My Chicago Garden

So it’s 28 degrees outside with a very light snow fall and my wife’s family is up for the thanksgiving holiday.  I enjoy making and having fires in my house and have come to love our double sided fireplace that is the center of our house.  I found this interesting product at one of the big boxes stores a few months back and bought a bag.  It’s called "fatwood" and is 100% organic and is made from the stumps of harvested pine trees.  You basically take a few sticks out of the bundle and put them at the base of the wood stack you have built for your fire. You put a flame to the "fatwood" and it literally bursts into flame and kicks the fire into action.  It really is amazing stuff and I’ll never use fire starter or paper again.

I pray you have a cozy thanksgiving with your family as well.

And if you need to start a fire this winter, grab a couple sticks of "fatwood".

My wife and I have decided to plant the remainder of our driveway fence line with ‘Heritage’ raspberries.  We’ve never grown raspberries so this should be interesting. From what I’ve researched the ‘Heritage’ variety is the most popular world wide and is one of the varieties recommended for Northern IL by the extension office.  Also, if I whack it down to the nubs in late fall I don’t need a trellis system and I’ll get one large harvest in early fall.  At least that’s the plan.

If anybody has advise for me feel free to leave a comment.  I found a local supplier I’m going to use.

An update on the cold frame…..it isn’t doing anything to stop the cold nights.  By early evening it has equalized with the outside (except for a higher humidity, which isn’t necessarily good). It does improve heating during the day.  Unfortunately I’ll be spending the next couple weeks in Connecticut for my day job so I won’t have time to try any fixes.  An interesting note though….I had grown oregano last year and when I moved everything around and built the new raised bed for the cold frame I left it in place.  It has survived perfectly fine in the cold frame so far.

No sign of the garlic so far.  Not sure if I should be worried or not.

Now that we’ve had a week of near freezing temperature I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my vegetable garden is dead.  But what that reminded me of was that I had not reviewed my car emergency kit lately.  After moving to Chicago about a year ago it has been in the back of my car just sliding around.

With a possibility for snow in the next few days, now is as good a time as any to make sure I have everything.  Here’s what I put together for my car emergency kit a few years ago while I was researching ‘emergency response’ topics.  It’s an all weather kit, not necessarily just for winter. I have not included my ham radio gear in the list below, but you should have some kind of portable news radio with you and extra batteries or charging device for your cell phone at least.  Cell phones usually do not work during an emergency but if that is all you have, that is all you have.