Wednesday, July 4, 2012

just a little heat wave

temperatures are forecast to be 100+ degrees fahrenheit here today so i went out to campus to soak the plants since i won't be able to do it again until tomorrow evening and i had the time and inclination to go...the reproductive cycle is still booming out there...all kinds of dna replication going on...the top photo is a terminal spear of one of the seventy odd proaxes the eastern gamagrass has produced...the flowers are dying back and the green seeds will look like little chunks of wood soon enough...the seed won't be mature and viable until it turns brown and dries...the problem is that once it does that the seed heads shatter so readily that collecting the seed becomes a matter of timing and i am bound to miss some ( actually a lot most likely ) and so the gamagrass will be spreading unless i yank it up by the roots in the spring...the second photo is of some chinese yam blossoms out on the rope of vines the plants produced this year...this will mean a robust production of aerial bulbs...and my failure to collect all of them is equally assured...so more yam plants next spring as well...although they may be difficult to see in the third photo the asparagus "ferns" are a veritable sea of asparagus berries ( my supplier said they had sent me all male plants because they produce more spears...so much for their ability to sex an asparagus crown ) so the asparagus beds may see new growth as well...all of this is going on earlier than last year by about a month ( the jerusalem artichokes are blooming away as well and that has me wondering what [if any] impact that will have on this year's harvest...more on that in september )...so there has to be at least one more season just to see if this is anomalous because of the warm spring we had or if there is some long-term change in the climate, and so, the behavior of the plants...i have two natives in the garden...gamagrass and jerusalem artichokes and both are behaving markedly different than they did in the garden's previous two seasons...i will be watching them and looking or more native food or forage plants to introduce...the last two photo shift to my back yard where a squash plant has found a sunflower to vine on...in the closer shot you can see where a tendril has attached the two plants...cool...what i put them there for...more on the garden's progress and the climate it lives in as it becomes manifest.

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