zea diploperennis

i didn't make it over to the pgp after i planted the sunchokes in the community garden yesterday so it was my first stop on the reconnaissance trip i made this morning ( among other things, to check on those tubers to make sure nothing was monkeying around with them...raccoons have taken a sudden interest in my beds out back...i am less than pleased )...i wanted to have a look at the flowers that i had found emerging from the newer stand of zea diploperennis that i discovered the other day...they are still there and seem pretty much stalled as the temperatures have dropped ( particularly at night ) and the days are getting shorter by the minute...but i did discover three more coming out of stems...these more towards the top as a traditional corn flower does and as the annual teosinte does as well...these plants have been up and running for seven months now and i wish the season could drag out a bit more...but the photo period will get them ( probably ) if the temperatures don't...still in three years these are the very first flowers on this strain of teosinte that the garden has produced and i keep wondering if it has anything to do with climate change...certainly the day length at this latitude hasn't changed any since the first plants were established in the spring of 2010 so is it climate or just seeds from a different accession? ( after the fire i had to restock all the seeds the usda had sent me and the second batch of seeds from a different group...but the same species of plant ).. i imagine the only thing to do is to establish a third stand of zea diploperennis somewhere else and see if it acts the same or goes off in some completely different direction...nothing fast-paced about this and no easy answers...i could chalk it up to simply being a different accession of seeds if the native perennials that are out there were behaving well...but they aren't...i was digging jerusalem artichokes at home yesterday because i needed space to plant the remainder of the fresh seed tubers we got from maine ( my backyard is the overflow from the pgp and the community garden...also a sort of control )and the harvest, while better than last year's drought impacted scarcity of tubers, isn't what it had been in say 2010 or 2011 when there were sixty to eighty tubers per plant rather than the twenty or so i got here yesterday...it was a season that saw fair volumes of rain that brought us to neutral or "moderately wet" on the palmer drought indices only have have weeks of dry weather that took us back to "moderate drought" before the next batch of rain...i did not water the jerusalem artichokes since part of planting native species is to see how they would react to the climate and it has had an impact...but is it unusual? don't know...not enough data yet...so the sunchokes in the community garden will serve as a comparison to the ones in my yard next season...we will give them the same treatment in both locations and monitor any differences in behavior and production...nothing short-tern in perennial land.