community sunday

a sunday off so off to the community gardens to see what was what...

the asparagus on campus has thrown up another spear...as the weather cools there may be more and, possibly, edible ones...

since the einkorn has finished the back of the bed has become somewhat "weedy"...

the bureaucrats can become a might testy over that sort of thing...so i brought along the weeding hoe...

and cleared the native growth into a pile...

it has been dry lately and a bit warm...i noticed the soil in the asparagus bed was dry as i cleared it...the asparagus doesn't care, however the maize does so i irrigated the maize bed...

dry or not the hopi turquoise seems to be fine...

with multiple ears coming along...

this season is winding down...still the alfalfa is as unruly as ever and still in bloom...feeding the bees...

and while we are talking bees, they were mugging the bean blossoms over at the portage garden...

three more spuds had finished up over there...

the largest was just a few ounces short of a pound...

and the whole haul wighed in at four pound eight and three eights ounces which puts the production from that bed at a shade over twenty-five pounds...

the portage maize is tall...looking around eleven or twelve feet...

and there are maturing and relatively recent ears here as well...

even if something seems to be trying to get at them...

finally, i found a carerpillar on a tomato...not a monarch...and possibly not beneficial to the tomato...this will run its course...live and let live...more about the back yard as the teosinte comes along.

oddly enough, more zea and solanum ( with a side of asparagus )

there is an increase in activity in one of the patches of zea out back...

this turned up on a maize leaf a couple of days ago...

and, since the mantis seems to have shuffled off to better hunting grounds, this guy has taken up residence in the maize...

while amongst the teosinte plants there are a wealth of ears to be...

and in a sign that the season is getting late,teosinte ears are beginning to protrude from the stalks...

aa well as seeds appearing just below the flowers...a few more weeks and i will begin to harvest seed...

moving along with the late season theme this spud is clearly signaling it is done...

it rendered half a dozen michigan blue potatoes that weighed in at twelve ounces...not all that shabby for a container in a yard that is more shade than sun much of the day...

the asparagus is chiming in with some late season news about the relentless nature of dna...

a late summer spear has ferned and flowered...it may be a bit late...although, while the season for edible asparagus is rasonably short, the overall season can go on into november...

so it may produce seed as has its neighboring fern and they may actually mature...we will keep an eye on it.

zea and solanum

with a day off i found the time to wander by the portage garden to see what was up...and what is up is the maize...

this is an heirloom flint corn, not sweet corn or dense yellow #2, so the plants all have multiple ears irrupting along the stalks...i counted thirty-one ears in an unscientific survey ( in other words i may have missed some...or, given how thing are these days, double counted one ) so we will have maize i believe...

on the other side of the bed one of the remaining potatoes ( there are still half a dozen holdouts refusing to finish ) announced it was done and it produced three healthy tubers which i took home...

rinsed off...

and weighed...this brings me up to the neighborhood of twenty pounds so far from two-thirds of a four by eight foot bed...we may see thirty if we're lucky...we will see.

slow day out back

it must be august because the jerusalem artichokes are in full bloom...and, for august in these parts, it is a cool and overcast day which, in insect terms, means nothing much is going on...not that things are at a standstill...

a solitary bumblebee had the run of the blooms...

almost all of the teosinte plants have begun to produce silks...

and since the sap of the teosinte has a fair amount of sugars in it they have attracted ants who have herded their aphids to the stems just below the flowers to feed...if they become destructive something will have to be done...in my experience that won't be necessary...we will, however, be vigilant...i want ears and seed...

as another sign of august ( and the nearness of autumn ) the butterfly weed is producing seed pods...

two years ago from early july until about this time in august the ancestors of these plants were alive with monarch butterfly caterpillars...now for the past two years all they have had on them is pods...monarchs are officially endangered and i saw one last year...zero this...we can argue about the whys ( or you may...i will abstain ) however the empirical evidence is in my yard...which is a marked absence of maonrchs and their progeny...so it's a slow day and near as i can tell the news is a lot worse than anyone is willing to admit...have a look around where you live...what's changed?