it is late september and time to consider planting overwintering small grains if there is going to be a harvest next summer...in the weeks since i harvested the winter wheat and rye the beds have been reoccupied by local plants and some volunteers that burst through after the grains were removed...
i cleared the native denizens from the west bed..which had been home to the rye last season...spread some compost from the bin, turned and hoed the bed...
i broadcast a larger amount of seed in the bed this year than last...the summer's wheat harvest was not to shabby for a thirty-two square foot area...however it did not yield enough grain for even one loaf of whole wheat bread...this season's bread will, of necessity, be rye...so i sowed more densely in hopes of greater yield...after the wheat sprouts i will sow sweet clover to both set nitrogen and help keep the natives at bay while the wheat develops a strong enough root system to successfully overwinter...
the rye is going to be in last year's wheat bed...mostly to see how that might impact yield...if at all...this bed poses something of a stickier prospect than the bed i planted in wheat because of volunteers...
specifically spuds...
admittedly it is far too shady a spot for spuds to grow in...this one has very long ( about four feet ) vine-like growth which tells me it was starved for sunlight and put a lot more energy into leaves than it ever would in tubers...
and the one i did pull up had very shallow roots and produced two very small blue tubers...which would easily produce new plants if i used them as seed...as it is they would be fodder for a basement season which is something i have little interest in doing unless forced since they are never very productive in terms of energy used to sustain them...we'll see...
over on the south side the big yellow flowers on the jerusalem artichokes are all gone and they had become what the municipality and my neighbors would term "noxious weeds" so i hacked the dying stalks down which shed some light on other events in the bed...
to wit, egyptian walking onions...some firmly established and rooting for a solid overwintering...
and some working from bulbs on the surface scattered among the strawberries...the new yorkers stood up to the sunchokes fairly well over the summer and are still thriving along the north edge of the bed...i believe there will be more of an effort to control the jerusalem artichokes' territory next year to allow the berries to establish a firmer territory much like their sisters out in the east bed have done while cohabiting with the asparagus...
the northern tepehuan teocintli is finally coming out in ears with their signature mass of maroon colored silks and again it will be a race between maturity for seeds and a killing frost...
there are still a multiplicity of green ears on the zea mays mexicana...
as well as husk-less seeds...
there are mature seeds among them however...his variety has a shorter season than the northern tepehuan and these plants are a second generation grown from seed i harvested in my yard last autumn...
so i began this year's harvest of seed with an eye to next spring.
from around noon yesterday until six thirty p.m. when i took this photo the back yard received nine tenths of an inch of rain...
