intermediate wheat grass hybrids

the land institute in kansas has been working on breeding perennial grain by crossing annual wheat with the perennial intermediate wheat grass ( not the only breeding project they are involved in...but the one that hold the most interest for me )...dr. lee dehaan, the plant geneticist there, has sent me a dozen plants from three different hybrid strains to work with and i have utilized just about half of the garden's square footage to accommodate nine of the twelve plants on campus ( the other three...one form each strain, are in my back yard...both because of space constraints and as a sort of control/redundancy to backthe campus plants up in case of trouble ) i took the tools of the trade out there this morning...uprooted some of the annuals ( specifically cowpeas and the spent hopi blue maize ) and turned in one hundred and twenty pounds of compost both to enrich the organic matter and to aerate and loosen the soil for the plants' roots...i planted them to a depth that left the peat pots they arrived ( after i removed them from the plastic tray ) about an inch below the surface...i watered them well...dr. dehaan tells me that if there isn't a hard freeze for two or three weeks ( and the long-term forecast indicate there shouldn't be ) they should not need to be mulched...i am considering mulching some of them , but not others...once again as a hedge against possible disaster and as a sort of control...i will be mulching perennials late anyway and it won't be any stretch to mulch the hybrids either...i am geeked about this project and its overall ptential to reconfigure the way we do agriculture...making it more resilient and environmentally friendlier than the industrial system i rant about so much...there will be lots of posts about this...just because i am who i am mostly, but there's an off chance that some of the folks who read this blog ( a modest but dedicated group of readers and members...thanks for that ) could find it interesting as well...the other projects in the garden ( like plant morphology and its relationship to folk taxonomies ) will go on...this jsut spices it up a bit