On Thursday, Sarah Kaplan and I picked up the plants and tools at the Chicago Center for Green Technology, provided to us by Greencorps, through my involvement with the Chicago Conservation Corps. We each had a full bike trailer on the way home, with the wind at our backs. Fun!

Today we had a great turn-out, with Mr. and Mrs. Carrillo and their daughter Laura Rodriquez and Laura’s husband Rick, a neighbor from the 2400 block of Whipple, Mars (from Wicker Park, who found about the event through this website) and her mother (from Nebraska), and 5 of us from the HUB Housing Co-op, where I live.

We had 24 1-gallon pots, 3 each of 3 kinds of daylillies, 3 each of 2 kinds of hostas, 3 each of 2 kinds of bleedings hearts and 3 coralbells, and one flat of echanacia.  I was envisioning planting all of these is a fairly small area, removing the grass to do so, giving a really big impact in one dense area, or perhaps two smaller dense areas (the store is on the corner so has parkway in two places).  What actually happened was a sort-of dense area around one tree with 3 hostas and about 10 echanacias (these with no grass in-between, with 3 bleeding hearts nearby, planted in holes surrounded by grass (we didn’t take out hte grass except right where we planted), and then non-dense planting of all the rest.  Two or three trees had about 3 plants around each, with echancias to fill in, and some of the bleeding hearts ended up sort of off by themselves in the grass.

What’s really interesting about this in retrospect is that when a neighbor sees a full-on large-scale parkway garden, they may think it’s beyond their skills, experience or financial other means.  when they see two bleeding hearts in an otherwise solid stretch of 50 sq ft of grass, maybe that feels more accessible and they can do something like that themselves, without anything from me or other neighbors or the City.  That would be really cool!

Another thing about the day that was really cool was the amount of conversation that happened between neighbors.  Some of them came over to our place to see our compost and rainbarrels and talk about greenroofs and other goodness.  I really look forward to seeing these folks again, and I’m excited about the connections that were formed.

So we’re going to do another planting day in June, on Whipple, in a smaller area.  I need to check my calendar and the put in another order with Marissa.

When I moved into the HUB Housing Cooperative last spring, the composting effort immediately and drastically expanded. It went from one person and one bin to 8 people and 4 bins!

The more I tended the compost, the more I had an emotional connection to the soil we were creating. And I wanted to grow more plants specifically for the purpose of composting them! It felt to me like converting sunlight into soil.

I didn’t really fully understand the process until last night when I watched Upward Spiral by Paul Krafel. This is a 50-minute self-made film where he shows how bedrock left by glaciers is converted into soil by the process of life! This is the upward spiral. Life create soil just as it requires soil. And the more life there is, the more soil is created, thus leading to more life.

So of course the point is metaphorical about the power of each of us to help humanity move up the upward spiral, but the point I’m so excited about today is the equation in this post’s title.

air + water + sunlight = soil + oxygen

This also comes from Paul Krafel, from the very first issue of his free quarterly newsletter that’s been going for more than 10 years!

What he’s saying (crudely) is that photosynthesis takes carbon dioxide, water and energy from the sun and creates a physical solid (leaves and all plant life) and oxygen. This plant life then either drops as leaves and flowers or dies and drops as the whole thing, decays and creates soil. So far we’re just talking about compost, but here comes the cool part!

When leaves fall, they obstruct the flow of water. This obstruction causes the water to flow slower. A slower flow drops solid matter from the flow to create more soil. The more soil there is, the slower the water runs off and the more plants grow. This is the upwards spiral again!

This whole exploration, and timely email yesterday from a friend suggesting a green roof for the co-op, has me totally excited to plant vegetation on our roof and work on (at least) partial de-paving of our courtyard, to minimize run-off, thus benefiting the whole ecosystem and planet!

Can you tell I’m excited?

Added a few hours later: By the way, the idea of slowing down the water to increase interactions between particles the eventually become soil and thus leads to more vegetation sounds remarkably similar to the idea that slowing down the flow of traffic leads to more interactions between human beings and thus more life to our cities.  Ideally even bikes will feel too fast.

When I bought my compost bin a couple of years back (was it 2 or 3 years? 2, I think), I searched and searched for good information about how to actually make compost. Some municipalities had really good websites and even programs where you could get cheap compost bins. Chicago was not among them.

Until now.

The Chicago Home Composting Program kicked off with a bang today at the Garfield Park Conservatory and the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences (who know there was such a school?), where Chicago residents could get a home compost bin for only $25. Sarah and I picked up two for the Hub Housing Cooperative (rules allowed 1 per residence and we got one each) at the Conservatory.

I always knew the Conservatory was a really cool place, with lots of knowledge about growing all sorts of things. In fact, I had planned to see them about native species. But who know all the other cool programs and growing they’re doing?

They have a demonstration garden that’s a standard city lot-size 25 feet by 125 ft, I think, where they’re growing lots and lots of wonderful things to eat and some ornamental stuff as well. They have gardeners available to answer questions 12 hours per week (Tu, Th and Sat) and have tons of great programs, such as: Summer Mainteance and Planting Fall Crops, Herbal Gifts from the Garden, Troubleshooting the Organic Garden, Fall Season Extension, Seed Saving in the Garden, Cover Crops and much, much more.

And to get back to composting, the Chicago Home Composting site from the University of Illinois Extension has tons of resources on how to compost, how to build a bin, worm composting, classes and much more.

Totally awesome! Check it out.

Categories: Chicago, compost, urban, gardening, organic, native, species, housing, cooperative