reseeding

It’s been a busy three weeks or so since the fire and as one issue after another has cropped up…i have begun to look at the impact this has had on the garden project and while it isn’t all that grim ( almost everything that was lost can be replaced ) it’s still a bit like starting over ( except there’s three years’ worth of plants in the ground…like I said, not all that grim )… pretty much all the seeds I had were lost…but there were a few ears of hopi blue maize in my truck…so when I order more seeds in the spring i can still compare the “bought” seed’s production with those of a second generation…i also had a quart freezer bag of eastern gamagrass seeds i had collected over the course of the season so I will be strewing them all over next month…and today’s mail brought a quarter pound of northern tepehuam teosinte seeds i ordered from native seed search ( these too will be spread around, although i doubt there will be room for the whole package in the space i have available…i am sure i could be talked into parting with some if anyone local is interested [ some budding ethnobotanist among your students. coach ?] perhaps even some sort of a swap )whatever the case i will be growing far more individuals next season…I have some more jerusalem artichokes on the way to make a comparison of yields to see if this seasons paltry harvest was a function of the weather or a loss of viability because of the small number of individuals i had…on the other hand my potato storage experiment with the harvest form the government spuds i got from sturgeon’s bay was completely wiped out…so were all my zea diploperennis and zea perennis seeds…time to fill out another gremplasm request at the usda website…on the whole i haven’t much to complain of…the most important stuff for next season was saved by design, serendipitous circumstances, or diabolical luck because it was already in the ground. going back tot he last post...the noaa has posted the palmer drought indices for september 2012 and all three indices have us back in a "moderate" drought...it is simply a lot drier than normal around here since about march ( even so it did rain a bit last night...not enough to break a drought though ) doubtlessly this has had an impact on everyone's yields...from the pgp and iuncg to farmer brown's industrial field... food prices are up now...look for them to rise more as the harvest number come in.