Cross-posted from LetsGoChicago.org

With the end of the summer coming into view, our seedlings are long gone and the harvest is nearly here. The garden is full of life, and this week we’ll be completing this summer’s planned gardens. We’re currently tearing up the grass on a front lawn on the 6700 block of Ashland, so if anybody has seen the construction, yep, that’s us.

Biodiversity is crucial to a healthy garden, and we’re happy to see all manner of bugs and beetles all over the place, fighting it out to make sure nobody gets to sit around and eat the produce. We haven’t yet figured out how to keep yellow finches off of the rainbow chard, and we certainly didn’t expect to find this:

At least three baby bunnies have been sighted in our ‘home base’ Bosworth backyard garden, and they’re almost too cute to consider them a pest.

We’re also learning how to put new things together outside of the garden, and in the last couple of weeks we’ve built sub-irrigated planters, swales, cold frames, A-frame levels, worm compost set-ups, and reclaimed lumber raised beds. We’ve learned how to save seeds, mulch with weeds, and dumpster dive both food and materials. Maybe the most spectacular, though, was last week’s paper-making workshop:

This week we’re learning about bee keeping, so stick around for the inside scoop!
Ben