hoed

about two months ago there was a lot going on in the garden...

even a month ago it was a fairly lively place...

not so much so today...

the asparagus is still there...it is beginning to die back though and i will be tasking it out sometime next week when the opportunity arises...

and despite the success of puddles offspring in the basement ( eight in all so far and the onions are up as well )...

as well as the robust growth in the winter wheat bed in my yard...

the effort yo grow winter wheat as a cover crop and green manure in my bed on campus has inexplicably ( to me ) failed...not that i expected much from the second planting..however, the cause the failure of the first after a fairly promising start is and unknown...so i pulled out the dead geranium ...

and took a hoe to it to disrupt any nascent "weeds" i don't want hampering progress in spring...

all that was left when i finished was the alfalfa in the corner...

there were no bees in the alfalfa today...there were a couple of visitors though...enjoying the late october warmth...more on the asparagus later.

celebratory update

we have discussed Jean's puddle wheat and her remarkable comeback more than once in this blog and today we will dive into the story again..this time with a sequel...i planted some of the "berries" puddles produced on my birthday and today i have evidence that her ancient dna continues its relentless reproduction...puddles herself was a second generation of winter wheat and in my basement today her offspring are germinating..she was of heirloom stock...cold hardy and sturdy ( as wheat goes ) and there will be more of her offspring before we are through...the kids are on the way...

in other news...the mashua cuttings i treated with rooting hormone seem to have taken and are evincing new growth...

as are the two ( i know...only one pictured ) fully rooted plants i brought i..if indoor tubers are the only reproductive success the plants will provide we will work with that...more on pouddle's family as it arises.

birthday celebration

any regular readers of this blog will remember "puddles" the toughest wheat plant the hoosier state has ever seen, that germinated in a puddle of water in my basement about a year ago...

grew under the lights in my basement all winter...

was moved outside on what i thought were its last legs in spring only to have a rejuvenation...

produce ears...

and grow to fruition...

well today is my sixty-fifth birthday and to celebrate i took five of puddles' seeds from my stash and...

and planted them under the lights in a container last inhabited by some teocintli...

the original puddles cohabited with two onions so to keep continuity i took a couple of aerial bulbs i had left over from an egyptian walking onion and put them in as well...we will be watching..another generation coming along.

no ramps were harmed during this production

i collected the last of the ramp seeds early last month and the bed has been dormant since...every year though the bed is invaded by a network of roots just under the surface of the soil that i fear will impede the ramps in spring as they try to break surface...so, since the ramps are dormant, it was time to clean the bed...

every shovelful i turned over was alive with these things...

i cannot feature the minimal amount of non-ramp plant life that took root in the bed being responsible for a pile of roots a bit over two feet by two feet in dimension...i am thinking these are impinging from outside or from below...

wherever they are from, i dug up the entire bed to remove as many of them as possible...

obviously i could not dig up the entire bed without disturbing some ramps...they are dormant...it did them no harm and they were not out for long...

so after i raked the bed back to a reasonably level condition i set about replanting the wanderers...

ramps are wild leeks...members of the allium family and related to green onions...and they can bunch like green onions ( which is why i have an expanding population )...so i separated the ones that had bunched...

and planted them all, roots down with the tops about three inched under the surface...after the trees shed a bit more i will gather some up to mulch the bed for winter and keep the ramps thinking they are in the woods rather than my yard.

october ears

sunny afternoon...

expectations met

it hadn't rained yet ( never trust the rain...and what precipitation has fallen has been meager and short lived ) so the first thing i did was soak my bed because it has been dry since i resowed my bed with winter wheat after the first crop railed ( for whatever reason )...then i had a close look...

what i found was the stragglers left over from the first seeding...

and not much beyond that...i had set my expectations for this at not "high" earlier in the week and i may have ( for once ) been prescient...then again, the weather could moderate and i could have a bed of wheat in november...we will see...

down the row the asparagus is still greening away...

with a newly ripened clutch of "berries"...

and a few green ones to show that the last burst of blooms wasn't a waste of energy...

as well as a couple of newly hatched late season spears...it may be past mid-october but the plants have not gotten the "slow down, it's fall" memo yet...my surmise is they won't be done by early november either...this may put a hitch in the mulching schedule.