pulses and yams

things are starting to wind down on the season...the top photo is of a cowpea flower bud that i took yesterday and which will probably open today...the second photo is of a cowpea pod that has formed form one of the flowers that i photographed earlier this week...so there will be another generation of seeds produced in the garden to create next season's green manure...that is the sort of cycle i am interested in perpetuating and a subtext to the garden's exploration of annual versus perennial staple foods...the third photo is of the yam vines starting to die back along the trellis...i retrieved a handful of aerial bulbs from that vine but this is nothing like the hundreds of bulbs these same plants produced last year...i noticed that at the nodes along the vines where bulbs formed last year, this year new vines sprouted...the plants produced far more leaves this year than last and i can only think the root system has expanded...it will have to wait for harvest for that story to be told...but i am concerned about how deep the yams will be...they were approximately eighteen inches down last year, but i am told they can be as much as three feet deep...a harvest that would require a large hole in a small garden...you can see in the bottom photo that the jerusalem artichoke blooms are diminishing...i dead-headed the spent bloom this year and so the plants produced more flowers...i am curious to see what harvest i get from the same number of plants that i had last year...the leaves on the plants are beginning to die back from the bottom up and it will soon be tome to take down the stalks...harvest will wait until mid-october as is till have work to do on the storage project in my back yard...hoping to simplify the frozen ground issue...hoping not to be a public failure...but that is how we learn...i have threshed and winnowed all the winter wheat...i am prepared for the cover crop/nitrogen reservoir phase over the winter...i am still geeked...now if only i can untangle the bureaucratic mess around the wild potato seeds i will be ready to move forward on another morphology project ( the seed potatoes are already bought and paid for...the campus garden will see spuds again next spring )...always something to do.