My Chicago Garden

What a wonderful day to play in the garden! The temperature was wonderful and prospects of rain tomorrow. So I took the opportunity to do a quick look around the garden to see how things were doing.

	My wife and I hit the the Native Plant Sale in Wheaton a weekend or two ago and used what the girls picked out to replace the scraggly plants out by the big rock in the front yard. It is now our Native Plant garden. We have no idea what the girls picked out but who cares!!! It’s native.
	The plants Melissa planted down the the driveway garden are all coming back and we’ve added several blueberry plants. I’m taking a bit of a risk with acid soil loving blueberries since I didn’t do a soil test, but I never have done soil tests so why start now? There’s a little bit of room left (where I’m standing to take the picture) but we don’t know what to do with it yet.
	The perennial plants from last year are all coming up fine and I added a bird bath and bird feeder in the “screening garden” between the vegetable garden and the street/fence. You can see the edge of the vegetable garden in the left of the picture, and the fence to the right is the back of the fence in the first picture.
	Tom Miller (our wonderful do-it-all contractor who has done the roof, the kitchen remodel and window, the master closet remodel and plumbing) has started the work of removing 50 year old cedar siding, soffits and windows and replacing them with completely brand new everything including windows and doors. By the time he is done the house will probably need to be called the Tom Miller house. You can see some of his work in the background of the new front yard sitting garden. We plan on doing some extensive landscaping in this area a couple years from now (not enough money!!), but for now it’s just a container or two and some chairs. We saw an oil lantern at the Wheaton French Market this morning that would be really neat to have in the early evenings in summer.

	The vegetable garden is coming along nicely. The FedCo potatoe has started to sprout, but not the potatoe from the local nursery. Hurm….
	Since I didn’t have sun flowers in the raised beds this year, I threw a couple down in a bare patch in the “screening garden”. I have no idea how it will look.
	I purchased some row covers for the cabbage and broccoli. I had pretty bad damage last year. Hopefully this will help. I had not expected to plant broccoli this year but I had some open ground in the raised beds and there was a sad looking 8 pack at HD that needed a home
	I’ve already had to make one harvest of the oregano. I had a paint bucket full of oregano when I was done. All from my pyscho oregano. I’m having to cut it back heavily to keep it from over growing the box and shading out the new tomatoe plant. Those are the garlic to the right that are growing like gang busters.
	I’ve never really tried growing lettuce so this is my first year to give it a go. I’m trying to maximize space by having the cucumber run up and over in a shading arch to try and keep the lettuce cool during the high heat of the summer. I have several varieties all starting to peak out. There is also a row of spinach popping down in the bottom of the picture.
	Here’s the last of the three raised beds. Peas are heading up the trellis and green beans are starting to fill out the grid pattern. You can also make out a bit of carrot tops and some more cabbage I’m trying to start from direct sow seed. It will go unprotected to see what happens.  Oh yeah…and a couple basil up by the tomatoe. Can’t have tomatoe without basil in our house!

Brian of cybology.com, and member of the Men’s Garden Club of Villa Park (not just for men!), just clued me in on a compost gold mine.

If you’ve ever looked for different kinds of compost/manure/etc at the local stores around you, you probably have noticed that all the big box stores seem to sell the same brand. It’s best for your garden to have multiple different kinds so it doesn’t get loaded to one side or the other of the nutrient scale. Well Brian found the gold mine.

Meinke’s Garden Center on Touhy Ave.

5803 Touhy Ave.
Niles, IL 60714
847-647-9455

The bags are 1cu Ft. costs varies. They have Duck, Sheep, Chicken, Bean/alfalfa, mushroom, cow and goat compost. Sweatness!!!

One was 4.75
One was 7.95
the rest were 6.95.

Basically it’s between O’Hare airport and the lake at the cross streets of Des Plaines Rd. and Touhy….If you know where the leaning tower is in Niles….you are almost there just a little further East and it is on the South Side of the Street.

Man! I can’t win this year.  Two days of below freezing have completely obliterated my poor little tomatoe plants.

You can see the row of 3 tomatoes in the first picture.  Yeah…that’s them…the brown lumps of goo. Just two days ago they were busting out of their store pots begging to be let loose.  You can see, if you squint, the forth tomatoe behind my king kong, take a beating, show me some more SNOW, I dare you..oregano.  It over wintered with the garlic just fine and is going gang busters frost or no.  You can see the lettuce is popping up too.  I had a simple layer of straw over them for the last two days of frost.

I also noticed that I forgot to try and protect my two squash plants over on the other side of the house *sigh*.  They have some tip burn it looks like but I think they may have survived.  I’m not too concerned with stunted growth as they are in a tight area anyway.

Forecast looks good for above freezing temperatures, though still cool. But something else to watch for. It’s severe weather time (eg: tornados) and the College of DuPage folks are out storm chasing this week and Paul Sirvatka has posted that we are heading into a period of potential severe weather for Illinois.

If you don’t have a NOAA weather radio you really should.  A couple of my weather nerd friends swear by the Midland WR-300 ($50) or WR-100 ($30). Your local Radio Shack should carry the WR-100 if you don’t want to order via the web. That reminds me. I need to get one!

1) What are you using for the seed potatoes?

I maintain a planting diary that is fairly up to date with the latest information about the garden. If you check the diary you’ll see that I planted Red Cloud potatoes and Kennebec.  The Red Cloud’s I got from Moose Tubers (a Fedco company) and the Kennebec from Barn Owl and Feed (a local garden/farm/feed store)

2) Did you get the tomatoes in the ground? If you did, what are you doing for them now that it’s snowing out?

I did. My seed tomatoes I killed due to lack of attention on my part. So I went to a big box store and picked up some seedlings while I grow some more in the garage.  When there is a threat of a late frost (like tonight) and my cold frame isn’t available, I use plastic in a makeshift cold frame style. Here’s a picture from this evening.  The tall plastic is my tomatoes already staked and ready to grow.  The smaller rectangle is the herbs, cabbage, garlic and another tomatoe.

3) I noticed in your gallery that you have a solar panel set up. I’m curious to know how you are using it.

I don’t have that system anymore.  When I lived in KY I was the Emergency Management coordinator for the Amateur Radio operators in the county.  Because of that, and because it was fun to build, I designed and built a fully off the grid power station for my amateur radio and weather station equipment in my basement. I could technically run forever without power. I kept a parts list if you want to try and do something like it yourself. Here’s the flickr set with wiring diagram and photos. I also participated in the Alternative Energy Associate (AEA) of Cincinnati. You can see a tour of my rain barrel setup and solar dog house on their website.

4) What is that tent in your image gallery. You never posted about it!

Sorry about that!  My wife and I are going backpacking in July and I wanted an ultra light tent.  I did a bunch of research and decided on the RainShadow 2 from TarpTent. I had it up a week or two back to seam seal it and get some practice putting it up.  The tent is not a traditional tent, in that it is not completely enclosed. It’s basically a tarp (see name of company) with a sewn in floor separated by bug netting. It makes the tent only 46oz instead of somewhere around 100oz for a traditional 2 person tent (50% weight saving).

Well it happened.  In preparation for this weekends garden activities, I put my seedlings out in the cold frame to harden them off with a bit of outside weather a few days ago.  And with all the hustle and bustle I forgot they were there!!!  They got fried when I forgot to lift the windows during the 70 degree weather this morning and the temperature went over 100 degrees.  By the time I got to them I had lost nearly all the plants.  An entire early seedling set down the toilet. I think the hardiest of them, the one tomatoe and the two squash may have survived. But I don’t have much hope for the cucumber, cabbage, cauliflower and the cherry tomatoes.  I can’t believe it! I’m going to have to scramble to replace the dead plants with store purchased varieties if I want any early harvests. I could have kicked myself.  That’ll learn me.

I replaced the cabbage and cherry tomatoes from seedlings at Home Depot this evening and they’ll go in tomorrow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen cucumber seedlings so I planted a few seeds next to each seedling I set out in hopes that if the seedlings die the seeds can take over. I remember seeing cauliflower at Menards this morning so I’ll go there after hitting Planters Pallette tomorrow morning to see what they have.  I’m taking a day off from work due to the awesome weather and a bunch of garden stuff needs doing ASAP.

On one good note, I got the potatoes cut and ready for planting tomorrow.  And my wife is actually warming to the idea of the front grass area (between the low front yard fence and the road) being turned into a squash bed!! Wouldn’t that be a hoot….monster squash plants as the front border! heheheh