Here's a squash-melon cross that produced prolifically in our in-ground garden. These babies must be hardy, because they didn't get much light.
Art used a spade bit on his drill, marked to the depth of the tea candle insert, to cut these out. Nice job! They'll grace our family Thanksgiving table along with whatever's pretty out in the yard--rose hips, English ivy, sage, and yellow maple leaves.
Good video. A highlight for me was the hive with a window. Read more here.
...the Tour de Hive offers for those who wish to participate in this free event, the opportunity to see working bee hives in a cluster of Portland neighborhoods, and to ask questions of their hosts to learn more about the bees, and urban beekeeping opportunities.
Friday night I helped our friend Nance Klehm process about 75 pounds of pears--that she had foraged the day before--into cider. I don't think you'll take home anywhere near what I did after my work, but thought our readers would like to know about an urban forage that Nance is leading on October 5th from 5-7pm, starting at the Graham Foundation, 4 West Burton Place, in Chicago. I've lived here over 20 years and until prompted by this event, had no idea that Burton Place is a tiny little street near State and North Avenues, just south of Lincoln Park.
It's being sponsored by The Graham Foundation, who is paying Nance for her time, making it free for the public. Space is limited and you'll need to register by following this link.
On Tuesday, October 5, 2010, Nance Klehm will lead a small group on a two hour Urbanforage of Chicago’s Gold Coast. On this informal guided walk throughthe spontaneous and cultivated vegetation of the urbanscape, participants will learn to identify plants, hear their botanical histories and stories of their use by animals and humans, and share antidotes of specific experiences with these plants.The Urbanforage will begin in the garden of the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House, where participants are invited to sample an herbal beverage made by the artist. Space is limited, reservations are required.
Nance Klehm began leading Urbanforages in 2006 in suburbs and cities including; Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, New York and Mexico City.
She is an ecological systems designer, landscaper, horticultural consultant, permacultural grower, consultant, speaker, and teacher. She is respected internationally for her work on land politics and growing for fertility. She has lectured at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the University of Cincinnati, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. She has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and Dartington College in the United Kingdom. She writes a regular column for Arthur magazine and was included in the books Radical Homemakers (by Shannon Hayes), Participatory Autonomy (edited by Rick Gribenas), and The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements (by Sandor Katz).
Nance Klehm’s work as an urban forager was featured in the exhibition, Actions: What You Can Do With the City, which was on view at the Graham Foundation October 16, 2009 – March 13, 2010. http://cca-actions.org/
This event is presented in conjunction with Chicago Artist’s Month.
We're hitting the road and I want to see if we can get our daily greens from a couple of quickly made travel SIPs. Is it obsessive to want all the nutrients of New Zealand spinach, chard, collards, tatsoi, and cress while we wander the wilderness?
I don't think so.
For guidance, I asked Bob Hyland at Inside Urban Green, whose sub-irrigated window box + salad bar SIP concepts intrigue me for next spring. He coined the term "portable microgarden" and it's truly descriptive.
I already had these years-old Earthbound farm spinach boxes, and I found a sturdy brown plastic carrier that will allow me to lift them in and out of our camper easily (you don't need a carrier unless you want to move around a couple of these at once).
The guys at the tire shop provided the plastic drink bottles, which I made vent holes in, for water and air (mine might be a little large, but as with most SIPs it doesn't really matter). Then, two larger holes for the fill tube and the overflow.
The soldering iron I used made it easy to line up/melt the overflow hole on the container right in line with the exit tube. Below are my results. On the right I centered the bottle and it's a bit unstable (see the fill tube tipping to the right?). On my second attempt, at left, I nestled the bottle into the corner instead so it stays in position.
Once I packed these with damp potting mix, though, it didn't seem to matter.
Next I turned to the cool-weather greens I'd started a few weeks back in some of our bucket SIPs. Here are some nice-looking young collards, perfect for transplanting into the travel SIPs.
Happily, Bruce and Chef Art had popped up to the roof, where I was working, for a surprise visit. As we thought about the new travel SIP they suggested I dig down and lift a chunk of soil, root, and plant, transferring the whole handful to the travel SIP.
Good plan.
I top-watered these babies (for the trip I have a funnel that fits into the fill tube) and left them out in the nice overcast day to settle in. As we travel, they'll move with us, inside on road days and outdoors in the cool sun when we pause. And I'll clip clip clip for greens.
Quick-ref instructions, courtesy of Inside Urban Green:
1. Poke some small holes around the circumference of the bottle for air and water circulation (like the perforations in the corrugated drain pipe).
2. Add a piece of plastic tubing for a fill tube (or use something recyclable from the trash).
3. Make an overflow drain hole in the box and connect it to the bottle with a piece of (clear) plastic tubing.
The overflow drain hole is a primitive valve that determines the capacity of the reservoir depending on how high you install it in the reservoir.
Click here for a step-by-step on how to plant your personal microgarden.
Summer 2010 was the antithesis of Summer 2009, the latter cool, rainy, and overcast. This year's Chicago growing season can best be described as a blast furnace. Could it be that we need to think about lightly shading plants to shield them from the sun?
Check out the black funk on these black velvet tomatoes. Click to enlarge. Seriously sad to cut down the plant, since it produced early and often this summer. We picked every one of the last beautiful fruits, which had no signs of disease.
And then we removed the old fertilizer, added some new, and seeded the tomato SIP with collards. There, that's better. Our tomatoes started producing nearly two weeks early this year, but didn't have the stay power of other more moderate weather years.
I wonder if the heat stressed them so badly that it set them up for disease, because we surely have a lot of funky looking tomato foliage. Interestingly, I visited Bruce's roof garden (six blocks away) and his greenery is suffering from the same plant-destroying whatever. Further, my brother the in-ground organic gardener in suburban Chicago told me his heirloom tomatoes did not do well at all.
Still, there were some productive periods. I brought in a few pounds of produce every other day, enough to keep us happily fed (one of these years I'll start recording the weight like these folks do).
The eggplant listada, from Seed Savers, was a robust producer, and nicely disease resistant.
So was this Franchi tomato start from Debbie, a sort of Christmas tree loaded with flavorful small tomatoes. The Peppers Santa Fe Grande, another Seed Savers selection, always do well, and this year's heat didn't faze them. Here's a real downer. The Armenian cukes that Art built a new trellis for were devastated by powdery mildew, despite being planted in late June. One lonely cuke...
This year we also planted summer squash in late June, trying to outwit the powdery mildew. I seeded some mustard alongside in one of our adopted earthboxes. But not so fast...click pic to see the powdery mildew in all its glory today (one nice squash too).
We grew a melon called Golden Midget this year. I don't think the foliage is supposed to be golden though. Mildew again? Still, we got a beautiful melon, sweet as can be.
Here's a pepper I planted very late--mid-July maybe--since it didn't get planted in May-June. I have no idea what it is (Bruce, any help?). Looks like a yellow banana type. This is planted in the Canadian SIP sold by our big-box Menard's store for $5.
And here's a self-harvested Mickey Lee melon. I found it cracked on the roof on morning after it apparently cut loose from its vine on the melon trellis one windy night.
Pried it open to reveal a gorgeous interior, sweet enough for dessert.
You can always hope for more, better, and less disease, but this day's gathering looks bountiful.
A fun upside to summer: Our new growing pals and co-bloggers Debbie and her Little Green Girl Kara visited the roof. Here Kara tries one of the purple tomatillos (or is she just faking it?).
They generously brought us The World's Tiniest Tomato! (in addition to a bounty of others) from their garden.
Debbie's heat-tolerant lettuce seeds are flourishing on the roof...
And remember Brooke and Amy, who came this spring to learn about SIPs and help me try the new wicking fabric method? Their rooster spur peppers (left) loved this summer's extreme heat.
More good news: in September they'll be showing a group of children at the Fremont Public Library District, where they are librarians, how to make Bob Hyland's pop bottle planters. Each participant will plant a young lettuce plant and also direct-seed some of the cool-weather greens seeds saved from our roof. Way to go, you two!
Most-fascinating-plant-to-grow-for-the-first-time award goes to...okra. Beautiful hibiscus-like flowers and noble fruit. This plant is about 7 feet tall. Remember the Olive Garden salad bowl SIP? This one's still growing salad, using seeds we harvested from plants started by Bruce in February, set out in March, and gone to seed last month. Nice mustard greens and wrinkled crinkled crumpled cress. We also direct-seeded some SIPs that had run their course. The tatsoi and collard seeds sprang to life, though it took several attempts because the heat on the roof dried out the soil the first few times.
Growing food is filled with uncertainty: you can't control the weather or pests or spores that move invisibly on the breeze. There are ups, there are downs. On balance, though, it still seems remarkable that we can eat so well from the roof of a building in downtown Chicago.
If the title of this post stumps you...listen:
For so work the honey-bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom. William Shakespeare
Did someone say "act of order"? In retrospect, we humans were quite orderly in our descent on the hives to disrupt all the hard work these girls did over the spring and summer. Our weather Sunday -- outside the bee costumes, not in -- was sublime.
So many people were interested in watching/participating. Since it was our first harvest, we didn't know what to expect, but we quickly learned.
It started at 9:30 am, when Noam and Laura, above, suited up (me too!), smoked the hive, and cracked open the casa de Italians in Hive #2.
Noam began by removing each frame and giving it a shake to throw down the bees. Here he's working on Hive #1. And then he'd use his brush to gently encourage the others to leave. He handed off the mostly bee-free frame to me...
...and I handed off to Laura (click to big it up) halfway across the roof. She did a final brush off and placed each frame into a hard plastic bin with lids to keep the bees out. Art devised an attachment for this (heavy when full of frames) box that went onto a pulley. It was then lowered down to the landing on our fire escape. Then the boxes would be carried the rest of the way down.
Remember, the roof is 30 feet up!
Look at the thick comb, filled with honey.
Noam was kind enough to show me how to use the tool, a simple pry bar, to remove a frame. Then I got to try the throw-down maneuver to remove the first bees (I was a little too vigorous, feeling untouchable in that suit) before brushing.
After a lot of backing and forthing, we moved downstairs--as far away from the hives as we could get--where the action picks up. All the honeyed frames have been lowered down, four full boxes worth.
Here Rob carefully removes the wax caps off the hexagonal chambers where bees store their honey. They're incredibly smart. They seal the chambers once they're filled, to protect them.
Note the 1970s-era afro pick (not really, but that's what it reminds me of) used to de-cap.
Rob's an orderly de-capper... ...and Laura's got one all done. Look at the depth of comb...and as a consequence, honey. Once de-capped, two frames fit into the borrowed extractor (thanks to Noam's pal for this). The lid goes on and the crank turns the mechanism, using centrifugal force to pull the honey out and into the bucket. Like this:
Everyone takes a turn turning... ...while we fall into a sort of groove of de-capping and extracting. I'm admitting right here that even though I'm smiling, this is not my favorite task. Rob and Laura were skilled artisans at this. My favorite part was getting globs of wax and honey out of this scraper bowl to eat:
The bees didn't wait long telling each other where all their honey went.
Frequent washing was essential. I'd say this outdoor sink, which Art set up with hot water, was a star of the show. Once the honey starts to accumulate in the extractor it gets strained into the tapper--used to fill jars. Here we tried using my chinoise, whose mesh may have been a little dense for the job at hand, to strain the honey as it flows from the extractor to the tapper. It's an exciting moment--the first pure honey!
Art pulled down his old French cooking strainer, and it fit reasonably well atop the tapper bucket, making the job slightly easier. Here the honey comes out of the extractor...into his strainer...and finally into the tapper.
Noam gets the last of the extracted honey out of his tub.
Now we can start the jarring process. This borrowed tapper unit is meant for making booze and so the tap is a bit poky when filled with the more viscous honey, but that's OK.
We're like a well-oiled machine, with people de-capping, extracting, straining, and filling.
At some point the extent of this harvest becomes apparent. We need more jars, and Bruce comes to the rescue. He wheelbarrows over a bunch of jars he needed for canning this summer. Meanwhile, the scraping bowls from decapping hold a lot of wax. Bruce and Brooke decide they might make candles. Each went home with about 2 pounds of wax to play with. Here Bruce transfers the wax to a go-container. Then Noam and Laura de-capped two frames that are extremely dark in color. He postulates that these Hive 1 frames first housed brood (babies) and then honey. He wants to strain this honey separately, since it's darker. This is a real Martha I-strain-honey-in-my-pretty-sundress-and-necklace moment. The dark honey and the lovely Laura, who had to leave for a quick shower and costume change so she could attend her workplace picnic, where they were roasting a pig--yum. It's all gorgeous. Time for a toast with our neighbors' homemade wheat beer. Thanks Sean and Fran! The perfect ending to a perfect day.
What a fine group effort. So many hands and friends, not all pictured here. And more vids to come.
Thanks, Rob, for the stills and the vids. Thanks to everyone who pitched in. Thanks to Art who never stopped all day and who is strangely absent from the photos.
Most of all, thanks to Noam for his focused tenacity, helping us all learn what to do and toiling from 9:30 until nearly 8 pm to leave us with nicely intact hives and a honey-free work area.
We never did get it all bottled...still working on that indoors here. Gallons to go before we sleep.
Can you find the fill tubes in my travel SIPs?
Inspired by Mrs Homegrown and her post The glass is half full--even if it's full of greywater, it's time for a reckoning.
Seriously sad to cut down the plant, since it produced early and often this summer. We picked every one of the last beautiful fruits, which had no signs of disease.
Our tomatoes started producing nearly two weeks early this year, but didn't have the stay power of other more moderate weather years.
The Peppers Santa Fe Grande, another Seed Savers selection, always do well, and this year's heat didn't faze them.
Here's a real downer. The Armenian cukes that Art built a new trellis for were devastated by powdery mildew, despite being planted in late June. One lonely cuke...
But not so fast...click pic to see the powdery mildew in all its glory today (one nice squash too).
Still, we got a beautiful melon, sweet as can be.
Remember the Olive Garden salad bowl SIP? This one's still growing salad, using seeds we harvested from plants started by Bruce in February, set out in March, and gone to seed last month. Nice mustard greens and wrinkled crinkled crumpled cress.
We also direct-seeded some SIPs that had run their course. The tatsoi and collard seeds sprang to life, though it took several attempts because the heat on the roof dried out the soil the first few times.
And then he'd use his brush to gently encourage the others to leave.
Rob's an orderly de-capper...
...and Laura's got one all done. Look at the depth of comb...and as a consequence, honey.
Once de-capped, two frames fit into the borrowed extractor (thanks to Noam's pal for this).
The lid goes on and the crank turns the mechanism, using centrifugal force to pull the honey out and into the bucket.
Like this:
...while we fall into a sort of groove of de-capping and extracting. I'm admitting right here that even though I'm smiling, this is not my favorite task. Rob and Laura were skilled artisans at this.
My favorite part was getting globs of wax and honey out of this scraper bowl to eat:
Once the honey starts to accumulate in the extractor it gets strained into the tapper--used to fill jars. Here we tried using my chinoise, whose mesh may have been a little dense for the job at hand, to strain the honey as it flows from the extractor to the tapper.
It's an exciting moment--the first pure honey!
Noam gets the last of the extracted honey out of his tub.
Meanwhile, the scraping bowls from decapping hold a lot of wax. Bruce and Brooke decide they might make candles. Each went home with about 2 pounds of wax to play with. Here Bruce transfers the wax to a go-container.
Then Noam and Laura de-capped two frames that are extremely dark in color. He postulates that these Hive 1 frames first housed brood (babies) and then honey.
He wants to strain this honey separately, since it's darker.
This is a real Martha I-strain-honey-in-my-pretty-sundress-and-necklace moment. The dark honey and the lovely Laura, who had to leave for a quick shower and costume change so she could attend her workplace picnic, where they were roasting a pig--yum.
It's all gorgeous.
Time for a toast with our neighbors' homemade wheat beer. Thanks Sean and Fran! The perfect ending to a perfect day.
