3 october 2009

this blog began a decade ago on this date mostly as a record of an experimental garden on the campus of indiana university northwest...

it was intended as an exercise in what dr. kathy forgey ( who never let me call her kathy...but whom i did not call dr. forgey either...she did tell me we were friends so i will take the liberty of referring to her as kathy from here on ) termed as "experimental archaeology" which was to explore why staple crops in agriculture are mostly annuals as opposed to perennials with the working hypothesis that annuals were more productive per unit of farmed area...more bang for the buck...greater return on work...

we grew wheat, spuds, asparagus, chinese yams, jerusalem artichokes, cow peas, tomatoes, and toecintli and eastern gamagrass as representatives of the ancestry of maize...and found that perennials, especially tubers, were every bit as productive as annuals in terms of return on work...so the hypothesis shifted to group mobility...annual seed is easier to transport than perennial tubers and root stock

unfortunately with the untimely passing of kathy and diane cutler of the i u northwest physical plant ( of whom i cannot seem to find a photo anywhere ) the garden was left in the hands of less sympathetic elements and met its demise in 2014...these things happen...i moved some the observations to the i u northwest community garden however i found that environment too open to ( unintended ) interference by outsiders so i moved most of it to my back yard yard which shifted the focus from the experimental to a look at everyday food...

i still grow maize ( left ) and teocintli ( northern tepehaun on the right )...

just to compare ( and be geeked by ) the morphology of the ancestor/descendant...

and i still grow wheat ) this year's crop of hard red winter wheat is sprouting and rooting away ) in a quest to see if i can produce enough grain to make bread from scratch...

all this gardening has brought the weather and the climate into a better focus...i pay a lot more attention to it..and how the plants behave because of it...and the insects and the birds...i am in the process of becoming native to my back yard because of it...not quite there yet...i know and see more than i did...it is a more complex process than i would have thought...doubtlessly more to learn...

all this gardening has me thinking about the food in the supermarket...how it is produced and where it come from...what's in it...and it has me paying more attention to what i eat...fortunately i live in a suburban/rural nexus and i can roam about nearby fields to have a firsthand look at industrial food's feed stock at its source ( these soy beans are nearly ready to harvest...if the rain stops )...

and all the above mentioned rain has had an impact on the industrial season..it is still standing in fields...

there is some dense yellow # 2 corn out there although most of the planted fields are in beans...

just as many are fallow and muddy...

while a few have been planted in a late crop of sunflowers...whether this is for harvest or simply ground cover is something i do not know...it seems late for a harvest...and if the rain holds up that may be moot at any rate...so it has been a decade of failures and successes...gains and some awfully painful losses...closer attention to elemental facets of life and a learning curve that becomes steeper and shallower depending on what i am looking at and how well cognition is functioning on a given day...four things i have learned for certain...all perennials are invasive, solanine from the nightshades ( potato and carolina horse nettle fruits ) makes my hands itch, teocintli plants look remarkably like maize even if their ears are not exact matches, and bees are very important critters...the rest is up in the air.