last october twenty-eighth i found an ear of wheat that had germinated in a puddle of water in my basement...i planted it and put it under the grow lights in the basement plant room because i wasn't going to let it just expire...i was skeptical of it producing ears down there because there wasn't going to be anything like a natural day length...
Jean dubbed it the "puddle wheat" ( which was, at some point, was shortened to just "puddles" ) and she prospered to the extent that she grew long, green wheat blades like a good grass will..but no ears...
by april she had begun to show signs of dying back, like all annuals will do, she was one hundred and forty -nine days old at this point and spring wheat runs about a four month season...it was natural...Jean wanted ( and i agreed...it was not obliging ) her to see the sun and feel wind so on april twenty second i took her outside...
and here is where the story becomes a bit of a surprise...on may seventh i discovered what looked like new growth for puddles...at fist i thought something else had seeded itself in the container but as the days past it became more and more clear that this was a new burst of growth from a one hundred and sixty-four day old wheat plant...
by may twenty eighth ( two hundred and eleven days in ) she began to produce her first ears of wheat...
and by a week later it was obvious she was dead serious about wheat...
this week a determined puddles finished her ( for my money ) remarkable season...fifty-five ears worth of come-back production...and so, two hundred and seventy days since her roots touched soil, i harvested what puddles worked so hard on...
she did a good job..creating large ears of wheat with good sized "berries"
i set aside roughly half of the ears ( those that are on the straighter stems ) to send along to Jean...the rest i will keep and thresh and winnow...and late next march i will plant a few containers of puddle's offspring..continue her dna and a unbroken ten thousand year old chain of wheat planting...her family has a long history...
her root system was not nearly as large as i thought it would be...hardly matters...what mattered was her resiliency...my vote for "tough little plant" of 2018.
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