Mobile Garden Featured in Chicago's Art on Track

Early Saturday, Joe Baldwin of the Mobile Garden Project stopped by to pick up a SIP-ful of rooster spur peppers, hauled down from its rooftop perch and sporting a fresh label, all set for her first CTA train ride.

Art on Track is a mobile art gallery on board a CTA train. The Art on Track train circles just the loop elevated track. The public is invited to board the train in order to view the art work. Art on Track takes place Saturday, September 17th between 5pm and 10pm. 

More in-process pix at flickr. I like shots like these because you're reminded how stark the day-to-day version of these train cars actually is.


 Mr Brown Thumb made a nice vid of Joe's completed train car. Well done!

Upgraded Fruit Fly Trap

Doors open all summer, fresh produce being chopped all day...we gotcher fruit flies right here. When I started to see larvae in my easy fruit fly trap (at left) I knew it was time for a fresh start.

Debbie told me how to make the sleeker version from a recycled water bottle. Just slice and invert the top, add the elixir (water, cider vinegar, squirt of detergent), and make sure you tape the edge so they can't fly out. 

Next time I'd put a rock in the bottom of the water bottle to provide some ballast.

WeI have a new batch of unfortunates already...

Sunflowers

Here's a sunflower volunteer that sprang up from a random seed in our garden. The complexity is breathtaking.

One of the happiest flowers: swaying, dancing in the breeze, nodding their sunny faces. Apparently they're also volunteering for this heartbreaking duty at Fukushima ...

But there's also an effort to decontaminate and lift spirits. Fukushima is distributing 20m sunflower seeds to suck up the cesium radionuclides that have permeated the soil. The towering yellow flowers now adorn gardens, farm fields and roadside plots. Although they brighten the landscape, their stalks and petals concentrate the radioactivity and will later have to be burned or left to decompose in a controlled environment.

The sunflowers are the brainchild of Kouyuu Abe, a Zen monk who owns a temple just outside Fukushima city and is committed to the "fight against radiation". He allows people to dump the irradiated soil from their gardens on the hillside behind his temple, where it will be buried and covered with zeolite. He is also planning to decontaminate the forests with high pressure sprays so the leaves are less of a hazard when they fall in the autumn.

 

Windy City Coop Tour

I decided to include my coop in this event*, taking place on Sunday, September 25th. There are 25 different sites, all private homes, where people are showing how they raise chickens in the city.

Chicago chicken keepers invite you to learn from their personal experiences with backyard chickens! Visit their coops and hens, ask questions, and take photos.


Make your own route and visit any or all of the 25 locations between 11AM and 2PM.

MAP of locations and site info

* Please respect the privacy of our Tour Hosts and Their Flocks by visiting only on the day and hours of the Tour.
* Children supervised by adults are welcome on the Tour.
* DO NOT BRING DOGS or other pets.
* Stay within the boundaries around homes and coops that Hosts designate for visitors.
* If a given yard is full when you arrive, you may be asked to wait momentarily until the crowd thins.
* Restrooms, drinking water, and snacks will not be provided by the sites on the Tour -- so plan accordingly and bring what you need with you.
* Street parking may be scarce. Consider taking public transit and/or riding a bike on the Tour!

Tour Passports will be on sale at each site for $3 while supplies last.
Windy City Coop Tour t-shirts (very limited edition) are also available while supplies last.

*Despite thinking that proclaiming that I keep chickens in the city has a Stuff White People Like vibe about it.

Planting Seeds for Winter Greens

We've been seed-starting, hopeful for a big crop of beloved greens this fall and winter.

Used the re-purposed spinach box travel SIPs--with spinach box cloche to prompt germination. Upstairs on the second floor they get plenty of south light and the ever-busy autumn squirrels aren't tempted to dig around in them.

We'll grow greens upstairs indoors as in previous years, but also we'll try a low tunnel over the raised bed Art built this spring against the south wall of a building out back. The compost we filled it with had sunk with all our summer rain, so Art scooped out some rough compost to raise the level.

I laid it in and topped it with some bags of mushroom compost.

The Red Giant mustard (via Hudson Valley Seed Library) we seeded in this travel SIP practically sprang forth overnight.

 

Some of the other seeds germinated spottily.

 

I went up to the roof to investigate a few of the SIPs we'd let go to seed and found that this Wrinkled Crinkled Crumpled Cress (Wild Garden Seed) had re-seeded itself, so I brought the young starts down to the raised bed to plant, along with some tiny baby bok choy starts.

Still awaiting our collection bag on the roof: lettuces, kale, and collards that have produced copious seed pods.

The seeds started in the travel SIPs have beautifully developed root systems--sub irrigation works.

In the photo below, upper left is a couple rows of Perpetual Spinach Chard (Bountiful Gardens) that I direct seeded. This spinach/chard is my favorite new green tried in 2011. Also direct seeded some upland cress (Victory Seeds--from 3 years ago). Both came up nicely, though a few other seed types did not.

Click to enlarge: tiny plants establishing already, drinking in the cool temps (as are we) and awaiting their tunnel covering later this year. I started a bunch more seeds in travel SIPs (aka portable microgardens--click here to see how to plant) this morning, which I'll transplant in a couple weeks.

Anyone have a recommendation for approach on the tunnel?

Rhode Island Reds: A Portrait

Such beautiful healthy girls, unperturbed by my opening their nesting box from the outside, via the egg-collection trap door.

And such individuals

 

Compare and contrast

We all know where this leads...

Folks This Ain't Normal: Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms

I don't watch many vids, so special thanks to Bruce for the refer on this killer-good one. Sit back with Joe Salatin and ponder how cocked up the food system is, all the while hoping his perfectly titled book sells a million copies and starts a real debate.

ps: focusing on approving a pipeline for toxic tar sands seems like the very antithesis of this.