turning

it must be september because the bean plants in the field by the supermarket are beginning to turn and harvest wil be along before you realize it...

and there are a lot of beans to harvest..both in the canopy ( which is about two feet off the ground...this is a piece of data we use use in a minute or two ) and down the base of the rows...perhaps a bumper crop of tariff...

these three plants clustered together top out at a bit over three feet and between then produced one ear...at first i had thought some critter had been at it given the condition of the husk ( remember our discussion of catastrophic sexual mutation a while back? corn husks don't open on their own ) but what i found was a stunted, green ear that showed no signs of predation...it opened on its own...which is something i have noticed in volunteer corn in yeas past...whether that is the product of genetically engineered failure or just the poor reproductive qualities of hybrid corn i cannot say...what i can say is the seed would not be viable...

one thing i do not think had an impact was the proximity of the plants...dense yellow #2 grown in this same field last season had plants spaced as close as two inches apart and they produced one or two full sized ears...

down the row this set of three footers produced some swellings in the stalks but no visible ears...

as a final contrast, a bed in my yard crowded with intermediate wheat grass, beans, wild berries, and the inevitable foxtail and creeping charlie has produced teosinte and maize plants taller than my six feet...so volunteer corn consistently ( so far ) fails to reproduce well...not, i think, because of field conditions but rather as a result of genetics...not being a geneticist i cannot tell whether it is an engineered failure or simply hybrids being mules...i do find it odd that indigenous agriculturalists ( and we are relying on buffalo bird woman here ) had a methodology for storing maize that ensured both food and viable seed for at least two years where modern "improved' seed cannot find parity with that.