A dose of sweetness

Hi everyone. Mr. Mikulski here. Just wanted to share a couple pics of yesterday's harvest. Unfortunately my phone/camera is not working, so I wasn't able to take a photo of everything I had picked and packaged, all in the back of the truck. That looked amazing, let me tell you -- ten vegetable boxes, packed to the brim, and then an extra big plastic box full of, well... extra produce, and then there were enough melons for everyone to have one -- filling in the few remaining spaces in the truck bed.

I WAS however able to make a photo once I got back from share delivery at Arrigo. Here are four remaining shares, the box of extras, and the remaining melons:

Josie-eye view -- Mmm!!!

Aerial view -- If you look closely you can guess what kind of produce Josie got her hands on

Melons are nice, huh? It's nice to have something desert-ish in the box, for a change. Here is one share up close:

I moved the mizuna greens off the top, so you could see everything in the box

The truth is that there was other stuff to harvest, too -- stuff like smaller cherry tomatoes, corn, and possibly potatoes. But since it was raining on and off during the normal harvest time yesterday, nobody else showed up to help pick stuff. I usually have at least one other adult out there with me, but no such luck this time. So I just picked as much as I could from 1:00 to 4:00 and then called it quits...

I reckon we'll keep having stuff to eat until at least mid-October -- and I don't think it's just me being optimistic. Because we're not over-fertilizing, the plants aren't getting exhausted early on. Also, I just looked at a calendar, and, geez, Harvest Week 1 turns into Harvest Week 12 so quickly. It has been a great ride so far, hope you all are enjoying it too!

Until next time!
Mr. Mikulski

The banana trees

Today, as i was on my way to school. I saw 2 big banana trees outside in front of my house. I decided to take a picture of it because i never saw a banana tree before and it was a surprise to me. I was so amazed. My mom told me about it but i never had a chance to go look at it myself, because i have always been busy. But, today i decided to go see it because i thought it was kind of important to blog about it. Also, I wanted people to believe that we really had banana trees growing in chicago, because some people dont believe we do so here is pictures to prove it:



This is the first banana tree

This is the second banana tree



The trip to the wild!

On Friday, August 10th, 2012 was a fun day for me because we took a trip to the wild. We experienced different things like seeing nature: Dragon flies, bees, frogs, grasshoppers,etc.. We were in Des Plaines, IL. Its about 30 to 45 minutes from Chicago. First we stopped at Mcdonalds and had a good breakfast ( sorry i don't have the pictures for that). I was so scared to go inside of the woods because i thought something was going to attack me. But i still went in the woods and ran into a beautiful pond:

Also, along the way we picked berries and put them into clear containers. We are goin to make maybe grape juice out of it. We only saw one kind of  berry and that was the blueberry. We tasted it and it was very sweet. We had a hard time trying to reach the top ones because those were the good ones and it was more on top.

These are one of the blueberries that we picked

This is another container filled with berries

This is a pond with frogs but you cant really see them

We were afraid to go in there

We've impacted google maps!!!

hey everyone,

I was just google-mapping the neighborhood around our vegetable plot, and saw that the new Google Maps scan has aerial photos showing the plow lines that Doro and I made back in April:

How cool is that? I feel like we're changing the world, one small square at a time... :)

Mr. Mikulski

I'm Back!!

 Hi, everyone this is jasmine and i finally got my internet back on so I'm back. Today, we watered everything in the garden. We also had some vlunteers to come along and help us. It was this nice lady who works at the school, Ms. Thompson, with her 2 nephews : Jonathan and Jeremiah. They were great helpers. We found out that they had a garden as well.

This is the corn plant with the Aphids but you can hardly see them because they are so small.

I found out something interesting about the corn plants. We found out that there were little green bugs with black legs they were called Aphids. They suck the juices right out of the stem. But, there were three types of bugs: Ants (both little and big), Lady bugs and the Aphids. The lady bugs helped us by feeding on to the aphids so that they wouldn't suck the juice. The Ants were actually like farmers, they wait until the Aphids poop or pee and suck on it. It is actually kind of sweet to them. Even though, you cant see it but Mr. Mulkulski told us that.

These are the volunteers that came along and helped us out:Jonathan and Jeremiah

I also did something that was fun. I lawn mowered between the plants to keep the weeds from getting badder. I mowered all the rows. I thought of it as being fun to do because i never did it before.

Updating our members (nudge, Jasmine :)

Hi everyone,

Jasmine's internet has been on the fritz at home; while I'm helping her brainstorm ways to overcome this adversity, I thought I'd share some nice pics that Ms. Ebright took at the end of Harvest week #6 (July 22nd):

(click to make bigger!)

The only thing you can't see in the 'everything we picked is in plain view!" picture #2 is the green onions, which are in the orange bucket on the ground. Oh, and of course, you also don't see Ms. Ebright, who selflessly took herself out of the picture in order to snap the photos.

You may have noticed in your box the following:

- broccoli (some of it, admittedly wierd; I don't know why so few plants are making the usual singular, dense floret in the middle)
- beets
- cucumbers
- serrano peppers (little dark green ones)
- hungarian hot peppers (larger yellow ones)
- golden cherry tomatoes (like the last few weeks)
- a different kind of small tomato (golden and shaped like small eggs; more tomato-like sour than the gold cherries)
- eggplant
- green onions
- some people got some late radishes (I hope they still taste OK)

I see some kinds of other squash growing now (our patch seems to have survived the vine borers) and there are some other fruits which I won't mention here, for fear that thieves may go looking for them like they did our cucumbers!

All the best to you all this scorching week; you should get a post from Jasmine soon, or else I'm going to fire her.

Just kidding :)

Mr. Mikulski

The rains this week were a blessing!

So, Jasmine slipped a bit on her duties this week, and did not have a post for ya'll. So, I told her I'd send some pictures and give you all an update on the past couple of weeks. What we're most excited about out here is the fact that we got a bit of rain on TWO SEPARATE days this week. While they weren't the monsoon-like downpours that the roots of our lovely plants would have liked, the precipitation was at least enough to refresh them a bit.

Our 'pumpkin patch,' which is fighting off some nasty bugs right now...

Here's Jasmine cutting some vicious thorns off an eggplant fruit...

Today we harvested these goodies from our plot.... hooray!

We put down some nematodes into the pumpkin patch on Friday; in time, we'll be able to tell if they infect and kill the vine borer larvae like they are supposed to. We'll watch and see if any new plants start to wilt and display a hollow stem...

Also, the eggplants are starting to come in. This week, you'll get a 'baby' eggplant, but next week it'll be a bit bigger... and the following week, a bit bigger still :)

Other things to watch for... golden cherry tomatoes are coming in in spades, and we may have larger tomato varieties to offer in about two weeks. Also, in the next week or two, our cucumber plants (provided we ward off the dreaded cucumber beetles) will have some ample-sized fruits for us.

One box for each of our share members... with "pom d'oro"s to spare :)

Thank you all for your support throughout this endeavor -- the kids are certainly also thankful, both for the experience, and for the summer job (via their internship with me and CPS). Also, hopefully my folks can get a better idea of what our garden is looking like, with the overview pics that I'm including here:

I know it may not seem like much, mainly because we can't water like my grandma does (twice a day, for as much as the plants can drink) and also because we let the grass and weeds grow in between the rows to cut down on water being lost from the soil due to evaporation. But, if you're there in person, let me assure you that it is looking good! (our neighbor, soul legend Syl Johnson, came over today and said so himself :)

Until next time,
Mr. Mikulski