My Chicago Garden

In this episode I’ll give another update on the status of the garden. But before I get into that I had a few people over the last month ask me to mention a gardening related event that some of you may be interested in.  If you, or your organization, live in the Chicago area and would like me to mention your event on the podcast send an email tyler@mychicagogarden.com.

First we have a Garden Sculpture Workshop that is being held at the Chicago Botanical Gardens.  It runs for four days from 9am to 3:30pm on Monday August 20th through Thursday August 23rd.  It’s being run by the award-winning sculptor, DJ Garrity the Sculptor-In-Residence of Mount Rushmore National Memorial.  The cost is $599 for members and $720 for non-members. Space is limited, and I’m told that only a few spots are left.  You can find a link to the workshop description on the MyChicagoGarden website.

And lastly, I got an email from a listener inviting me to attend the Mens Garden Club of Villa Park.  Don’t let the name fool you though. It’s actually open to anyone.  They have a club greenhouse, a plant sale every year and various discounts on garden material for members and every meeting they have a guest speaker.  Their next meeting is August 25th at 7:30PM.  If my schedule will allow it I plan on attending as Villa Park is just a few miles east of Wheaton.  Their website is www.homegardening.org.

So what has been going on in the garden.  I installed two different drip irrigation systems which you can see in a video segment I submitted to gardenfork.tv.  A link to the video is up on the MyChicagoGarden website.

I know I said Wow in the last episode but I have to say it again.  Wow. The sunflowers are over 8 foot tall and the corn has finished producing with a harvest of roughly 30 ears of corn over the last few weeks. All from a 3 foot by 8 foot area.  I have also picked 25 good sized cucumbers over the last three weeks with another 10 or so on the vine.  I only planted two cucumber plants and I’m over whelmed with produce.  I really only need one cucumber plant but I don’t like planting just one plant as it means a zero harvest if something happens to it.  With two plants you at least have a chance of one surviving.  I finally ended up just slicing all of them up and making some refrigerator bread and butter pickles.  They turned out to be just about the best I’ve ever had.  I took a jar to work for the guys to try and they agreed.  I think I had a good harvest with the cherrie tomatoes I planted but I can’t tell.  My youngest girl eats all the ripe cherrie tomatoes before I can pick them.  I usually see a clump of almost ripe tomatoes and when I come out a few days later they are gone.  I’ve never seen a kid eat so many tomatoes.  A few weeks ago I had to remove one of the Borage plants because it simply took over half of the 4ft by 8ft bed.  I’ve also already learned a few things this first season with the square foot gardening method.

First off, you need to do more planning that I had expected.  I choose the location of each plant based on spacing requirements, companionship with other plants near it, and the casting of shadows.  But what I didn’t take into account was the trellising plants such as the cucumber not really following the trellis. I probably could have done a better job of threading the new shoots into the trellis but I didn’t have the time.  By the time I had checked back on the cucumbers they had pretty much covered the couple squares of green beens I had planted.  I can see bean leaves in between the cucumber leaves so I know they are there.  But I can’t get too them!  I think for next year I’ll plant the vining plants in their own bed.

Secondly, I really should have been more strict about my book keeping.  I can’t remember when I planted my first row of carrots so I had to pull a few as a test. Luckily they were ready for harvest so I pulled a few more and my wife added them to our fried rice one evening and the girls eat a couple as snacks.

And thirdly, I’m glad I didn’t plant all of one crop in the same area.  In particular, I spread out my cabbage plants.  I didn’t do this for any reason other than spacing in the garden.  But it had a beneficial unintended consequence.  One one of my cabbage plants was showing signs of cabbage fly infestation I was able to pull that one cabbage and deal with the other cabbage plants before it spread.  I believe that since I had beans and tomatoes and a HUGE borage plant between the cabbages the little beetles and larva would have had a hard time making the transition to other group of cabbage.  Bio-diversity helps again!

And lastly, at least for this episode anyway, is dont forget to try and mix your lettuce packet if it’s one of those mesculin mixes.  I planted several rows of lettuce a few weeks a part but simply tapping out a few seeds into each row.  What I didn’t realize I was doing was planting the same kind of lettuce in each row.  Which means I don’t really have a mix of lettuce to harvest.  The seeds are different sizes and shapes and so they tend to fall out of the seed packet in a specific order.  Oh well….lettuce was an experiment anyway since my family doesn’t eat much lettuce.  I think for next year I’m going to put a bed nearer the house so it’s easier to just run out and grab some for dinner.  I think this smaller kitchen garden will also be the opportunity to try and build a real cold frame out of the left over windows I found in the garden shed.

Back in Episode 6 and 7 we ran a series on Composting.  If you payed close attention you’ll notice I never finished the 3 part series.  That’s because I didn’t have a place to start my own compost pile.  Well now I do.  In fact, I just went down to a local store in Wheaton and picked up one of those black plastic compost bins with no bottom. It’s effectively a two piece black ring with a lid. You secure it to the ground with some large plastic screws.  It cost about $80 and should be fairly easy to get going.  I had intended to build a cedar three bin compost bin but I don’t have the time right now and I really need to do something with my garden trimmings and food scraps now that the kitchen is finished and we’ve started cooking the majority of our own meals again.  I’m interested in seeing just how badly a bin like this smells and attracts the unwanted critters like fruit flies.  I don’t know if it attracted the skunk I found in my front yard one night, or if it was coincidence, but it was one exciting evening.

If you started your garden early like I did, it’s time to plant for a late summer harvest. So break out those seed packets and see what you have left.  Some of the big box stores put their seed packets on major discounts if you need to replenish your supplies.  A couple of them around me don’t have any seeds anymore so I’m stuck with what I have on hand.  I’ll probably plant some beens since my first crop got covered by the cucumber.  I’ll also probably try and start the remaining tomato seeds as those are always good for canning late in the year.  And my remaining broccoli is a cool weather crop so they should be fine as well as long as I can get them to last through the final heat waves of the summer. However, make sure you check the time to harvest information for your seeds.  And then compare the current date with the average first frost in your area. Here in the Chicago area the average first frost is October 14th so we have about 75 days before we are truly gambling with mother nature.  The beans I have list 55 to 60 days to maturity, so I’m pretty sure the beans will make it under the wire with a week or two to spare. The broccoli is listed for 60-90 days but they can handle a few cold nights, just not a really hard freeze so they should be fine. The beefsteak tomatoes are probably not going to make it though, as they are listed for 80 days. But I’m willing to gamble on a late frost so I’m going to try it anyway.

One way that I could have cheated an extra few weeks out of the calendar would have been to already have had these seeds sprouted and growing in my seed starting workshop in the garage.  Much like you do in the very late winter when you are getting ready for early spring planting.  Here again taking good notes earlier in the season would have helped.  I would have been able to see in my notes that it had been 70 or 80 days since I planted the first set of plants and that would mean that it was time to get some seeds going again.  That way when the first set of plants were dead I could pull them out and replace them with a healthy little seedling, instead of a seed.  That would shave off anywhere from 10 to 25 days depending on the plant.   If you have even more time on your hands, the best way to do this is to actually plant one plant, then wait a few weeks, plant another, wait a few weeks plant another, etc, etc until you hit that last planting window where the expected first harvest hits the expected average frost.  But this assumes you have seeds and seedlings at various stages of maturity in a constant rotation in your seed starting area. I just don’t have the time to do it right.

 Standard Podcast [9:37m]: Download