now i need more research...

...to make sense of the data...when the university of missouri said that harvesting eastern gamagrass seeds reqired "careful timing" and that it was 'difficult" i believed them and experience is just reinforcing the belief...the top photo is what's left of a shattered seed head...just some concavities in a proaxe...the second photo is some seeds i did collect but there must have been at least a half dozen shattered seed heads i missed over the last two days...i don't think i can get to campus every day but it seems as if more trips are in oreder if the burgeoning seed production ( that's 140+ proaxes in the third photo ) isn't going to lead to a colony of gamagrass that will be nothing but a headache all the way around...the hopi blue in the fourth photo has righted itself form all the wind and is definitely thickening at the base...the tiller ( branch ?) continues to grow and there are signs of a third one...if this keeps up i will be utterly geeked at the teosinte/maize/ancestor/domesticate morphological similarities...this will just bee too cool if it comes out like the photos in will and hyde"s book ( thanks again coach! all sorts o good stuff in there!)...the eleventh of july and i am already dead heading jerusalem artichokes...did in half a dozen spent blooms this evening and i still have no concrete explanation of their accelerated behavior beyond "warm spring"...given the nature of the weather last march that's a bit of understatement...the question is why was last march so anomalously warm? and what are the long term effects/ the rain last month pulled the long and short term palmer drought indices for northwest indiana into line as "severe drought"...is that an effect? is the sunchokes behavior a symptom? more research and more seasons of observation before any sort of answer can be relied upon...a project for my retirement and dotage.