dna is relentless in its drive to replicate itself and the plants in the garden are chock full of it...the evidence is all over...photos one and five are what really have me geeked today...the northern tepehuan teosinte in my backyard has flowered...cool beans! now, is teosinte self-pollinating? i don't know just yet...if it is we may just have some seeds here...if not there's hope the largest one on campus could flower and they could pollinate one another...if that doesn't happen then at least i know it can have a long enough season here to flower and i may be able to produce seeds of my own next year ( i already have seeds from native seed search for next season)..a killing frost is still along way off...several months at least...hopefully enough time for seeds to form... whatever happens i know more than i did in march and that's why i'm here...the second photo is of three more gamagrass seed heads that the second clump has produced...all on the same stalk...the whole seed head in the fourth photo ( which was taken four days ago ) has shattered and those are the seeds i recovered from the ground in my hand in photo three...more viable seed to plant this autumn to make an attempt to establish gamagrass in my yard...all agriculture is the distortion of natural plant behaviors into an anthropogenic system that benefits humans...tinkering with dna...i've been growing "wild and weedy" ancestors of domesticates to get a better grasp of plant morphology and the traits early agriculturalists would have found desirable or useful...it would be nice to have the same success with teosinte we had with wheat and wheat grass.
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