the trellis seems to be working fine with vines form the cowpeas running along the lower level and the yams across the top..if the yams reach the end of the trellis they will not move downward but the cowpeas will go up...here's hoping intertwining vines won't trouble one another...the northern tepehuan teosinte on campus is developing a third tier of support roots as well...almost four feet tall i had to add some support form outside to keep it from toppling over...and while we're on the topic of the zea family...some of the ears of maize are ripe and so i harvested them...looking at the husks i was reminded of hugh iltus's theroy of "catastophic sexual mutation" in which zea mays developed a husk that denied it the possibility of reproducing with out human intervention...i am inclined towards a gradualist view of evolution...even the punctuations in stephen jay gould's "punctuated equilibrium can last thousands of years...so anything "catastrophic" ( and suicidal to boot ) in terms of a mutation that evolves through natural selection does not sit well...a thin membrane that protected the seeds and was modified by , in mary eubank's words, "intense, targeted artificial selection by humans" seems more likely to me ( and for those of you who have been paying attention i just tipped my hand on where i stand in the corn war)...whatever the case the maize is done, harvested, weighed, and will be consumed...the fourth photo is of the seed alignment in the gamagrass seed head....more corn war stuff and why gamagrass is in the garden..another ancestor...finally the jerusalem artichokes are in full flower on campus and about to begin setting tubers...haven't had any since march and i will enjoy them this fall.
would those extra support roots come in handy with Birdwoman's mounded dirt? just wondering
ReplyDeletethe maize i grew on campus and at home all sprouted support roots just like the northern tepehuan teosinte ( but not to the extent the teosinte has...the maize grew one tier of support roots, the teosinte on campus and in my back yard are both working on their third set )even with support roots in evidence i had to hill the maize back to an upright position ( remember those heavy rains in early july?) twice...buffalobird-woman points out that she pulled soil up around the base of the maize hills several times over the course of the season ( that is a great book...full of information...thanks for that) so i am thinking from experience that the support roots need help, at least in more extreme situations...i'll have to drive down county line road and look at the field corn again and see if the morphology of dense yellow number two is different than sweetcorn because of some gene splicing...engineers love to change things,
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