two years

the perennial garden project marks its second birthday today...two years ago, after a summer's worth of emails about a lot of stuff including food and food production, kathy forgey and i began an exchange about the land institute and the efforts of wes jackson and company to breed grain plants that were perennial rather than annual...this led us to a discussion of the reasons behind the predominantly annual nature of staple food crops...she suggested a research garden on campus and set things in motion by acquiring the necessary permission...the actual groundbreaking wasn't until septemeber....but the germination of the idea and the beginning of the process started in august...since then we have grown six species of perennial food plants, jerusalem artichokes, potatoes, asparagus, and chinese yams...we also grew perennial species of spinach and tomatoes as die-back annuals because we are well north of the range of winter survivability for those plants...we also grew the prennial strain of teosinte, zea diploperennis, as a morphological comparison with maize and the perennial eastern gamagrass...also a maize ancestor...nine annual species were grown...seven for a comparison of productivity with perennials...winter wheat, spring wheat, arrugula, beets, turnips, rutabagas ( in progress)and maize...we grew the annual northern tepehuan teosinte as a morphological comparison with maize and cowpeas are in the garden as a "green manure" fixing nitrogen in the soil rather than being grown as a food crop even though they are edible...winter wheat will serve double duty as a productivity comparison and a winter cover crop to act as a binding agent for the soil to reduce winter erosion and to act as a reservior for the nitrogen the cowpeas are fixing that would be lost to leeching if we didn't save it....an innocent series of emails has led to two solid years of gardening and research and there is more to come...i have broached the subject of a second independent study paper with dr. stokely ( aka "coach" [she's my academic advisor in anthro...at least to the extent that i am advisable] and "captain" for her captaincy of the kiva lending team she established ) so there is at least another year of work to do...now if the usda would only do some work and approve my import permit for wild potato seeds from peru i could get down to some serious research and planning...papers don't write themselves...still a lot to do.