rain wheat rain spuds rain zea

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...

from six thirty p.m. yesterday through about nine this morning it received anther four and one tenth inches...five inches in twenty-one hours...no world's record...but it hearkens back to may and the rainfall that had a heavy impact on the induistrial season's planting...and if it keeps up the harvest is going to be harmed as well...

the actual impact out back was minimal...i had sown wheat yesterday...it is planted shallowly...about a quarter inch deep...and the rain had floated a lot of it to the surface...so rather than say "open season on wheat" to the local birds i covered it with a light layer of compost...wheat will surface germinate ( see blogs on "puddles" )...not if the birds consume it however...

while i was rooting around in the bed i came up with a few more spuds that look to be some elmer's blue and some german butterballs...

the rain left the silks on the northern tepehuan sodden...they will need to dry to collect pollen i think...

more of the tillers on the zea mays mexicana are beginning to topple over...but not because of the rain...

while there are many green seeds to be seen all over the stems...

more are verging on mature...

this one was fully cooked so i brought it in...

serendipitously i found a fully done ear of, not maize, but dense yellow # 2 ( which explains why the squirrels hadn't nailed it...and you can't really call it maize...got the seed form the usda ) so there is ancestor/descendant ( distant ) morphology to look at...

dwarfed by its descendant, it has a much looser husk and seed that is definitely harder than the field corn ( the squirrels don't even have the teocintli on their food radar...hardness and size would be my guesses as to why )...

looking at the hopi blue maize kernels on the left, the trocintli in the middle, and the field corn you couldn't be blamed for thinking them unrelated...dna sequencing says they are...with some eastern gamagrass tossed in...it is still raining...albeit lightly and intermittently...there may be more rain news yet today though.