This strange spring had us setting seeds in pots way earlier than usual. At first, it was no big deal, since they were in a winter greenhouse that has lots of sunlight — until, that is, the leaves come out on the trees. Which they did, again, way early.
So Stephanie and Sarah and Alexandra carried all the little seedling trays to the porch, where they’d still get sun. And that worked fine too, until it got colder at night, and started to damage the little squash seedlings.
So I put a sheet over all of them for a couple of nights. And then Stephanie told me to put plastic over them instead (to keep the heat in — DUH! Right!), and that worked okay last night.
But tonight, grrr. . . it’s already cold and is set to go down to mid-30s. So . . . I put the plastic down on my living room floor and carried them all inside just now. That’s fifteen trips. Then fifteen trips back outside tomorrow. And probably tomorrow night as well. That’s 60 trips altogether in and out during this very strange spring which has us all either scratching our heads or highly aware of global warming/weirding.
A photo update of the work taking place around the garden.
We hope you come and get involved. Next work day: EARTH DAY, April 22nd from 2-5 pm !!
Spring is sprung. The garden in its weeded glory.
Seedling power! Stephanie and Alexandra planted some seedlings over Spring Break… and within days they were popping up like champs!
This eggplant jumped up right away and needed to be re-planted into bigger containers!
Compost here! We got a lot of help from the neighborhood, including Jim making these awesome compost bins! THANKS!!! Now, we need all of your compost, grass clippings, coffee grounds, etc!
Mmmmmmmanure!Thanks to Steve Headley and his horses for this wonderful natural fertilizer! (FYI – his farm is on Mt. Gilead Road in Bloomington for others who might benefit from using this manure on their gardens). We will be spreading the manure over the beds to get them chock full of vitamins and minerals for healthy plants!
Weeding… a necessary evil. Thanks to all who pulled weeds to get GANG ready for yummy plants!
Yes, Shadow absolutely helps, too!
Ann is excited for the brambling blackberries and raspberries!
Ahhhh, planting. Steph and Sarah had some fun planting beans and peas along the perimeter (they’ll grow up the fence) and around the teepee (another good structure for their vines to climb up).
I can’t let today pass without a quick blog about the garden. It is, after all, Spring Equinox. And spring is definitely in the air!
Last week, over IU’s spring break, we got pretty excited about the garden. The 80 degree weather helped encourage that excitement, and it led to some action.
First, we planted seeds and placed them in the greenhouse. We have tomatoes, eggplant, herbs, and arugula – which was also very excited for spring and peeped up after only 2 days! These little starter plants will be re-planted in a few months in a clean, mulched, frost-free garden.
A few days later, we got even more ambitious, and we started to weed. Shadow the dog helped us enormously (by digging his own hole to rest in the shade) and we made great progress. More remains to be done, but it was rewarding to see how in such a short time, all our work together made a difference.
We are planning some changes in the garden for this season – moving some of the beds so the plants get more light, a night-blooming garden with delicious-smelling flowers, and, of course, the city-required gate. More news on that to come soon!
Green Acres is a neighborhood which some of its residents envision could be an ecovillage.
Photo: Gretchen Frazee/WFIU News
Green Acres Neighborhood Garden is an urban garden where people who tend to it also share the fruits of their labor.
This is the last in a series on cooperative living in Bloomington, Indiana.
In the summer, in a small garden in Green Acres, just east of Indiana University, is full of tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, basil, onions, radishes, corn, cabbage, strawberries… you get the picture. It us a lot of food.
Ann Kreilkamp owns the garden, but several people in the neighborhood and as well as students from IU’s Permaculture Department tend it, and, in return, share the harvest.
Kreilkamp envisions several similar gardens popping up around the neighborhood and eventually forming the Green Acres Ecovillage.
“What we’re trying to do here is trying to build an ecovillage from what’s already here,” she says. “It’s called a retrofit ecovillage where you use existing structures, and you can have renters and people who own them.”
In her vision, neighbors would help each other garden and share the fruits – and vegetables — of their labor with everyone involved. Basically, a large-scale version of what she’s already doing.
“Eventually I would like to see in 30 years, the whole neighborhood is an ecovillage, with zoning laws having changed so you can have small businesses inside it,” she says.
Kreilkamp is petitioning the Bloomington Zoning Commission to change its laws so she can operate her garden without being afraid of overstepping the law. The Bloomington Planning Department says it is taking all the zoning requests on a case by case basis.
Jim Ollis, a student from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is staying in Bloomington for a few weeks as a part of his permaculture studies. He says Bloomington is ripe for this type of community living because it has a lot of land that can be used for small-scale gardening.
“Communities like Bloomington have a much easier potential and much easier transition than places like Philadelphia in the city because the land is wide open, the land is readily available,” he says.
Kreilkamp says she hopes people like Ollis will take inspiration from her work, leave Bloomington and begin similar projects throughout the U.S.
“Because we are a university town you have people constantly moving through,” she says. “So the type of governing you have to do is really educational so they will learn how to do it and then they’ll move and do it somewhere else.”
Her dream, she says, would be to see her grandchildren living in a world that is sustainable and lives in sync with nature’s cycles. Krielkamp says, she thinks they will.
Notice all the lotuses in the pond. I keep clearing them out so the fish get some sun, and they really appreciate it, flashing up to my hand as I pull out vines along the edges. This fall we will have to go in and "muck out" the pond for the first time, after three years.
. . . except that we forgot about seed saving. And we only got part-way through the garden in our assessment. We did plant a few beds for fall, with greens, tatsoi, beets, radishes, and peas.
What happened?
Well, it’s been so damned hot and humid for so many weeks, night and day, and frankly, I think we’re all enervated. The last thing any of us needed was to spend an entire day in the blazing, wet heat. So we didn’t. Note to self: never schedule an all-day workshop in the heat of summer. Three hours in the morning is plenty.
Oh, and there’s more! Nathan had a late evening paid music gig an hour and a half away on Saturday evening, so asked if he could come at 10 rather than 9 am. A couple of people who were signed up, didn’t show up. A couple of people who didn’t sign up did show up. On and on. Rhonda was supposed to co-teach with Nathan, but her daughter Maya won best of class with one of her rabbits (congrats, Maya!), so they had to go to the state fair. Luckily, Stephanie (who taught the Children’s Workshop) was able to come and assist Nathan.
(And, wouldn’t you know, the class was held during a Mercury Rx period (happens three times a year, for three weeks at a time, and tends to foul up areas involving communication and transportation. Best for going inwards and communing with one’s muse; not so good for connecting clearly with others.) That wouldn’t stop me from doing what I plan to do, unless it would be signing contracts. And, BTW: that “debt deal” was signed on the very day Mercury turned to go retrograde. . . .)
To top it off, the class was held on Sunday, the day before everybody knew the stock market would crash, triggered by the S&P downrating of U.S. debt in a year when the Arab Spring seems to be hissing up from a thousand cracks in the rigid hierarchial global control system.. The economic/political atmosphere, I think it’s safe to say, is downright uneasy, even eerie, worldwide, and of course, we’re all breathing that air, whether in fear or love, depending on our level of awareness.
We spent the first hour sitting in my living room, talking. Talking about what it’s going to take to feed the world during the coming difficult years of climate change and most likely, at least partial collapse of the systems that have maintained us unsustainably since the industrial revolution. Susan, Doug and I had read an article that I put up on my www.exopermaculture.com site the day before — do read it — and it alarmed us all. The difficulties we face, especially in growing enough staple crops (cereals, grains which require either huge labor or at least small machines) are formidable. Then there’s the lack of awareness, the entitlement attitude, the fact that old-time farming and “putting up” skills have just about gone extinct within one generation, and any romantic view of the future dissolves into fairy dust.
So, that was the context of the class that did take place! And we had fun. Nathan is a wonderful teacher, and Stephanie his bright, smiling, knowledgeable assistant.
Notice the giant sunflower plants behind Nathan. The entire garden is sprinkled with them this year, all volunteer (three plants were planted last year). We decided to just let them do what they will, and boy did they!
He did get a bit carried away by some subject, which I can no longer remember, but it was in response to someone’s question about why their garden isn’t doing so well this summer. I do remember him saying that whatever the problem is with your plants, the solution is usually to keep feeding the soil. That plants do better, and fend off pests, when they are living in a rich enough environment. When asked what kinds of amendments to put on the soil, he recommends human urine, diluted five or ten times, about once a week up until two weeks prior to harvest. Best to use what’s at hand, rather than buy more stuff. . .
Nathan noted, as part of an overall summer assessment that, while sunflowers are gorgeous, they are “heavy feeders,” taking a lot of nutrients from the soil. So. That’s the last time we’ll let them get so unruly, and we’ll make sure to put lots more compost in the soil near where they’ve been. We did remove a number of them during the workshop.
The big lesson of the day was how to deal with squash borers. A number of the squash plants have already died, from what looked to me like a kind of yucky squishiness at the very base of the plant. Last year, we also had squash borers, but they had entered a few inches up the stem in each case, so I didn’t recognize the same problem when I saw it. So much to learn in a garden. A zillion details, and all depending on close observation.
Here’s a plant with a squash borer problem, notice the yucky part, right at the base.
He cut this one open a few inches up, because the borers travel up (you can tell how far by whether or not the leaves are dead at that point), and he wanted to find them. The trick is to slit the hollow stem vertically without going through the other side. That way, the plant may still live after the borers have been removed. Someone told me last year that you needed to make sure you found two of the little buggers, because there were usually two, and if one remained, the problem would, too. Nathan said that there may actually be more than two . . . At any rate, here’s what one looks like, on the tip of his knife, a whitish slug, with a tiny, very black dot at the tip.
I had heard that if you then make a tin foil sleeve for the place where you slit it, the plant might be able to live on (and a couple of plants that I got borers out of last year did live with this technique). Nathan said it’s best to put the tin foil around each plant before the squash borers come, because they usually do, eventually.
Lesson: besides the number of critters that can munch on plants, there are also lots of different ways to deal with them. How to garden is not written in stone. But it is overwhelming for anyone who has no experience. For example, Doug, in the middle here,
who confessed to me as I was about to pick off dead leaves from a bed of chard plants for composting and live leaves for our lunch, that he felt completely overwhelmed, didn’t know what to do . . . As he stood there, looking stricken and lost, I invited him to kneel and join me; I showed him how to discern which leaves could be eaten, which were too far gone. Hint: lots of tiny insect-made holes are okay, rotting blackened areas are not.
I know exactly how he feels. I felt the same way not so long ago. In contrast, here’s two young ones, Ash and Jessica, who seem to come by gardening naturally.
Jessica has just returned from part of her summer in Puerto Rico, where she was on a wwoof program (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), staying with a young couple and their child, on an organic farm by the sea. So glad young people are becoming farmers. We’re going to need millions more as we relocalize industrial agriculture everywhere.
BTW: I am really glad to see these two Indiana University students in the garden, because they live (or, I should say, they lived, both having now moved to other digs) right across the street, and after all, this is supposed to be primarily a neighborhood garden, not just a teaching venue. They had joined our weekly workparties in the spring, and Jessica wants to continue through the remainder of the growing season.
After thoroughly working that old chard bed (which has fed a number of us for at least three months now), we planted greens in and around the plants that were still viable, punched bamboo stakes in the ground and hung string for a little pea garden, planted the peas and other beds we prepared into a rich compost/top soil concoction that my son Colin had mixed and laid out on the picnic table for us like a feast in the early morning.
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By that time it was high noon, hot and humid. We gathered our bag of chard leaves and basil, came into my house, and stir fried chopped chard and onions with freshly made pesto (garlic and pine nuts and olive oil blended with basil), and served it with slices of the first gorgeous ripe tomatoes.
After an hour or so, everybody but Nathan and me went home. He and I spent another hour in the garden, planting, removing more sunflowers, and talking. A good day. Here’s the lordly okra plant, with blossom.
And here’s the pond, with fish, looking cool and refreshing, but, in reality, the water is quite warm.
