What can 990 square feet of Chicago soil grow?
22 feet by 45, behind a two-flat in Pilsen. Nine seasons, no fertilizer, no pesticides.
- PLOT
- 22 × 45 FT
- SEASONS
- 2017—2025
- INPUTS
- COFFEE · EGGSHELLS
A ledger of the year, fourteen lines long.
CLEAN → STORE
ONE CYCLE, 9 TIMES
- 01CleanLast year's stalks pulled. Bare ground, first.
- 02TillFork in twelve inches. Coffee grounds and eggshells — nothing else.
- 03RestTwo weeks. The soil settles on its own schedule.
- 04RidgeBeds raised every May so spring rain runs off, not in.
- 05PlantSeed and transplant, one ridge at a time.
- 06GrowSix weeks where the work is mostly watching.
- 07TendWater, stake, thin, pull. Every other evening.
- 08HarvestThe ground gives something back.
- 09ArrangeCarried in and laid out on the table. Deliberately.
- 10WeighScale, and sometimes a photograph of the reading.
- 11PhotographOne frame from above. Same table, nine seasons.
- 12TableDinner, the same night.
- 13ShareNeighbors, family, whoever was on the block.
- 14StoreFrozen, pickled, dried — the season pushed into winter.
Chicago springs are wet, and flat ground holds that water. Sitting in it, roots rot. So every May the plot was shaped into raised ridges running its length, and the rain ran down the furrows between them instead of pooling around the plants.
Nine seasons grown.
Four seasons documented.
- NONE
- 1—2
- DOCUMENTED
- RICH
Density shows how much was photographed, not how much was grown. The early seasons were grown just as fully — they simply weren't documented.
2017: he didn't think to take pictures. 2025: he took 867.
The earliest photographs that survive, beside the last Pilsen season.
2017 was farmed as fully as any year that followed. Not one frame of it exists, so the comparison starts where the record does.
28 PHOTOGRAPHS THAT SEASON
Rough, uneven, and all that is left. Every one of these is kept regardless of how it looks.
867 PHOTOGRAPHS THAT SEASON
Every harvest week recorded end to end, on the same ground, at the same table.
The scale was part of the ritual from the start — carried in, arranged, weighed, photographed. But the number was never written down. It was read, said out loud, and forgotten. What survives is whatever the camera happened to catch in the frame.
No weekly record was kept. This is Chandra's recollection of the biggest August and September weeks — the whole harvest, every vegetable together — not a measurement.
- 2023-07-20WEEK 29
WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2023-08-02WEEK 31WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2023-08-17WEEK 33WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2023-08-27WEEK 34WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2023-10-08WEEK 40WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2024-07-25WEEK 30WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2024-08-11WEEK 32WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2024-08-25WEEK 34WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2024-09-12WEEK 37WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2024-10-05WEEK 40WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2025-07-19WEEK 29WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
- 2025-08-16WEEK 33
WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2025-08-31WEEK 35WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2025-09-20WEEK 38WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
2025-10-18WEEK 42WEIGHT NOT RECORDED
168 photographs caught the scale in frame, 15 of them shown here. None of the readings have been transcribed yet, so none is shown as a measurement. The scale is a 22 lb kitchen dial — it weighed single items and single trays, never a whole week at once.
Roughly sixteen hours with a screen. One with the soil.
I lead engineering teams, so most of my day is spent with a laptop open — call it sixteen hours. The evening hour on the plot is the one that runs on daylight instead. Water, stake, thin, pull: tasks small enough to finish, and by dusk the whole thing is done and holdable. It is the fastest reset I have found.
And there is the plain delight of it — you tend a ridge for six weeks and one evening it hands you a tray of tomatoes you started from seed. Nine seasons in, that still lands.
- TILL
- FAMILY
- PLANT
- FAMILY
- TEND
- FAMILY, WHEN I TRAVEL
- HARVEST
- ME
- ARRANGE · WEIGH
- ME
- PHOTOGRAPH
- ME
Work travel is why the beds still went in. Two people forking a ridge in May is also just a good evening.
Every week: carried in, laid out, weighed, photographed.
357 ARRANGEMENTS PUBLISHED
The photographs went out the same evening they were taken.
What came back was the surprise — people who had never grown anything asked what to plant, then sent back their own first tomatoes.
JOIN THE INITIATIVE →The cycle doesn't end at the photograph.
Two of the fourteen steps happen after the table: the food went to neighbors and family, and what was left went into the winter. 990 square feet fed more than one household — and it did it without a bag of fertilizer.
WHERE THE FOOD WENT →