wheat

the intermediate wheatgrass is going to seed....five plants have produced seed heads so far, and there is a family resemblance between it and domesticated wheat...personally i think it looks like emmer wheat, although an argument could be made for its taking after einkorn, or rather einkorn taking after it, wheatgrass is the proposed ancestor here...according to dorian fuller both emmer and eikhorn wheat were domesticated in the fertile crescent...emmer wheat 9800-8800 Before Present (BP) and eikhorn around 9000 BP... although grains of wild emmer wheat found at ohalo II have been radiocarbon dated to 17,000 BP...intermediate wheatgrass is native to asia minor and central europe, it was introduced into the united states in 1932, so it could be part of emmer wheat's ancestry...i used a piece of paper as the background rather than the garden to show how awned the wheatgrass is...that facet was being obscured by the garden backdrop. eastern gamagrass is another possible ancestor to domesticated crops we have in the garden...mary eubanks from duke university has done extensive research into the ancestry of maize and belives that gamagrass was crossed with teosinte to produce it. gamagrass is difficult to establish because its seed dormancy is problematic...i planted thirty seeds in the garden last november and let them winter over, which is one strategy to stimulate growth...out of those thirty seeds we achieved three plants, but those three are doing well...the two largest ones have reached almost three feet in height and they are around eighteen inches in diameter at the crown. the smaller plant has been overshadowed by the advance of the jerusalem artichokes and is quite a bit smaller, but still appears to be healthy. another perennial grass, they will be a part of the garden's second season.

we've had quite a bit of rain at the end of july and beginning of august so i haven't really had to water the garden in the last week...the standing water i found there last saturday is an indication of that...there's sand under the garden about eighteen to twenty-four inches down, so it is well drained...standing water means considerable precipitation and the cowpeas weren't really happy about it...some of the younger ones began to take on a yellowish cast from overwatering in the middle of the past week...it has dried out a bit since then though and they were recovering a healthy green cast when i looked in on them yesterday afternoon...i will hold off watering for a time.

the chinese yams are producing a prolific ammount of aerial bulbs...i have collected seventy-two so far in an effort to control their numbers...they are considered an invasive species in some quarters and with this sort of reproductive rate i can see why...between them and the jerusalem artichokes it is becoming obvious that growing these perennials isn't so much the challenge as containing their efforts to colonize the entire garden...i was expecting this but expectation doesn't always communicate the scale of the issue...there will be some aggressive harvesting of jerusalem artichokes to go along with the vigilant policing of yam bulbs if i am going to retain adequate space to plant pulses next year.

finally there are signs of siginificant movement in the perennial tomatoes....they are sub-tropical and i thought there might have been a daylength issue in their refusal to budge...however they have reached a couple of feet in height and the largest of the plants has flowered so we may get some fruit yet...there are a couple of months yet for them to produce in.

this season has move by quickly and it will be time to bring in the rest of the harvest soon and begin preparing for winter...after a late crop of spinach when the weather cools.