backyard

the weather here has been changable from the nineties to the forties...dry...wet...windy...name it...most of the plants are taking it in stride...the teosinte seems a bit confused by it all but that could just be that the beds in the back yard are a bit more shady than the campus garden which has full sun all day...and that the ones out back were only planted after the ones on campus came up so aren't quite as well established yet...they will, i think, be fine...the top photo is of a bed of mostly perennials...the three elephant garlic plants are flanked by winter wheat...if you look between the two front garlic plants you can just see a volunteer potato...those are jerusalem artichokes at the back...i have been contemplating being a courteous neighbor and installing some rhizome barriers at the back of that bed and in a few other places to prevent the sunchokes from colonizing my meighbor's yard...i'm looking for 1/4" sheets of uhmw palstic but have only found it on line...menards perhas...the second photo is of winter wheat in a half barrel...doing every bit as well as the campus wheat and i have a larger population here spread out all over...perhaps rutabagas in the half barrel after the wheat is done...spring wheat is in the middle photo, in a bed that is mostly grasses...gamagrass, teosinte, wheat, and an overflow tomato plant...the potaoes are doing just fine and it will be time to hill them this weekend...that will be fairly simple...i have some rotten straw from last winter's campus mulch...that and some compost will do just fine...if they keep this pace of growth up i will be hilling thwm again in june...adding more organic matter to the bed won't hurt...they will be done in july and then i think it will be cowpeas as a green manure and then winter wheat as a cover crop for winter to keep the nitrogen in the bed...i will need to rotate something else through that bed for the next two years until the potatoes return...something to ponder in the off season...my inclination is toward permaculture, but a three bed rotation for poatates dictates some annuals too...that's okay, most ecosystems feature a mix of annuals and perennials...it's a matter of choosing carefully among compatable plants...the bottom photo is one of twenty-one thriving jerusalem artichoke plants out there...i look forward to a harvest of thousands of tubers and i have been thinking furiously about storage..plundering the internet for articles by gardeners and anthropologists and anyone else that might spark ( or provide) some ideas...a root cellar is impracticasl so some sort of storage conatiners filled with soil and stored above ground outside to be brought in and thawed before use is where i am leaning...we'll see if anything else comes up that's better as the reasearch moves along...it's a process and there's time to let it develop...but not that much.