First off, let me thank you all for being a part of our community-building, food-growing, space-and-time sharing enterprise LAST year (2020). It was a weird year that definitely now has a younger, square-peglike sibling... but you worked together with us to make the veggie, eggs and baking share from CCC possible. You rock! I think that was our fifth year so far, since starting in vacant urban lots in Chicago several years ago, that we had people sign on to help us grow food for ourselves and them by sharing in the tools, consumables and work-time expense.
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| Our veggie plot rolodex. Recently updated, with new 2021 contacts ;) |
This year our cooperative is welcoming several new members, and also having one (maybe more; I haven't heard back from everyone I emailed several months ago) depart. I have tried to leave everyone I have NOT definitely heard a 'no, thanks' from on the distro list for the blog, but the peeps that have followed up with my email offers + payment instructions so far this year are the following: Jane Anne, Jessica, Marcel, Calder, and Kimberly. If you haven't paid yet and want to, please confirm your intent NOW with an affirmative email and either a check in the mail or a PayPal plop =)
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| Those rows don't tidy back up themselves, you know... |
A few weeks ago we started our first batch of seedlings for the garden, and are about to move them outside to make room for another round... cross your fingers and/or pray for us that we manage to keep the frost off each successful eviction from our warm and artificially lit basement-bunker seed-starting room!
The most tedious work in the garden (absent weeding and trying to fight off pests, which is a unique blow-by-blow delight reserved for mid-summer =/) is nigh... we are hand-amending the rows with lime and topsoil presently, and will follow that with newspaper mulching (once you get to know clay, you know how much of a d@&n baby it can be about drying out) as well as traditional mulching with double-ground wood chips. These are the days when gym memberships seem a pretty dumb re-engineering of otherwise natural processes, for sure!
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| What's missing? Well, mulch, more mulch, weed fabric, drip hoses, protective fencing, eh... (I'm getting faint just thinking about how far we've still got, before even we start 'greening' the dag-gum thing) =P |
A week or so ago we managed to plant potatoes and new onions, and are waiting to see them sprout as the first intentional greenings at the plot. Next on the list will be some experimental direct seeding with some more 'expendable' early spring crops (meaning, ones I found for a GREAT deal at AgCare on Smokey Park Hwy). And then, there is plenty of non-share-related homesteading work staring me squarely in the eye.... namely, getting the various fruit trees in our little orchard properly weeded and mulched. And then, on the horizon, transplanting the seedlings into bigger pots. And then...
...well, let me cut this short for now, and just say that things are fully into 'beginning' again on our grounds... and it feels not only good, but proper.
- Farmer(-ish) Matt and the Gang
