communities

i took a ride out to the comunity gardens to assess any storm damage and the news is good...

as with home there were some leaning maize at the portage garden...

and like home it was a simple matter to stand them back up...

the spuds came though seemingly without a scratch...

and half a dozen beans have broken surface...minimalist bed = minimal damage i suppose...

there was, if anything, less impact at the campus garden...

like all palnts, wheat needs water...but not the abundance that something like maize demands...so the einkorn has been untroubled by the dry weather ( even if it despises heat )...

so the ten thousand year old dna in the bed is having no hesitations in reproducing itself...tough little ears with tough husks...you can tell readily that it is not an "improved" variety...

the surviving teosinte plants are doing well ( and looking corny ) and i decided to help them along a bit with an idea left to us by native peoples of the southwest...

i brought some rocks and some earth worm castings along...

gave both plants a dressing of earthworm poop...

and mulched each plant with the stones...this is an efective mulch for retaining soil mosisture, i can expand it as the plants and their root systems grow...and it is simple to remove from the bed at season's end or if i decide to plant a cover crop...and can be reassembled next season...humans can be cleverly creative in constructive ways...learning to work within an ecosystem, not in opposition...

and, in terms of this bed, i would like to add that "containment" is a relative term when dealing with alfalfa...it does not need mulch...it is shading itself and the spuds that are in there...

while we are talking shade, the asparagus remained upright through the storm...

and so is providing some shade and mositure retention to the cow peas...since i am not planning to trellis the cow peas they will overrun the bed soon enough, shade out any "native growth", provide their own moisture retention system ( shade again ), and, hopefully, help the rhizobia set nitrogen in the bed for, probably, the rye grass to come...no devistation this time...one assumes more summer storms to come.