more seeds

"...essentially all of nature's land-based ecosystems feature perennials. this has to do with the fact that only twenty-some elements represented in on the periodic chart in our science classrooms go into all of earth's organisms. and importantly only four of these building-blocks circulate freely in the atmospheric commons. the rest are in the soil, and they are all water soluble. managing these elements and water is accomplished by a diversity of roots beneath the surface. this management scheme occurs in millimeters and minutes ...the elegant micromanagement of these essential elements has eluded farmers who work with annual monocultures. annual monocultures on the landscape are not there year round...in such a manner we built an agriculture that was at once simple and simplifying, disrupting countless subtle, ancient processes that had been reliable over millions of years."
from "Consulting the Genius of the Place: An ecological Approach to a New Agriculture" by wes jackson p 148-49.



and so we dump petroleum based fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide on farm fields to make up for the simplification of the ecology...and i'm not convinced annual cereals are more productive...extrapolate the eight-hundred odd jerusalem artichoke tubers i harvested form around five square meters last autumn out to a hectare and see what sort of number you get ( i did the math...so can you)...there are drawbacks to no-till planting of annuals like dense yellow number two field corn because of thing lie soil compaction ( corn likes loose soil...that's why farmer brown discs his fields so thoroughly) and moisture retention in the build-up of organic matter on the soil surface ( litter as the national corn growers would call it) that creates difficulties in germinating for the hybrid and genetically modified corn varieties ( the reason why planting was running so far behind here and around the country because of the cold,wet spring) the obvious answer would be perennial grains, right? and that's the connection between the photo of wheat seed heads on either side of intermediate wheat grass ( winter wheat on the left, spring wheat on the right, wheat grass in the middle...same with the seeds in the first photo)...the family resemblance is the result of wheat grass's ancestral place in wheat's linage...the wheat grass is perennial and the wheat strains are annuals...the folks at the land institute

http://www.landinstitute.org/

have been diligently working on creating perennial wheat by cross-breeding wheat grass with annual wheat...a reversal of the process of annualization during domestication aimed at a more ecologically healthy agriculture based more on perennials and less on petrochemicals...there are serious efforts afoot to cross bred perennial maize as well...this sort of thinking and an interest in permaculture are what got the perennial garden project started...i suspect we won't be making any sort of measurable contribution to the process of changing the basis of the way we produce food...but i certainly am learning a lot.