red nordlands

the potato plant that was broken last week definitely withered up so i dug into the hill to see if there was anything in the way of a tuber in there...after i got down about nine inches i hit what i first thought was a stone or a clod of earth...turned out to be the first of three small but complete red nordalnds...so elephant garlic and potatoes are at least two successes...taking a close look at the rest of the potato plants i can see they're beginning to yellow...they were supposed to be done this month and are on schedule, so i will be taking my root and tuber fork out to campus over the coming week to search for more spuds...the large elephant garlic is also starting to yellow, signaling it season is almost finished as well...i imagine i will be putting that yam vine on the trellis where it belongs, and speaking of yams, the plant on the south side of the row which has grown up and across the trellis is putting out new vines...it must be doing well in its evnvironment which has me wondering what we will find at harvest time this autumn...as more plants are harvested i will be planting more cowpeas to help prepare the garden for next season...things are moving along.

the other day i was commenting on the way the garden stands in opposition to industrial food philosophically, and i used some photos of cornfields down county line road as an illustration...something unidentified struck me as different about the fields that day and it took me until i was riding by those crops on the way back from the bookstore today to figure it out...there aren'r any soybeans out there this year...there was corn, but no beans...just some weedy fields interspersed with the corn...fallow perhaps, i thought...but that isn't an extractive viewpoint...you have to use everything...when i stopped to take those photos i saw a sign for a hybird type of alfalfa across the road and it took until today to click...the farmers are putting in a late planting of alfalfa in those empty fields...seems there is a stong market for silage for dairy cows this year...bigger herds? more severe winter forecast? i'm not sure, but the futures for alfalfa are much stronger than those for soybeans, so...alfalfa. farming's a hard dollar...whatever works.