Join us tomorrow (Sat. 4/13) for garden stewardship! Now that spring has truly sprung, we’re resuming our usual cadence of stewardship days: Wednesday evenings 5pm-sunset and Saturday mornings 10am-lunchtime, weather permitting. Come through to chat with neighbors, do a little work, and check out the spring ephemerals!
Here are a couple of fun links that the garden stewards have been sharing with each other:
Tomorrow (April 10) is our first Wednesday garden night of 2024. It is also election day for the Local School Council. Please vote in this important election, and afterwards come join us in the garden. As usual, from 5pm to dusk, there will be stewardship of the garden and food around the fire, but Wednesday will also see the return of the garden jam. So bring an instrument if you like and join the musicians in the garden, all skill levels welcome!
Link here for the main page for the April 2024 Waters School LSC election including additional flyers from endorsed candidates, voting info, and more.
Click here —-> add voting to your google calendar and rsvp ‘yes’.
Join us tomorrow (Sat. 4/6) from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. for garden stewardship!
Spring is here. The garden is waking, and soon our regular work days will be back. As is our tradition, we will be starting the season with fire. Prescribed burns simulate the wild fires that were part of the natural ecosystem that historically existed in the Chicago area. They were used by Native Americans to maintain open woods for safety, farming, and hunting. Now, they are an essential tool in restoration ecology. Chicago area native plants have evolved to withstand fire, some even requiring periodic fire as part of their life cycle. Many invasive plants are not fire evolved, so prescription burning is a valuable tool in keeping these invaders at bay.
This Sunday, March 24, we plan to conduct a prescribed burn in the garden, weather permitting. We will meet at 12:30 p.m. to prepare and hope to have fire on the ground around 1:30 p.m.
If you have attended a prescribed burn training or you have burned with us in the past, please join us as part of the support crew. All others are welcome to come out and watch, but please remember to keep yourself and any children a safe distance from the fire and the burn crew.
Mark your calendars! All interested gardeners and neighbors are invited to a song circle at the Waters Garden fire pit next Saturday Feb. 3 from 1:00–2:00 p.m. We’ll get together to sing around the fire—led by Megan Eberhardt, who also leads a similar monthly event at the Old Town School—and share hot chocolate. We will pass the hat, and any donations to support Megan’s work as a song leader will be appreciated.
If you’ve been to the garden on a wet day, you may have noticed that the main path from Sunnyside to the school becomes a bit of a muddy lake.
But a solution has arrived! We recently received a load of gravel, and with unseasonably warm and hopefully dry weather in the forecast for this weekend, a volunteer crew will be gathering tomorrow (Saturday 1/27) starting around 9:00am to lay it down on the path.
Join us for this rare and special January garden day – as the saying goes, many hands make light work!
Winter is rolling in, and our stewardship days will be taking a break until spring.
In the meantime, Waters gardening friends are invited to our sister-site, Riverbank Neighbors Natural Area, for:
Riverbank Neighbors Winter Solstice Gathering
Saturday, December 23, 2023
1:00 until Sundown
2556 West Berteau (Berteau and the east bank of the River)
There will be a warm fire burning, and we will share food and drinks, warm and chilled, stories, news, songs, impromptu dancing… Please join us for a moment or the duration.
Well well well, Saturday looks like it will be a nice day for Fall gardening. I plan on being there by 9:00 but I have to leave by 11:00 for a Friends of the Park event. Here are some thoughts and observations:
Bravo to parkway plantings:
I went to the school yesterday, sunny and lovely, to check out a few things. And I noted that the parkway plantings along Campbell and Maplewood look well-tended and healthy. Bravo to those of you who put time in to make them more presentable and more productive. More signage?
More sapling pruning needed:
There are still more saplings that need pruning. We did A LOT last Saturday, burned up the smaller pieces, and stored the heftier pieces for future twig fencing. Again, bravo.
Dried, bagged oak leaves useful:
We have a lot of leaves laying around. The non-oak leaves tend to rot and disappear by the end of Spring. But oak leaves can serve another purpose. If we burn the natural areas in the Spring, and there is not enough grassy fuel, we can prepare for the burn by distributing oak leaves that have been bagged and stored in the shed overwinter. It used to be a fun task for students to rake and store oak leaves, and helpful.
“Everbearing” raspberries:
We have a lot of these raspberries (I think they have been “modified” by selective cultivation). Anyway, you may have seen raspberries fruiting in late summer and early fall. By now, all that is left is the late, spent carpels of the fruit. I always heard that you should cut these canes to the ground, and they will produce a good crop next Fall. So I hope to label all our “everbearing” rasps, so that we can handle them differently. Let’s have a look on Saturday!
Regular raspberry pruning:
Some of you have heard my instructions on raspberries pruning, which I more or less stand by. But here is a really nice video about pruning in a more commercial, less chaotic setting than we host. Check it out and let’s compare notes.
What a blessing of days,
Pete
Join us on Saturday, 10:00am until noon, for garden stewardship! We’ve been grateful for a string of unseasonably pleasant Saturday morning weather throughout the fall, and there is always more to do to get the garden settled for winter. But our luck will certainly run out sooner or later, so come on by tomorrow for what could be our last workday of the season!
The final native plant to flower each year is the witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana). We have two witch hazel trees at Waters, and they can bloom as late as Christmas. Their delicate flowers have four yellow petals and four yellow sepals. Once pollinated, the seed capsule takes a year to mature. During this maturation process the seed capsule turns into a mini seed canon. As it dries out, it begins to deform, which applies pressure to the seed inside it. Eventually this force is large enough to overcome the seed’s resistance, and the seed is fired out at speeds of up to 30 mph.
The witch hazel in the south swale is host to the witch-hazel cone gall aphid (Hormaphis hamamelidis), an insect with a fascinating life cycle that includes seven distinct generations over the course of a year, three of which occur on the nearby river birch (Betula nigra) trees. One of the generations lives in a gall that forms on the leaves of the witch hazel. You can see these galls throughout the year protruding from the leaves.
The witch hazel in the south swale has been blooming for the last month or so. The witch hazel closer to the school main entrance is blooming now. Go check them out.
The “Focus On” series is written by Jeremy Atherton, the parent of a Waters 5th grader. He is a research scientist at Northwestern University Medical School. In addition to volunteering at Waters Garden, he is a steward at Riverbank Neighbors and a member of the 47th Ward Green Council.