about it. Thus far I feel like I'm totally making it up.

But then again, I guess making things up is half the fun of gardening, right?

Thanks for reading!

Home Made Soil Blocker

2009-02-20T18:04:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went through all my seed packets and organized them based on how early I needed to start them indoors. I was excited to notice that the time to start my onions and leeks was NOW if not a month ago. These are the first seeds I'll be starting this year (and the first onion or leek seeds I've started, ever.) Here they are!

I made up my mind that for my seed starting this year I wanted to try using a soil blocker instead of using cell packs or those dehydrated pellets wrapped in coconut fiber. I don't like the waste created by using the plastic cell packs, and I've not had much luck with the just-add-water pellets b/c I find them too small and they tend to dry out really easily. n case this is a new idea to you, the basic idea with a soil blocker is it takes regular potting soil and squishes it into small lumps appropriate for starting seeds. There's no plastic pot or cell pack to throw away when the seedlings are mature and theoretically its a money savings since you're not having to buy cell packs or pellets every year. I say "theoretically" because most soil blockers start at around $40, which isn't a lot I guess but also seemed kind of silly since all its doing is squishing soil, right? It was this logic that lead me to spend two hours at the hardware store looking for materials I could use to make my own blocker. I've seen some impressive tutorials on the web for making soil blockers that work similarly to the ones you buy, with springs and mechanical leverage action and such. However, I wanted to go old school, ie: I didn't want to get that sophisticated. Sure, the fancy seed blockers you can buy are tough durable pieces of equipment that can crank out thousands and thousands of soil blocks relatively quickly. But, my seed starting isn't quite at the commercial grower scale. I decided to bet that I could use a bit more time and elbow grease and end up with the same results. Another reported benefit of using soil blocks is it prevents your plants from getting root bound and lessens transplant shock. As your seedlings grow their roots will poke out the surface of the soil and will self prune themselves (stop growing) when they hit air.

After my tour through the hardware store I decided to go with a 1 and 1/2 inch diameter piece of PVC pipe (this will be the cylinder in which the soil is placed) and a 1 and 1/2 wooden dowel (which would be the plunger or "squisher" that would turn the loosely packed soil into dense little soil blobs that will hopefully hold their shape while the seedlings grow. I also found a chop stick which I used to make small holes in the top of the blocks in which I placed the seeds. Here's what my home soil blocker looked like. I had my hubby cut the PVC pipe to approximately 4 inches tall. He also cut the wooden dowel to approximately 12 inches tall. I wanted to make sure that I'd have plenty of dowel to hold onto even when it was fully inserted into the PVC.

The technique is as follows: Start with potting or seed starting soil mix. Google can help you find several "recipes" for making potting soil and even for making soil that's block making specific. I chose to use some organic potting soil I already had. I also added some coconut fiber "eco peat-moss" to the potting soil which should help it hold moisture. When you're talking about making a block of soil and having it hold its shape for a few weeks while the plant grows, apparently one of the most important factors in success is moisture level. You have to add water to the soil before you "block" it. When you're making the blocks, the soil should be somewhere between just dirt and mud. I found that a little experimentation is all it takes to figure out how much water you need to make nice solid sturdy blocks. Once the blocks are made you must keep them evenly moist throughout the growing process, otherwise they will dry out and crumble. This is why I added the eco-"peat moss" (coconut fiber) because its job is to retain moisture.

Once I got going on making the blocks I realized that my PVC pipe was probably a bit too tall. The idea is that you loosely pack the soil into the pipe then you squish it to between 1/2 and 1/3 of its original size. I found out that if I filled up my 4'' tube to the top and then squished it, the block I'd end up with was too tall and would often crack in half. I'll probably have hubby trim about a half an inch from the PVC pipe. I also adopted a three-squishes per block method where I'd loosely pack the soil, squish it with the dowel once, then remove the dowel, turn over the pipe, and squish it again from the opposite side. On the third squish you can lift the pipe off the surface you have it sitting on so that the block can pop out the bottom. This is what I ended up with:

The next thing you need to do is decide where you want to store your soil blocks which will soon be sprouting seedlings. The most important thing is that you choose a non-porous container.. . ie: one without any wholes in it. The blocks should be kept moist from the bottom up at all times. This means there should be a small puddle of water in the pan at all times. You can also purchase capillary mats that help the blocks stay evenlly moist without getting washed away by too much water. The blocks should not be watered directly or they will probably fall apart. Instead of watering each block, you just pour a bit of water into the bottom of your pan or onto a corner of the capillary mat. In most cases you will probably have to add water every day. Also, it is highly advised to keep your trays covered with those clear tray domes or plastic warp.

I ordered several solid bottom flats and some capillary mats, but they haven't arrived yet. So, when I made my first set of blocks, I placed them in a container I had left over from last year that was designed to hold those pellets-wrapped-in-coconut-fiber things that I didn't like so much. To my surprise, the 1 and 1/2 inch blocks I produced fit perfectly into the indentions in the tray. I left the center row of indentions empty so that I could use this space to pour my water. This is what my tray looked like:

As you can see, the soil I used had a fair amount of larger fibrous material in it (almost like little twigs). In most of the literature that I read regarding soil blocking its usually recommended that you use very fine textured soil, however since this is the soil I had already I went ahead and used it and it seems to have worked fine despite all the little twigs and pieces you can see hanging off each block.

After I made all the blocks I then had to make indentions in each one of them where I could place the seeds. While the first few blocks I tried fell apart as soon as I tried to poke a whole in them (using a chop stick) I soon discovered that if I held each block in a tightly closed fist, then I could poke the seed hole without the block falling apart. Just give it a few tries and you'll get the hang of it.

Finally, I placed the seeds in the holes I'd made in each block then covered up the hole with a bit of extra potting soil. I added water and covered with some plastic wrap (I'm still waiting on my domed lids to arrive in the mail so the plastic should keep the moisture in well enough for right now.) I took the pan downstairs to my seed starting greenhouse and placed it on top of heated germination mat (which I used last year and highly recommend) Finally, I placed a plant light above the flat. I know in the picture below that the plant light is placed too far above the flat. Plant lights should actually be placed within a couple of inches of the foliage of your seedlings. However, seeing as I'll have a week or two before my seedlings germinate, I can take some time another day to figure out how I want to hang my lights. Here's what the set up looks like:

I also used post-it notes taped to the underside of the flat and sticking out so that I could read them as my latest idea for marking my seeds. I'm SO bad about planting seeds, marking them poorly or not marking them at all, and forgetting what they are. I'll let you know how this latest seed labeling venture turns out.

So there you have it. My home made seed blocker. Like I said, my simple version of the blocker does take more elbow grease and time to make each block than would the professional ones. However, I "built" this one for about... $4, and I still have plenty of dowel and pipe left over to make three or four more blockers if I want to. It took me about an hour from start to finish to mix the soil, make the blocks, make the holes, and plant the seeds into this tray of 40 blocks. That's not very fast, but I didn't find it to be prohibitively slow. It also takes a fare amount of strength to sqiush the blocks, so if that is a problem for you this may not be the best idea.

Here are some links to some of the other seed blocking resources that helped me learn about blocking:

Places to buy the professional soil blocking machines: JohnnySeed , Peddler's Wagon

Where I've ordered my flats, capillary mats, and domes: Charley's Greenhouse

A really in-depth PDF about how to make, use, and care for soil blocks: JohnnySeeds Soil Blocker PDF

Although I didn't use this method, I found this great tutorial about how to make a pretty sophisticated soil blocker: here and another one here

UPDATE: Its a week later and I'm glad to report that my soil blocks are holding together very nicely! I only had one sort of fall over and I think the cat may have been involved in that. Also, my onions and leeks are starting to sprout, so its good moods and good times over here at the snappy garden. Spring is on its way!

Seed Shopping - Edibles

2009-02-05T07:58:00.000-08:00

Last night I made the biggest one-time seed purchase of my life, thus far. I'm so excited about it, that I had to tell someone and that someone is YOU. So, here's a list of all the stuff I just ordered from Seeds of Change (my current favorite seed company). There are other things I will be growing there are not on this list. I've got some other seeds saved from last year and I'm also going in on a seed order with a fellow gardener. In other words, this isn't the full list of what I'm planting. Before you freak out, I should also mention that, yes, I have done careful planning and know exactly where in my not-so-big garden area that everything on all my lists will go. When I get some time I'll convert my chicken scratch notes into something legible and will share with you the full plan.

Ok without further adue, here's the list (with a bit of commentary added in parenthesis). lol

Mint – Korean Licorice
Stevia (herb that's used as a sweatener in South America)
Cilantro – Slow Bolt (Santo Cilantro)
Chives – Garden Chives
Basil – Red Rubin
Bergamont – Lavender (possibly for tea or flavoring of other stuff, not sure yet)
Chamomile – German (for tea yay!)
Carrot – Red Core Chantenay
Corn – Dakota Black Popcorn
Watermelon – Sugar Baby
Pepper – Sweet Sunrise Orange Bell
Pepper – Peruvian Purple Chile
Winter Squash - Gold Nugget (the only bush style winter squash I've come across, good for smaller gardens)
Beet - Detroit Dark Red
Chard – Orange Fantasia (freak'n cool looking)
Brocoli - Eartly Green
Onion – Texas Early Grano
Onion Siskiyou Sweet
Cabbage – January King
Cabbage – Red Express (quick and compact grower for small gardens)
Chinese Cabbage – Nikko F-1
Eggplant – Vittoria
Tomato – San Marzano (for sauce)
Tomato - Oregon Spring Bush (early maturing for slicing)
Leek – Falltime
Bean – Royalty Purple Bush Bean
Potato – Cranberry Red (early to mid season, orange inside, I like colorful foods!)

Garden Gift Wrap Up

2009-02-03T13:23:00.000-08:00

Apparently I've gained quite the reputation for gardening, at least that's what I'm deducing from the fact that three separate family members gave Nick and I some awesome garden related gifts for x-mas. I wanted to share with you my new garden toys and also express my thanks to those who sent them my way. Also, thanks to The Internets from which I stole the pictures below. Here goes:

1) The Garden Tool Utility Cart from Improvements.com.

While I haven't assembled this bad boy yet, I'm super excited about the tool organizational opportunities it will offer. I've got some serious organizational challenges... aka: I'm a slob and my garden tool area in the garage is constantly in a state of disarray. I know that one little garden cart can't fully compensate for a lifetime of slothenliness, but I"m sure it will be a big improvement.

2) Apparently the "Jessica needs some help with being organized" memo got around this year because the second garden related gift I received was this awesome super heavy duty hand tool tote from Smith and Hawken.

3) And in the could-be-a-murder-weapon-but-actually-is-an-awesome-gardening-tool category, I received this:

I can't tell you what store its from, because the entire label is written in Japanese. However, Google tells me that its called a "Japanese Pick and Hoe" and it looks like it will be great for getting into small spaces in my raised beds. I can't wait to start digging!

4) I consider birds to be part of my garden (sometimes a pain-in-the-butt part but that's beside the point... haha) so I also want to include these two awesome bird feeders we received.

The first is a recycled plastic bird feeder from Gardener's Supply. It looks great, is eco-friendly, and should last forever. The other feeder (I can't find a picture of this one) is a hummingbird feeder. So far in past seasons I haven't had eny luck attracting hummingbirds to my garden, but maybe the addition of a second feeder will increase my chances.

So there it is: my x-mas garden goodness. (I hope I haven't forgotten anything). Those of you from whom this wonderful gifts came, you know who you are and THANK YOU!

Thanks for reading.

Planning a Shade Garden in Illinois

2009-02-02T15:08:00.000-08:00

As has become my custom recently, I spent my lunch break at work doing garden planning. Today my topic of interest was what to plant in all the deep shade areas of my yard. Our neighbor has a HUGE tree that provides all day shade to about 2/3rds of my yard. Even though I've been through a full growing season at my house by now, this shade gardening thing is still new to me, so I decided to do a little research regarding what plants I should look for. I went to the Chicago Botanic Gardens Plant Finder website and searched for anything that can grow in full to partial shade. The CBG Plant Finder is a great tool. It lists plants that are well adapted for Illinois gardens, and you can search by plant type, flower color, and sun exposure. I ran the search and found that there are 24 plants that can survive in the dark damp areas of my yard. I eliminated one that was a full grown tree--the last thing my yard needs is more trees--and one that requires straigt up marshy conditions. I took the 22 plants that were left and organized them based on when they bloom and how tall they are so that I could more easily figure out which plants should be planted near each other. I want varying heights and textures and I want to make sure that there's always something blooming. The idea is, for each planting cluster I can choose one plant from each column to insure that I always have blooms and one plant from each height group to make sure I have visual interst. I also included general soil moisture info so that I can hopefully keep plants with similar soil moisture needs near each other.

So, here's the chart I ended up with. When I made this I didn't proof read it for publication purposes, so please forgive any typos. But, I thought this chart might be useful for other Illinois shade gardeners out there, so I thought I'd share it here.

As you can see, there are a LOT more early blooming plants for shade than summer or fall bloomers. I'll probably supplement any shade perinatal plantings with some shade loving annuals; I've had good luck with Impatients in the past. I hope to make a more specific plan regarding which plants I'm going to plant where. When I have all that ready I'll hopefully post more details here. I know my garden plants are keeping you on the edge of your seats. tee hee. Anyway, I hope this is useful. For more info on these plants, visit the CBG Plant Finder page here. (Click the chart to make it bigger)

The Gardening "Way-Back" Machine: Dateline August 5th - 18th, 2008

2009-01-14T18:16:00.000-08:00

According to my awesome digital camera that keeps track of when I take all my pictures (I know this isn't an extremely advanced or uncommon function, its just that I find it so incredibly useful since I'm terrible at documenting things and / or remembering what I did) I can sit here on probably the coldest day we've had this winter in Chicago and reflect on what a haul of harvest the garden was producing just five scant months ago.

Tomato awesomeness (just looking at this picture makes my mouth water). I think this is one of the many awesome big meaty Mortgage Lifter heirlooms I harvested last year.

More sweet snap peas. I'd never grown these before last year and I must say that they were pretty and tasty. I'm devinitely doing these again next year.

Tomatoes (I think these are Early Boys, which I think I'll probably use again this year. They're not heirloom, but they are fast and consistant producers weeks before any other tomato shows the slightest hint of pink.

Squash (probably one of the last I got before the Borer got to them), Cucumbers (I think Streight 8; they're all stumpy due to some unkown mold / blight diseas my plants had all season... but still tasty), Tomatoes (Early Boys and a Mortgage Lifter), and a smattering of Bush Beans.

My picture archieve also reminded me that my complete lack of seed organization finally got to me around mid-August so one Saturday I decided to organize things a bit. I sorted things into three categories: Veg, Herb, or Flower. I'm not sure if that's the best way to do it, but it seems to work. I filed empty seed packets in a fourth section so that I could refer back to them if needed. All this stuff is sorted in a shoe box right now and while its probably not the best organization method ever, its definitely better than it was before.

The Gardening "Way-Back" Machine: Dateline August 1st, 2008

2009-01-09T18:33:00.000-08:00

This is the first of what will probably be several installments of me finally doing what I meant to do between three and six months ago... that is, blog about what happened in garden land between August and October. The topic of this post is about gardens, although its not about MY garden. However, I hope you enjoy.

So here's the deal. On August 1st I attended a workshop about urban agriculture (growing food in urban environments) which was held at City Farm, a 1 acre agriculture site located smack dab in the middle of Chicago built on top of a pile of rubble. There are tons of reasons that City Farm is cool, including that they take piles of rubble and turn them into beautiful organic farms that provide fresh organic beautiful food to neighborhoods that may not have access to things other than twinkies. (In the particular case of City Farm the whole fresh-food-desert thing is increasingly less relevant as the neighborhood keeps gentrifying. There's a Whole Foods not even a mile away. But, for me, its the principal of the thing that matters, and they are quite a principled organization. Not only are they completely organic, but like any good garden, they make their own compost, save seeds, and build all their garden structures out of recycled and discarded materials. Finally, to top it off, they employe previously homeless and unemployed people from the neighborhood.

Wow, that's a lot of good-ness in one little acre. I was at City Farm not only to gawk at the awesomeness but also to take notes and learn things that I can hopefully apply to the community garden in my neighbhorhood. (Oh, did I tell you that? We finally got permission to build the community garden in a currently unused and kinda gnarly park area... there's tons of stuff we have to do before it will get done, but the fact that we got the OK was a big step. So stay tunef ro more on that as things develop.) Anyway, I was particularly interested in specifically how they built their garden, what sorts of toxicity mitigation methods they used, where they got their soil / compost etc... all things that we're going to have to deal with on the community garden site.

I learned a lot from City Farm. For instance, I found out that they don't use raised beds, as is the common convention for urban gardens around here. Instead, they covered the rubbled lot with about 12 inches of imperiable clay (to prevent potentially toxic substances from leaking up from the rubble below)) which was then covered with another 12 inches of compost. The organizaton that runs City Farm also has a couple other urban agriculture facilities in other parts of the city, and it is at one of these other sites that they produce literially (probably, i didn't actually ask an exact number) tons of compost made from plant materials they collect form their farms and from restaurants around town. So, for them, covering an acre with 12 inches of compost wasn't a big deal, especially financially speaking. For us at the comunity garden, if we were to use this same cover-the-whole-site-with-compost method would be very expensive, since we don't have piles of our own compost sitting around. But, it was cool to see an alternative to building lots of small raised beds.

I was also inspired by their hoop house, which they built themselves. Its where they keep their peppers nice and warm to spur better production. I've been interested in extending the growing season and I've seen several plans for built-it-yourself green / hoop houses, but this is the first time I've never been in one. It was cool.... and did I mension inspiring. Althogh it will probably come a few years after the community garden is established, I'd love to have one of these in the garden.

Lets see... what else.... Oh, for those of you who actually live in Chicago, you should know that City Farm has a farm stand right at the front gate of their site every Saturday durning the growing season. I got some awesomely tastey spniach-ish thing (can't remember... grrr) there which made awesone salads. Also, they invite volunteers to come help tend the garden during the season. Check out their website to learn more.

After our trip to City Farm, we visited the Chicago Green City Market, which is probably the most widely known farmers market in the city. Technically, their vendors are all actually certified organic. But they are all small farm operations whose gardening methods reflect a pro-organic ideology. Getting organic certification is really hard, especially for small farming operations, but that's a topic for another post. Anyway, it was a great time and I highly recoomend it if you've never been (although I think they charge more since their located in the ritsy part of town.)

Its kind of weird to sit here in January when its snowing outside and think about that great August day surrounded by gardening goodness... but its also kinda nice to get away from the frozen tundra for a minute.

Ok, hope you enjoy. Stay tuned for more from the gardening "way back" machine.

Hello 2009!

2009-01-08T10:46:00.000-08:00

Hello Snappy Garden Blog! I'm sorry I have neglected you so. You see, I spent so much time outside enjoying my garden during August and September, that I didn't have the willpower to keep up on my garden blogging. But don't worry, I took LOTS of pictures to chronicle things since my last blog post and now that its a deep freezer outside I hope to dedicate some time in the near future to uploading those pictures and make a sort of after-the-fact blog record of the last two months of the garden. So, look for that coming soon.

Also, its planning time for this year's garden. I've got my seed catalogs. The greenhosue is set up and ready to go in the basement, and I've got plenty of ambitious plans for this year's garden.

Stay tuned!

(if anyone is still out there reading this.. LOL)

:)

Mid-Summer Update

2008-07-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

Hi there garden blog people! Wow, I dunno about the rest of you out there, but things in my garden are getting crazy! The days of happy orderly garden growth went by quickly and now things have become out of control. Check it out:

Here's Nick standing next to my Early Boy tomato plant which is taller than him at this point. Also, check out the sunflowers which the birds planted for us. Our whole yard is dotted with these bird feeder escapees.

Check out these crazy cukes! Granted, I did probably over-plant and under-thin (I've got about 10 plants here at least) but this is just crazy! I've attempted to tame the cuke craziness by using a trellis that I made out of 5' fencing and bamboo stakes. Basically, the trellis starts at the base of the plants and is situated at a 45 degree angle angling up toward another verticle trellis (that was used for sugar snap peas earlier) where it rests. I'm pretty happy with the way this arrangement is working, although I think next time I may increase the angle of the trellis--maybe even make it all the way verticle--because that would give me more room in the bed for other things. As it is now, the cukes are shading out the whole bed so the herbs I have planted underneath aren't growing as well as they could be if they ever got to see the sun. All in all, I'm a big fan of trellising cukes, and I look forward to the opportunity to perfect this idea in upcoming years.

In addition to the sunflowers, here are a few other examples of flowering awesomeness that's going on right now. Here's a shot of my "butterfly / wildflower garden." Most of what you see in here are perennial wildflowers from one of those big-buckets-of-seed from the garden center. I like using seed mixes because you never really know what's going to bloom and when. So far we've been very hapy and entertained by watching this bed grow.

And, its the season of garden center sales! YES! I love this time of year. Last week, I bought
3 Coneflower and 3 Black-Eyed Susan plants to add to my skinny garden patch between the walkway and the veggie garden fence (3 bucks per plant, woot!). I took this picture right after I bought them then promptly forgot to plant them and water them and the Black-Eyed Susans totally dried up. I've got them planted now and I'm being extra nice to them, making sure to water them thoroughly, so I'm hoping they'll be back next year.

And finally, let me tell you about all the harvesting that's been going on. First things first, I had my first real live non-cherry tomato (strangely enough, none of my cherries are ready quite yet even now) a week and a half ago. Its a small Early Boy tomato. I picked it a bit too green and then of course had to eat it immediately anyway. It was pretty good. The Early Boy will have a few more tomatoes ready for me later this week. All the other tomatoes in my garden are still green.

I've harvested 8 yellow squash at this point. Here's a pic of a few of them along with that first tomato. I'm sad to say that my squash plant is looking kinda ragged these days, although the decline isn't fast enough to be the Borer, so I dunno what's going on. I hope I'll get more squash, but if I don't I'll try not to be too upset about it. Is anybody having luck with Squash this year?

And, in case my impatience isn't clear to you yet, you should know that I dug up half of the rest of my potatoes last Friday, as well as the carrots which shared the bed with them. The carrots should have been ready, according to the days to maturity thing on the seed packet. I hadn't done much if anything to care for them, including thinning, so I convinced myself that this was as good as they were gonna get so I might as well cut my losses. They're pretty tasty, although as you can see they're quite small. Sort of the same thing happened with the potatoes. I had neglected to hill them and was worried about their long term survival due to the amount of ants I found in their bed--I still dunno what's up with that--so I pulled them up. They're beautiful and taste great, but I wish I could have waited until the end of the season to get a full harvest. Luckily, I do have another bed of potatoes that I have been taking care of which I AM NOT GOING TO TOUCH i SWEAR until the end of the season. The good thing is, now I have an empty bed where I'll plant some more pea, brocoli, and edemame seeds hopefully for a late fall harvest. I've never planted seeds in the summer before and have never tried for a late fall harvest garden, so I'm just guessing at this. Hopefully things will be ok. The things I planted will mature in 60-ish days, maybe a bit more for the brocoli, which will get me to the end of Sept. I'll let you know how that works out.

Oh yeah, I also found this small handful of sugar snap peas on the browning pea plants which I pulled the other day. I was surprised to find that they were still sweet and tasty. Also, I took another mess of beans... a small mess... a mini-mess?

So that's the end of my md-summer garden round up. Thanks for reading! :)

Getting My Eat On

2008-07-17T19:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I harvested my first evern bush green beans! And to go with the beans (and because I freaking love potatos anyway and am finding it very hard to wait until the fall to harvest them) I pulled a few new potatoes from the garden too! Aren't they so pretty! The potatoes are really that purple; this is not a camera trick! I think next year I shall do some purple beans as well and take my love of purple veggies to a whole new level.

Also, on Monday I harvested my first yellow summer squash. I forgot to take a picture of them before I cut them up, so I'll have to tell you that they were beautiful, although probably a bit green and small. I pulled them sooner than later because the two first fruits on the plant rotted over the weekend. I dunno if it was the heavy rain or if I just left them there too long or some other weird malady, but I wasn't going to let it happen again. The two I pulled on Monday were ohhh so tasty! I'll probably have two or three more by the weekend. Oh I LOVE summer!

That's it, thanks for reading!

Garden Update July 9th

2008-07-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

I jsut can't wait until Bloom Day to share all the going on in the garden with you... although as soon as I typed that I reminded myself of all the actual blooms I still need to get pictures of so maybe there will be a Bloom Day after all. But, today will be.... ummm... vegetable day!

For the past couple of weeks I've been between harvests. My last smidgen of green leafies was eaten about two weeks ago, and boy do I miss them. I can't wait until there's more for me to harvest. Lucky for me, things seem to be moving along quite well in the garden--besides the squash situation which I will tell you about shortly--so even though I'm missing my straight-from-the-backyard fresh veggies, every little change in the garden and ever little ripening of fruit, keeps me going. So, here's what I've got, in no particular order (wow, that was a whole lot of build up for not much really LOL).

My first harvest of Sugar Snap Peas. I've never grown these before, and I must say that everyone is completely right and home grown peas are as sweet and tasty as candy and are the best things ever. I only wish I had planted ten more rows.

Next, did I mention in earlier posts that I have some of the biggest most beautiful longest volunteer zucchini vines? Well, it appears that they're some sort of barren hybrid seed, because after flowering for three weeks they showed no signs of producing fruit. It took me a few days to come to terms with the fact that I needed to just cut my losses and pull them up. Then, when I found borer damage on one of them, that was IT... they were gonna be OUTTA HERE. Here's the pile of failed volunteer zucchini:

To make myself feel better, and to take up the newly available room in the garden, I took advantage of the clearnace sale at the garden center and bought a few more pepper plants (a couple bell peppers, a jalapeno, and an Italian pepper), an herloom tomato called an "Old German" or something, and four interesting looking round eggplants.

And, my squash hopes aren't completely ruined, since I did direct sow some yellow squash beside the volunteer zucchini. They're looking great. SQUASH BORER- YOU BETTER STAY AWAY!

Here's what's left on my pea plants... probably enough for one more side dish or stir fry ingredient. Boy, I really will want to grow more of these next year!

I got a little anxious about my carrots so I pulled one... ok obviously it wasn't quite ready yet, but it tasted good and I'm looking forward to some (hopefully bigger) ones to come.

I really have no idea what I'm doing with this one, but I let some of my Seeds of Change purple chard go to seed. I hope to harvest the seed and save them for next year.... not quite sure how to do that yet, but I'll google it later.

Look, its a little bitty baby fuzzy Edemame pod. yay!

The Early Boy tomato I bought as a plant at the farmers market about a month ago is doing exactly what it promises. These are two of about ten green tomatoes its working on. My other plants are just now starting to bloom, so I'm glad I have the Early Boy, because I loves me some tomatoes :)

Beans! This is another new crop this year. I'll be coming for you soon!

And finally- Wow, grape plants are so pretty, aren't they? These grapes are still pretty small, but they're just so nice to look at, I kind of enjoy having them hanging there. I can't remember what type of grape this is. This is another one of the half way dead plants we bought half price at the end of last season. Its doing really well for its first year in our yard

Spilling The Beans

2008-07-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

(This is an almost duplicate copy of a post I made to my personal blog earlier today. Sorry if this is repeated information for you... its the curse of having two blogs with sometimes overlapping topics of interest.)

I think its about time to finally tell you about something very exciting I've been up to lately. My new friend, neighbor, fellow gardener, and former Tennessee resident Gina (over at My Skinny Garden) and I have cooked up a scheme to start a community garden in our neighborhood. Gina and I, who met through blogging, have been talking about this idea for a couple months now. This officially became more than just an idea last month when Gina and I met with the Recreations Board in our Village to discuss our idea and potential locations for the garden. The Board had a very positive response to our idea, and they suggested four potential locations for the garden. However, we knew that this idea wouldn't go anywhere if we didn't have community support and other residents who wanted to participate. In what I think has at this point proven to be our tendency to set almost unreasonable goals for ourselves that lead to stress and ideas of jumping ship, we decided that we needed to get the word out about our idea and hold a meeting where interested individuals can learn more / tell us what they think. We hung flyers and posted on the web forum for our neighborhood and somehow managed to get 20 complete strangers to show up in one room last Wednesday all because they saw our flyer to discuss the garden. The group's enthusiasm was overflowing. People began to volunteer to help plan the garden and fundraise the funds we'll need to get the garden going. We also created a website and designed an online survey where people could tell us what they thought of our idea and what their vision of a community garden is. Yesterday, Gina and I, along with some of our new community garden supporting friends, visited the Recreations Board again to tell them about our progress. We told them about the wonderful meeting we had and showed them the website we've created. We told them that we had 15 people take our survey and express their support. We showed them initial site analysis we had performed for the three potential garden locations that had been discussed at the last Recreations Board meeting (the fourth location was judged to be too small). The Board was VERY impressed with all that we had accomplished over the last month. They gave us some ideas for our next courses of action: We plan to distribute a petition this Friday at our Village's 4th of July fireworks. We'll present the petition to the Village Board at the next meeting on July 14th. We're also going to get a soil test to look for possible toxicity at the preferred garden location to make sure that there's not a prohibitive amount of toxins in the soil. Lead contamination, we've been told, is a legitimate concern when it comes to urban soils, especially for land that's near high traffic area (the potential garden location is actually adjacent to the freeway). We also hope to organize a planning and a fundraising meeting sometime in July so that we, and our growing supply of community garden troops, can make more specific site / operational plans for the garden and start to solicit funds and donations. Our goal is to have the garden ready to plant by March of next year.

I just found out today that the local newspaper will be interviewing me about the community garden for their upcoming issue. This is great since it will be yet another way for us to get the word out about this idea. I'll post a link to the story once its up.

So that's what's going on... the big "news".... when I'm not working on this I'm usually working in my own garden (or shopping for purple dresses hahha!) so life is busy these days... but good.. very good. :)

For those of you who live int he Chicago area, if you know anyone who lives in or near Forest Park and would like to participate in a community garden, please let them know about this... we're always looking for more people to get involved.

Thanks for reading.

Oh My Baby (Tomato)

2008-06-20T05:26:00.000-07:00

Hi garden blog people! Its Friday! YAY! I always look so forward to the weekends, because it means a weekend of gardening of course! Anyway, I have another harvest to report: Yesterday with dinner we had our first home grown salad! I harvested a full head of green leaf and half a head of red leaf lettuce. I added some radishes, also from my garden. The carrots are organic from Costco, however. I've got carrots growing though, and I can't wait until I can taste my first home grown one!

Ok, I've got to confess something.... we were bad... VERY bad (although I must say that we were bad in a very economical way, so that must count for something, right?) *sigh* So, even though we just paid a lot of $$ (although we did get a good deal.. its just more than we've ever spent on any one home project before--kind of shocking) for our new patio, we decided to go ahead and spend even more $$ and buy a new patio furniture set! YAY! haha! We've been needing a larger more comfortable eating area for the patio for a long time, and Target just happened to be having a 1/2 off clearance price sale on their Smith and Hawken collection... so here it is.. in all its glory!

We got the large dining table, two dining chairs, two director's chairs, and a bench (ok.. its marketed as a coffee table to go with the outdoor sofa thing that we didn't buy, but it looks like a bench and seems to be sturdy enough... so .. now its a bench! That's three booties worth of space for $50!... rather than $50 for one chair! awesome!) So yeah, the whole set which can seat between 6 and 7 ppl comfortably only ran us about $300. I'm telling you this because I'm the type of person who is always proud of finding a deal, so bare with me lol! OK.. enough about that. Moving on....

OMG!!!! Guess what guess what???????!!!!???! Ok.. I gave it away in the post title... oops.. (I'm very excited, can you tell?) I'VE GOT MY FIRST BABY TOMATO! O-M-G! Tomatoes are my favorite garden food. So... I now have concrete evidence that tomatoes are on their way. yay! Take a look: (this is the Early Boy plant I bought at the farmer's market a few weeks ago... all my other plants are still not even to the flowering stage yet)

But, something that is definitely in the flowering stage is my sugar snap peas! They are growing like plants on steroids (and they're not! btw.) They're already about 3 feet tall and will soon reach the top of my trellis... what I'll do then, I'm not sure. But for now, they're pretty and doing very well. YAY! This is another first-ever crop for me (never done peas b4).

I have officially been "woooed" by my Clematis. Every day when I get home I go to say hi to it.. to see how many new blooms it has (usually several). Its so pretty, I just had to share another pictures of it. I'm sure that compared to well established Clematis, this is nothing, but this is my first Clematis ever so I'm really.... easy to please?

That's it folks.

As soon as I say that, I realize that I have more to talk about. hehe. I just wanted to tell you that I've started a list of my harvests (on the right column over there ---> and what I plan to do is keep track of how much of what I harvest and how much that would cost me if I bought it (organic) in the store around the same time that I harvested it. I keep forgetting to record the store prices when I'm at the store (grrrr @ me) but I hope to get that going pretty soon. Like my husband is so quick to remind me, its extremely improbable that the money I'll save from not buying produce in the store will equal or surpass the money I've spent on my garden--especially this year, since this is my first year gardening here so I was starting from nothing--BUT, I think it will be interesting to see anyway. I don't garden to save money.. I garden because I love it. But, visualizing a few bucks saved when I harvest a salad from my garden does add to the pleasure of it.

Ok.. now that's really all. :) Thanks for reading!

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day June 2008

2008-06-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

Ok, people, it seems as though I've gotten my stuff together enough to actually do a Garden Blogger's Bloom Day post this month. This will be my first! YAY! Unfortunately, not all that much is going on in my little yard, but here's what I've go:

Its good to see that the peonies I moved have survived, although apparently this is as brilliant of a display as they can muster.

As if they knew that Garden Bloggers Bloom Day was coming, my clematis finally bloomed for the first time just two days ago! This makes me so happy! I also have some blue-ish ones that are setting buds just now. Ohhhh yay! I love Clematis.

Here are some lavender colored "weeds" that I neglected to pull up from the fence row. They're very pretty and I'm glad I left them. Does anyone know what they are?

The Yarrow is going to town!

And the Dogwood that I thought wasn't going to bloom proved me wrong!

The best for last! My roses are going completely nutz. This one in particular is just so freak'n pretty! And smells good too!!

Alright, that's all folks! Thanks for reading.

What A Saturday In The Garden Will Get Y'a

2008-06-14T21:00:00.000-07:00

Today was a perfect day. The weather was amazing and I spent a good 7 hours in the yard doing one project after another. I busted out the ice tea maker and brewed up a batch of unsweetened tea with lemon... just the way I LOVE it. Its funny how thirsty I get in the garden. I'm hoping that it means I'm burning calories. That combined with the typical two meals a day I have when I'm gardening (I get so involved, I forget to be hungry), I'm hoping this can be my new weight loss plan. hehe. So, yeah, here's what I did today:

First, I started by finishing planting and mulching the little skinny garden left between the walkway and the fence surrounding the garden. I planted Marigolds and "Yellow Drumstick" Chrysanthemums that I started from seed a few weeks back (several weeks back for the mums). None of them are close to blooming at this point, but hopefully they'll be there by the next Bloggers Bloom Day. I also direct seeded some Zinias, Lavender, and Chives. Its probably a bit late to be direct sowing things, especially he Lavender, but I thought I'd just go for it and see what happens. I'm also interested to see if the Lavender will be a perinatal here in zone 5. The seed packet says it will, but I'm a bit skeptical. Finally, I mulched the whole thing. Mulch makes everything look nicer, doesn't it? here's a pic of the "skinny" garden; its not very intersting to look at at this point. lol

Next, I took care of another bar spot left by the patio job. I stole some sunflower seeds from my yard under the bird feeder (OMG, my whole yard will be sunflowers before I know it, which I'm actually kind of excited about) and planted them in the little square spot next to the garage door. In case they don't take kindly to being moved, I also scattered a dozen or so sunflower seeds. Also added some Zinia seeds to shake things up a bit. At this point int he season I find myself being extra impatient when it comes to seed sowing. I want flowers now!!! Waaaahhh! lol! But, I have all these seeds so I might as well use them. While they're growing I'll just have to focus on the other millions of interesting things that are constantly going on in the garden.

The front yard... I've been avoiding the front yard basically ever since we moved in, except for a few tulip bulbs. Its a weird hodge podge of a couple boxwood type hedges and a Yucca that I think the previous owner planted when she put the house on the market. The yucca drives me crazy since it looks like it should be in the desert. But, my heart warmed to it a bit when it managed to survive the terrible winter. And now it had to go and bloom (well its not blooming yet but its got like twenty buds on it) so now I've decided to just let it hang out for now. In an attempt to clean up the front bed, I trimmed all the Tulip and Daffodil leaves that were turning brown. I planted four Geraniums that I had over wintered, as well as some more of those Marigolds from seed. A few weeks ago we moved a rose bush from where the rain barrels now live to the corner of the font bed. Also, I spread a few Sunflower seeds around the back edge, just to see what will happen. Then, I mulched the whole thing. Yay mulch!

Today I also made a few more container plantings using more Geraniums from the basement as well as Marigolds and Basil (also started from seed).

Finally, I built some more plant supports out of the bail of fencing we had lying around. I'm going to run an experiment to find out which works better: tall "ladder" made of fence, short "ladder" made of fence, short fence calendar, fence trellis which I'll have to tie the plants to, or the good old tomato cage from the store. I'll let you know how it goes.

Oh yeah, and we've had another harvest from the garden. This time its Swiss Chard. I really enjoyed growing this stuff. It was so pretty! I had decided that it was time to harvest and make room for more summer crops. What I didn't count on is that I'd harvest a huge handful, enough for a side dish for one meal for two people, and would still have at lest six more batches of this size left. So, it looks like we'll be eating Swiss Chard for the next couple of weeks. There could be worse fates, right?

And, finally finally, an update on the Mr. The Fish:: The 0.27$ goldfish we bought for the pond last week is still alive. Here he is in all his blurry and obstructed by green pond sludge glory. He may be getting some friends soon.

Ok, इ'm done. Thanks for reading. And, stay tuned for a Garden Bloggers Bloom Day post from me tomorrow (it will be my first! assuming I can actually get my act together and get it done this month)

Are You Ready to Rock?

2008-06-08T09:34:00.000-07:00

Hi garden blog people. OMG! I love our new patio so much! Yeah, its useful and all that stuff, but its also just so damn pretty and it really did a lot for the look of the backyard. However, the construction process left me with a few areas of dirt that I wasn't sure what to do with.

Well, yesterday it sort of came to me: a rock garden / bird habitat area. So, yesterday I easily blew over $100 at the garden center on plants and rocks. Here's what I came up with:

The idea was to dress up this corner between the patio and walkway. Also, we've lived in our house for almost a year now and I've get to find a location for the bird feeders that I'm happy with. Also, dealing with the mountain of seeds that end up on the ground has been a hassle. You can't see it in this picture (cuz I haven't purchased it yet) but I plan to put one of those rubber tree ring thingies directly under the feeder so that I can (h0pefully) sweep up the left over seed periodicly. The big round thing that looks like a fire pit, um, is a fire pit. I doubt we'll be using it much now that its regularly a ba-gilion degrees outside, so I've re purposed it as a bird bath. Birds like water, and I like to watch them play in water, so I figured this was a good idea. I just have to make sure to change the water every day to keep the blood suckers from laying eggs.

The plants you see include:
Blue Bells
Silver Dragon Grass
Marigold
Salvia
Portulaca
"Firewich" Dianthis
Blue and Gold Myrtle Vinca
some other Dragon Grass I can't remember what its called
and, a plant we bought at the CBG sale that didn't have a tag in the pot so now I can't remember what it is...

Oh, and one more thing. Meet the latest addition to our family: Mr.... Fish... yeah...

For the royal sum of $0.27, we got this guy from the feeder goldfish tank at the pet store. He's going in our whiskey barrel fountain. Despite keeping the water moving, we've found some masquato larva on the water's surface. Mr. Fish's job is to eat the larva. If Mr. Fish manages to survive in the pond for two weeks, we'll give him an actual name and probably give him some friends. But, if he doesn't make it, he should feel lucky anyway because I think he's the only goldfish who's ever shopped at Whole Foods. (the pet store is next to the whole foods, we needed some food, yo, and Mr. Fish got to go with us.)

That's all folks, thanks for reading. :)

What's Been Growing On (Part 2 of 2)

2008-06-04T05:40:00.000-07:00

Here it is, folks, our contribution to the economic stimulus plan... I mean... our new patio! This is what it looks like when its a bit wet (from the rains yesterday). When its dry, the colors are a bit muted. We were told that there's "stuff" you can buy to apply to the patio that will keep it looking wet all the time, but I'll just go ahead and assume that the "stuff" is probably a) expensive and b) toxic to the environment and say that we're fine with the dry look too. Overall, we are very satisfied with the way it turned out. Thanks landscaper guy who I may acknowledge later if he says its ok. (EDIT: hhahhhaha! I didn't noticed until after I posted this picture that the dog is peeing in the background.... hhahha! oops)

And now, what I've been promising you guys for a long time: a run-down of what's going on in the 8 raised beds I have going. I've given up trying to compile a detailed list with latin names and cultivars, cuz I just can't find the time or patience to get that done, so here's the list in more general terms: (please excuse my weird capitalization tendencies in the following lists.)

Bed 1: In the middle I've got a "Purple Peacock" Broccoli that I bought at the Chicago Botanic Garden (CBG) sale. I've never heard of this one, and it looks so cool, so I decided to give it a try. Also, I've got four red cabbage plants I bought this past weekend at the farmer's market. Finally, I just planted seeds for Parsley, Cress, Spinach, and I think some Red Romaine lettuce here too.

Bed 2: This is my cool crop bed that I planted from seed near the end of April. I've got a beautiful row of Swiss Chard up top, with Radishes in the middle and various Lettices on the bottom. On either side of the Radishes, I've got both Red and Yellow Onions that I planted from seed. I dunno what to expect from onion seeds (I've only ever used the "sets" or seed onions in the past, but I decided to give it a go. I'm already harvesting radishes out of this bed and if the rain keeps up, I'll probably be harvesting the chard and lettuces soon.

Bed 3: On the back row I've got Edemame started from seed. I built a trellis for it out of left over fencing we hand and some 6' bamboo stakes. In the middle, I've got two rows of Potatoes started from seed potato. In front I've got Carrots coming up from seed as well.

Bed 4: I've got Sugar Snap Beans in the back... they're growing like crazy and hopefully they'll take to the trellis I built (just like the one in bed 3). In front of them I've got some Spinach that's looking great. In front of the Spinach I've got a couple Strawberry plants, which aren't doing much of anything. And finally, in the very front I've got Cucumbers which I've provided with a diagonal trellis. I figure the Strawberries and Spinach might like some shade provided by the Cuckes once things get really hot. Everything in this bed, except for the Strawberries, was sown from seed.

Bed 5: In the back I've got Bush Green Beans, with more Potatoes in front of them. In the front of the box I've got Coliflower coming up from seed too. Also, near the Coliflower, I planted two Tomato plans that came up as volunteers in my compost pile. I didn't have anywhere else to put them, so, there they are.

Box 6: This is a big mixture of Squash, other plants I assume to be Squash, and Onions of various types of origins. In the back I've got Yellow Squash that I planted from seed. In the middle square I planted three onions that were sprouting in my refrigerator. I've heard that they wont make more onions, but I thought they might bloom or otherwise entertain me. Also, I got to wanting some actual onions so I planted some yellow onions (using seed onions) on either side of the fridge onion. I planted some deep and close together for green onions and some shallow and spaced further apart for actual big onions. Finally, in the front I've got various plants that came as volunteers from my compost pile. I think they're all some sort of Squash derivative. I like the element of surprise!

Bed 7: This is a mixture of Tomatos, Peppers, and Purple Basil. The back two rows came from seed I started indoors. The larger Tomato in the left bottom corner, as well as the Basil, came from the Oak Park Farmer's Market. The pepper on the bottom row came from the CBG sale.

Bed 8: More Tomatos and Peppers from seed on the back two rows. The front row has a couple "Night Shade" Eggplants, some Spicy Basil, and an Heirloom "Mortgage Raiser" Tomato all from the Farmer's Market. I was told that the Heirloom tomato is indeterminant, so I've attempted to prepare for its huge-ness by constructing my own 5' tomato cage / ladder type thingy usiing more fence and bamboo. We'll see how it goes...

And, finally, a few other happenings in the garden:

The Clematis that I bought half dead (and half off the price) from Menards last year is doing absolutely great! Its doing its best to vine up the arbor entrance to the veggie garden. Its not blooming yet, or showing signs of buds, but I'm so happy that its, well, not dead. lol!

The roses have finally burst open. I don't remember them being this deep a color last year. I don't know if roses ever change color, so I may be making that up. They're just so beautiful and untouched by fungus and bugs right now. I doubt they'll stay that way, so I'm trying to enjoy them now. There are so many buds and blooms that I can take some for vases inside the house and never notice the difference on the plant. (there's also a huge ass thissle weed I need to pull up that's growing right down the middle of this rose.)

And, finally, the dogwood is blooming! I had thought it wasn't going to bloom--it seems so late for dogwoods to bloom doesn't it?--but here it is! yay!

Thanks for reading!

PS: While I was taking pictures of the plants yesterday, Nick was being attacked by the rain barrel. I couldn't help but laugh and snap this picture, before then offering him some help getting outta there. (the spicket on the barrel had been leaking so he had to get inside to tighten the nut, so it wasn't a completely unprovoked barrel attack or anything.)

This reminds me, I've been wanting to ask you guys: for those of you who have rain barrels, I'd like to hear how you use the water. ie: how do you get the water from the barrel to your plants? I haven't figured out a system that I like yet so I'm looking for suggestions. Right now, I just collect the water in a bucket and then carry it to the plants and pour it on. This isn't the type of slow soaking water that I'd like to do, but the barrels don't have the water pressure for a drip hose, or even a regular hose once the hose is stretched the 20 feet over to my garden. Any suggestions?

Patio Update

2008-05-31T08:08:00.000-07:00

The patio guys managed to almost finish the patio yesterday! YAY! They still need to sweep up the sand and clean u, but things are pretty much done. Take a look... (We are very very happy with the results)

What's Been Growing On (Part 1 of 2)

2008-05-29T15:33:00.000-07:00

Hello blog people! According to Blogger, I haven't posted a garden blog in about three weeks. Holy Crap! I'm sorry about my lack of posting lately. Its not because there hasn't beenanything to post about. In fact its been the opposite: I've been so busy doing actual gardening things that I'm finding it difficult to have time to blog about them. I'm off work today so I decided to update you all on what's been going on in casa de Jessica. Here goes...

By far, the MOST exciting thing that's happened in the garden has been MY FIRST HARVEST!! Yay! Look at these huge radishes (the cat is thrown in for scale) that I just pulled out this morning. I had no idea they were ready so this was a big nice surprise! :)

In other news (and I'm not sure if I've mentioned this at all on this blog yet our new patio is underway. After debating for a long time about whether to build it ourselves, we decided to let the professionals handle it. Here's a picture of the yard before the construction began. The orange paint shows where the patio and walkway will be (if you can see it).

The work crew arrived on Wednesday morning, and I was told that they planned to have the entire patio and walkway area dug out and filled with the underlayment by the time I got home. That's a ton of work. I was skeptical. But, also I was wrong. Here's what it looked like when I got home. The area filled with stone is a bit larger than the actual patio will be, but its gives a pretty good idea of just how big a patio we've chosen (16x16 patio plus a walkway from the back door to the garage and back gate). Where did our yard go? I can't wait to get the pavers in! Unfortunately, a delay from the supplier and the forecasted rain today probably means it wont be done for a couple more days.

I also want to tell you about all the stuff that's growing in my veggie beds. Look for that in a post to follow this one in the next couple of days. (Taking pictures and documenting all that stuff is taking me longer than I expected, sorry)

A Long Overdue Response

2008-05-13T07:57:00.000-07:00

Gina over at My Skinny Garden tagged me for this question and answer game about two weeks ago, so I thought its about time I get to it. This is usually the type of thing I'd put on my non-garden blog, but since I was tagged by a garden blogger, I decided to go ahead and put it here. I thought maybe this would be a good "getting to know you" post for my new garden blogger friends. Ok. Here goes. :)

What was I doing 10 years ago?
Um.... I was about a month away from graduating High School... (Holy crap, has it been that long?) At that time in my life I thought I wanted to be a music producer / sound engineer, or Bono's girlfriend. Where I ended up has nothing to do with any of those things, but that's ok.

My to-do list/What I actually did
I have to-do lists (either in my head or sometimes actually written) going all the freak'n time. My reaction to these lists can vary: sometimes I ignore them all together, sometimes I do the easiest parts and lose interest before I get to the rest. Right now, my to-do list consists of blogging, finish editing a document for a friend, and do some actual work. I'm blogging, so at least I'm off to a good start.

Snacks I enjoy
Cake, fruit, cheese, peanut butter, chocolate

3 bad habits
Eating too much cake, PROCRASTINATING, not cleaning out the litter box as often as I should

5 places I've lived
in order: Shelbyville Tennessee, Evansville Indiana, Grantham England (ok, only for like 4 months, but surely that counts, right?), Chicago IL. Ok that's only four but that's all I've got. Oh OH wait.. I did live in Washington DC for like two months while I was doing an internship just after college.

5 jobs I've had
Also in order: Sales Representative at large office supply store, computer lab monitor in college, environmental activist, phone company sales representative, and urban planning research assistant

5 people who have interesting blogs that I'd like to tag
(most of these people are general purpose bloggers as opposed to garden bloggers)
Pardon the Egg Salad
The Space Suitcase
Jonniker
A Work in Progress
Goofus Musings

Thanks for reading. yay!

Tune back in on the 15th for my Bloom Day update!

Quickie

2008-05-12T07:08:00.000-07:00

Last week I took a couple hours to have lunch in Millennium Park and take a walk to enjoy the tulips on Michigan Ave. Here's a short video of all the pretty stuff I saw. I love this city. :)