Green Youth Farm

This week, we went for the first time ever to Green Youth Farm.  It was worth the drive in the heat.

To give you an idea, Green Youth Farm is located in Greenbelt Forest Preserve off Green Bay Road in North Chicago.  It's a Chicago Botanic Garden project, which really got me interested.  Have you seen my post about Cabbage and Violets, just for a tiny sample of what the CBG has to offer to gardeners?

At Green Youth Farm, local teenagers from the area learn job and life skills while also learning about and working on a one-acre organic farm.  They work part time together with staff and learn about composting, natural pest deterrent options instead of conventional pesticides, and a ton of other great things. 

 The kids and I caught up to a local library group also strolling through the farm grounds and listened to a staff member explain the different plants and answer questions.  The workers, in the meantime, were all around taking care of plants and learning about different plants and methods of farming.

This familiar looking weed is purslane.  No, they don't sell garden weeds there.  But you can actually eat it!  And it's loaded with nutrients.  Purslane is another example of the Colombian Exchange, a weed commonly eaten in Europe that came over accidentally with white settlers just like dandelions did.

You can see purslane growing between these onions...

Check out this idea with tomato plants, basil and marigolds along the bottom outside edge of the row to deter pests and help the tomato plants.  Brilliant!  I plan on doing this next year in my garden.

This is what cilantro looks like when it "seeds".  The seeds become one of my favorite spices... Coriander!


Produce is sold every Wednesday and Saturday, from 9 a.m. – 1 p.m., starting July 9 through October 8.  The best part?  It supports their efforts and keeps the program going.

When we had arrived, I assumed I would give the kids each a dollar to buy some produce with. 

I left with a half-bushel of organic produce.  The cost was a mere $15 and we also received a $10 coupon for our next visit as well as a recipe for a "Green Smoothie".  By my estimates, the produce would have cost me somewhere around double at the grocery store for organic produce, if I could even get it all in it's organic form.

I actually spoke to two of the teenage workers who kindly offered to carry my produce and watermelon to the car while I walked with my kids. In their words, this was their first year each and they loved it. They each said "I've learned so much."

I chatted with Chicago Botanic Garden yesterday and loved this...

 @PolPrairieMama Yes, the idea is to sell fresh organic produce at an affordable price for people living in food deserts.

— ChicagoBotanicGarden (@chicagobotanic) July 25, 2012

 These are blackberries getting ready to be picked in a couple of weeks.

Some grapes growing on an arbor.

The kids and I were curious as to what this flowering vine could be.  Any ideas?

A better photo of the vine...





I'd love if you would vote for Chicago Botanic Garden to receive a $25,000 grant from Plante Moran. 


What they plan to do with the grant funds:

Chicago Botanic Garden - To promote the enjoyment, understanding, and conservation of plants and the natural world.

With a $25,000 award, the Garden can purchase a cargo van to deliver fresh, affordable or donated produce to communities in need as well as local businesses that support program growth and development.





Green Youth Farm was exactly what I had been looking for:

• Serves the community
• Organic produce
• Actually affordable (I've been wanting to join a CSA but it was always out of our budget, this works even better for us!)
• Informative and helpful staff

I hope you go and check out Green Youth Farm.  This will now be on our weekly list of things to do.

Na razie...



Disclaimer:  I was not in any way compensated for writing this post or talking about or even visiting Green Youth Farm.  We went because we were curious and ended up loving it, enough to write about it.

The Polish House on the Street-Part One

There is a phrase my parents once told me and which I have found to be true more times than not.

 

You can always spot the Polish house on the street.  Theirs has the yard that is loaded with flowers, birds, bees and Nature.

It's not an exaggeration.

I lived in several places before coming to the Midwest.  But, everywhere we lived, we had some sort of plants growing.

When we lived in our house outside of Baltimore, which was the place I lived the longest in my entire life, our yard was that yard.  The Polish yard.

 

When we moved to that unimpressive, average house, the yard was empty.  There was a green lawn which was regularly mowed, peonies, and a couple of rose bushes.  That was all.  The sun beat down on our shoulders and neighbors could see anything and everything we did.  The yard was boring and nothing to look out the window at from inside.

That was soon to change. 

We came to that house already armed with an inherited green thumb and a few plants.  We had a tangerine tree which we had tenderly grown from seeds inside a tangerine snack years before, a palm tree and ivy plants which had been cuttings from friends plants.


The green thumb that runs in my family is full of a long beautiful history.  To sum it up, we came from a country with gardens like this one everywhere you looked, whether in busy, crowded cities or tiny, quiet villages.

Photo credit: 

Ogród botaniczny w Poznaniu

Botanical garden, Poznan, Poland.
More about Poland: www.poland.gov.pl

Fot. Mariusz Cieszewski

My parents poured over gardening catalogues, signing out books from the local library, writing notes, and stayed up late talking about what the yard lacked, where things should be planted, how it would affect the use of the yard.  And my brother and I went along doing our own thing, school work, trying to fit in-but listening.

 

I remember my mother and father going outside with a shovel, digging down into a couple of spots and holding clumps of dirt.  The neighbors probably thought we were crazy. 


What was that Polish family doing, just digging a couple of holes in the dirt without any plants to put in, just holding the dirt and talking in Polish while looking at it?

It turned out my parents knew what they were doing.  The ground was clay, unaccommodating to plants, a mess.  Bags and bags of peat moss were bought, lines for beds were drawn, shovels and spades were put to use, a wheelbarrow was my mother's best friend for a while as she worked under the hot sun mixing the soil with the peat moss.  The neighbors whispered because my mother was outside in shorts, tank tops and sandals, and she was thin, therefore up to no good.

At first, the neighbors assumed we were going to put in one or two neat little manicured flower beds that really did nothing for the yard.  They were wrong.

We planted a lilac bush for the fragrant smell, evergreen bushes that flower in front of our large window so that we could finally have privacy from their gossiping and staring eyes, a grape vine for shade and fruit so that we could sit out in the yard and not be burned by the sun. 

We planted a tree that reminded my mother and father of Poland and their childhoods-Brzoza or Birch tree.

We found wild strawberries and violets growing in a tiny patch of the lawn, every time mowed over and kept tiny.  My mother gently dug them out, found homes for them in our new flower beds and cared for them.  They took off, celebrating their new homes and gracing us with delicate blossoms and tiny berries.

 

My parents ordered bushes from a catalogue.  When the boxes came in, they were bare sticks.  My Tato went around the yard, following the line of the fence, sticking them into the ground and tying them to wood so that they would stay up.

My neighbors couldn't understand what we were up to.  They joked that the sticks were grave markers. 

 

They called "Hey, Polacks, why are you planting sticks in your yard?  That's not how you grow bushes!  Are you trying to grow more sticks?" 

My Tato smiled with what could have been a tint of darkness behind his mustache and quiet Polish accent and said something that I will always remember with gardening...

"Just wait." 

Now, our neighbors curse those leafed behemoths, because they "cut off the view across the street" (I was a teen at the time and I'm sure my parents partly planted those trees to give privacy to our yard so that grown men would not be able to stare at me throughout the day).

The yard grew and grew, plants sprang up everywhere, the sun stopped being our enemy and we played outdoors in the hottest of days under the shade of my parent's green thumb.  The wind didn't bear down on us in the winter, our gas and electric bills dropped substantially.

 

My Tato planted sunflowers that seemed to tower over our house.

 

Birds which previously had hardly anywhere to live in our neat little suburban neighborhood had nests in nearly every tree and bush.  A catbird moved in to the bush next to the fence and would sing all night long.  He would follow my children around that yard all the time when it was their turn to run in the shade of the trees.

  

Blue jays lived in one tree, harmoniously with countless robins, sparrows, squirrels, and others.  A chipmunk family and rabbit family moved in under our new shed.  Hummingbirds flitted across our yard and butterflies kissed our butterfly bush all day long.  My parents grew local wildflowers and flowers from Europe in flowerbeds spilling their color and fragrance throughout the street.

In the winter, the animals stayed.  We fed the birds and little tiny brown birds hid in the evergreen bushes outside our window, away from snow and freezing rain, and we would peek at them behind gauze curtains.

  

We grew blueberries, gooseberries, raspberries and blackberries and would daily go outside to see how much we could eat before the birds got the rest.  We always left them some on the bushes, since they were our neighbors now.

This was the Polish house on the block. 

When we gave directions to people, we would say, you will not be able to see the house, just a fenced yard filled with green.  That's us.  When people would come over after that first time, they would always agree that it was the perfect description to our yard.

I loved that yard.

My neighbors hated it, they hated the few leaves they would get in their yard once a year, they hated not being able to see into our yard, they hated the birds.  They tried to force the local Home Owners Association to get us to chop them down, they called the County to try to force us to cut it all down.  All we needed was some beautiful well manicured lawn and a couple of neat little flower beds, that's all.  The HOA and County told the neighbors to get a life and that nothing we did was wrong, that we were beautifying the neighborhood and preserving wildlife.

Our yard was full of life.

This is what I grew up with.  This is what I want to pass to my children-the love of growing and working with Nature.

Na razie...

Related Posts:

Fasolka po Bretonsku with Piekny Jas and Memories

Weeping Willows and A Rusalka

Word(y) Wednesday: Garden Inspiration, Cabbage and Violets

Word(y) Wednesday: Garden Inspiration, Cabbage and Violets

Kapusta i Fiołek Ogrodowy

Kapusta
(pronounced Kah-poo-stah)

Cabbage

Fiołek Ogrodowy
(pronounced feeoh-wehk Ohgrood-ohvih)

Viola
The literal translation is Violet of the Garden or Garden Violet.


Fiołek
(pronounced Feeoh-wehk)

Violet


Bratek
(pronounced Brah-tehk)

Pansy
The word loosely hints to the fact that the Pansy is the brother or friend of the violet.  Or that the Bratek is the brat (brother) of the Fiołek.

Violas are related to violets and pansies.  Violas tend to last better through the winter, so some gardeners prefer to use them.  You can use any of these plants interspersed and bordering your cabbage, lettuce, and other plants to protect them from garden pests.

Violet, Viola and Pansy petals and leaves can be eaten: 

• As part of a beautiful salad or dish garnish
• Crystallized on a dessert
• Make a jelly from them
• Use to delicately flavor a cake or icing
• Make a very traditional Torun dish called violet soup which is not common in modern cuisine
• Even the leaves can be cooked like spinach.

I must stress, however, that if you decide to eat the flowers and leaves, do not eat them if they have been sprayed with pesticides.

These photos come from our last trip to the Chicago Botanic Garden's Vegetable Gardens.

I hope this inspires you to garden and to think about non-traditional ways to grow your own food.

Watch for the next few Wordless (Wordy) Wednesday posts for gardening ideas and to see what we are growing in our own personal garden. 

The majority of my seeds come from Dom itp. Some seeds they offer are sunflowers, pickling cucumbers, Polish wild strawberries, several different flowers including violets and garden violas, parsley roots (I highly recommend trying this in some of your recipes), and many other varieties.  Their prices are comparable to going to your local chain or gardening store.  It's like having a piece of Poland in your backyard.

Disclaimer: The links and banner for Dom itp are part of an affiliate program. While the company does not pay for me to post their links and banner, I do receive a portion of all sales made using the links and banner in compensation. If you do purchase something from them this way, I sincerely thank you.

Na razie...

Related Posts:

Word(y) Wednesday: Our Polish American Garden

Word(y) Wednesday: Chicago Botanic Garden

Word(y) Wednesday:  Piękny Jaś

Wordless Wednesday: Our Polish American Garden

The children and I started a garden...

Rzeżucha (Garden Cress) one day old indoors...

The same Rzeżucha three days old...

Another planting of Rzeżucha over a week old planted outdoors...

Baby Beets...

Baby carrots...

A garden friend hiding from falling raindrops...

Pumpkin...

Radishes planted around the pumpkin patch to keep out uninvited bugs naturally...

Sweet Peas...

Brussel Sprouts...
(Oops, turns out these were planted next to the Brussel Sprouts, which never came up.  These are another variety of pea)

Maki (Poppies) to bring bees and other pollinators to the garden...

Baby cabbage (Kapusta) I need to transplant...

Our Piękny Jas (5 growing total in this bed alone)...

The little red bird we rescued a few days ago after it was hit by a car while flying.  After a few hours of rest, he flew to his tree where his mate greeted him and they returned to their nest together...

Our home made Worm Farm in the shed...

We also planted other plants, such as Alpine Violets, wild Polish strawberries, curly parsley, Polish Dill, red and white carnations, and several other flowers and fruits and vegetables.  We are waiting one more week to plant cucumbers, heirloom and Malinkowy Tomatoes, and a few others.

What are you growing?



Watch for the next few Wordless (Wordy) Wednesday posts to see what else we are growing and how you can grow it as well.

The majority of my seeds come from Dom itp. Some seeds they offer are sunflowers, pickling cucumbers, Polish wild strawberries, several different flowers, parsley roots (I highly recommend trying this in some of your recipes), and many other varieties.  Their prices are comparable to going to your local chain or gardening store.  It's like having a piece of Poland in your backyard.

Na razie...



Disclaimer: The links and banner for Dom itp are part of an affiliate program. While the company does not pay for me to post their links and banner, I do receive a portion of all sales made using the links and banner in compensation. If you do purchase something from them this way, I sincerely thank you.