wheat, mashua, yacon, and a bit of rain

it has rained here...over two inches in less than twenty-four hours...and the temperatures are in the fifties (fahrenheit)...so the emmer wheat in the top three photos is germinating happily which makes me happy...no sign of the syrian dwarf wheat yet...it hasn't been a week...we will wait...beyond that mashua tubers ( fourth and fifth ) and yacon rhizomes ( sixth) arrived in the mail today...the mashuia is in the vegetable crisper ( with the bees...which have molded again...a teaspoon of bleach in a cup of water and short soak this weekend )until may when it is done with the frost business ( my surmise is that the danger may be well over long before may but we will wait )...and the yacon rhizomes have been potted in the basement until pretty much the same time...the ramps and the new growth asparagus are doing fine along with the onions and garlic...there is early spring movement...things are picking up...spuds are next, early next month ( which is soon enough )...more as it comes up.

ninth day of spring

spring is nine days old and, while there are things going on out back, growth at the moment is pretty much limited to cold weather crops...the biggest piece of news today is there are more ramps up ( about time...they were far earlier last season )...seven in all now ( some in the top three photos )and , hopefully, many more to come ( with flowers and seeds please...we will, i think, let it seed itself this year )...am i imagining things or has the new asparagus grown a but today? ( fourth ) over on the south side of the house the egyptian walking onions ( fifth ) are robust and the garlic patch seems to be much happier with my light touch mulch this season ( sixth and seventh )...there is some news ( but no photos ) to report on the emmer wheat front as well...the seed i can see is turning white on the ends...a sure sign of impending germination...as soon as something photogenic pops up there will be images.

small victory

http://gardenengineer.blogspot.com/2016/06/viability.html the asparagus that i found growing in the bed of my truck last summer that had sprouted from seed from the asparagus that had sprouted in the perennial garden project and which i transplanted to the bed at the back of the yard here ( top photo ) did fairly well last season...it grew to about eight inches in height and died back ( second photo )...when i went out to check on the plant this evening i found...a spear..it has successfully overwintered and will be growing, "ferning", and feeding the roots ( with all the compost it wants )...so..in a roundabout way a perennial plant that was originally in the perennial garden project has an offspring in a bed in my yard...and so a bit...a tiny bit of a project that kathy was fully supportive of...and so a sliver of kathy herself has come to my yard...a small victory...follow the link to see the original planting.

four spears

it has been raining here ( still in different amounts in different areas of my back yard ) so it was too wet to dig my bed again...i went to the garden anyway just to see what was up...and what was up was ( and is ) asparagus even though, from a distance, the trench looks inert...in the week since i opened the bed four spears have emerged and, if you look closely, you can see more emergent spears just at the soil surface...the asparagus is harvestable this year so we will be checking in to make sure it doesn't get too big and woody...from now until june or so the season is on...the photos end with something i am always happy to see in a garden bed...the rain has driven an earthworm tot he surface of the asparagus bed where it is resting ( and not drowning )...a very pleasing discovery on a march morning in early spring..we will take all of these we can get.

ancient wheat

that the winter wheat did not overwinter has already been well established and that will become a potato bed in the next month or so...however i did not what to have a grainless season and i happened to have some emmer and dwarf syrian wheat seed left and it happens to be very early spring...prime wheat planting time ( it is a cool weather crop )...the emmer wheat has a very tough husk ( top photo ) and i spent about half an hour threshing out some grain to plant...emmer is very old wheat...domesticated between nine and ten thousand years ago at the beginnings of the neolithic revolution...and there is evidence of its wild ancestor being gathered and eaten up to seventeen thousand years ago ( even a cursory review of archaeological evidence will put the lie tot he whole "paleo diet" nonsense...gluten has been with us a long time and there are crackbrained diets everywhere...not so much what you eat [within reason] as how much )...i wonder how many generations of this wheat this will mark...uncounted...so i prepared some containers...broadcast the seed...and raked it under by hand to a depth of about a quarter inch...it will surface germinate but i wanted to keep the birds guessing...give it a week or two and we will check on the progress and the continuation of ancient strains of dna.

almost normal II

a quick post to say that something like fourteen and a half hours after that 84F reading yesterday evening it is 40 degrees ( or better ) cooler and raining ( admittedly it is very early spring here however a 43 degree drop in less than a day is not an everyday occurrence )...and there is a difference of about .15" of rain measured on the east side of the yard as compared to the west...those gauges are less than 100 feet apart ( i imagine i should make a measurement, no? )...if things are this complex in my back yard i have to wonder whether we understand much about the environment...oversimplified specifics may be within our grasp...one wonders about grasping all the connections between those specifics.

almost normal

the irises are up out back...crocuses are up...and so is the temperature...a bit unseasonal for the end of march...a portent? last time it was this warm in march we had a summer long drought...one hopes fro something different this time ( and, likely, will get it )...the egyptian walking onions ( fourth photo ) and the garlic ( fifth ) are all happy which is good...i avoided murderous over mulching this past winter and it seems to have helped...scouting out the ramp bed i found there was still only one brave plant broken through the soil ( sixth)...impatiently i dug around a bit and found that it will nor be alone for much longer...the plant in the seventh photo was just fractions of an inch from breaking the soil surface...on a down note, except for a few stragglers the winter wheat bed seems dead...the growth of last autumn did not get enough snow this winter to insulate it from the cold and it seems to have expired...the good news? there's now a bed open for spuds of all sorts...we will get something in there next month...finally the last photo was something i mistook for buttercrunch lettuce or curly kale...however closer examination shows me that the rhubarb has overwintered and has started afresh for the new season...we have new growth in a new season...we expect losses...we will adapt and persevere...something the species may need to ponder soon enough

first day of a new season

last year i waited until the twenty-eighth of march to unmulch the asparagus in the community garden and a very pale spear had already popped up ( first photo )...i didn't want to repeat that this year and so i went out a bit earlier to open up...i found no spears...which is not a surprise...asparagus isn't the strongest plant when it comes to pushing up through the soil...so i dug down into the compost i mulched it with last autumn and formed a sport of trench that will help the plants find the light of day...we will be back-filling that the the heaped compost and more since the plants are heavy feeders...the early spring weekly ( or more ) visits to the garden to check progress will be starting...the garlic ( fifth through seventh photos ) came through the winter looking robust and will be happy until it finishes in june sometime...while i was out there i did the first dig on the half of my bed i plant to plant in spuds in a few weeks time ( early april )...unsurprisingly i found jerusalem artichokes ( ninth photo ) which i replanted on the proper side of the bed...more distressingly i found some already greening queen anne's lace ( tenth and eleventh ) some with tap roots from nineteen to twenty-five inches deep ( twelfth through fourteenth )...a profoundly stubborn ( almost as relentless as jerusalem artichokes...but not quite ) perennial member of the carrot family, it was an issue in the old garden and i am afraid it migrated when we brought soil from the old to the new...it means we will need to be vigilant in the other beds and as early as possible since it is a very hardy plant...we are started...more on what's happening as i find out.