movement out back

it has been a bit rainy here of late and that is not a bad thing for the stuff in the yard...more spuds ar popping up in the bed on the south side of the house and there will be more going in over the coming weekend...the wheat that Jean and i are growing for the "bread from scratch" project is liking the wet and coolish weather as well...pushing a foot tall these days...the teosinte is acclimating itself to actually being in the ground and should be going more vertical soon...the grape vine is coming into leaf as well...when some of the trees out there were cut down some of the large vines that were growing though the trees were severed..this may put a crimp in this year's grape production, however it may lead to some new growth as well...it may not be the tragedy i first took it for...perhaps a pruning was in order...just do not like losing the grapes in the tree...i believe the sixth photo is of some bogata market mashua breaking the surface of the soil in that container...i will keep an eye on it and be looking for the rest as well as the nasturtiums i planted with them...finally there are seed heads appearing on the winter rye...i had to take a sheet of paper out to highlight them because the camera simply could not pick up the details with all the green in the background...technology has its limitations...and while i was looking at the rye i saw the seed head in the ninth photo and was wondering why it was bent over at that angle...the vetch tendrils in the last photo supplied the answer...climbing toward the light and not caring what they latch onto.

wheat bed preparation

the bed we chose to plant wheat in looked pretty much like an organic trash heap because that was pretty much what it was...up to and including a couple of pumpkins someone dumped there last autumn...they were in the way and we certainly didn't want any pumpkin vines coming up in the wheat so we dug a hole to bury them deeply enough to prevent any seeds from germinating...the topsoil out there is mostly leaf humus built up by the trees out back over the years...it goes down about a foot before the substrata changes to sand so there is a fair base for the plants...weeding a bed of wheat is just about impossible so we wanted to do a really disruptive dig to turn any seeds out there under and...since jerusalem artichokes have grown in the vicinity, to dig up any tubers we might find...the sixth photo shows we did find some...it also shows it has snowed the entire time we worked on this...it's fine...wheat is a cool weather crop...we found multiple worms in the bed...we are content with that...they can feed on the bacteria breaking down the pumpkins...after the dig we went over the bed with a warren hoe and then added around three hundred pounds of compost...turned that under...hit it with the hoe again and raked it into a semblance of even depth...a shade over an hour's worth of preparation work and we were ready to plant.