zea

a little bit of the morphology of a "wild and weedy ancestor" and its domesticated offspring...

dense yellow #2 in the field by the supermarket...

and northern tepehuan treosinte in my yard...

and again in the same order..

and again...

and one last time...

corn flowers ( tassels...i am corrected time and again...however it is a male flower )

and one from the teosinte...the family resemblance is strong in many ways...the way the ears emerge from the stalks is very close to the same...however since teoasinte has no cobs it can have multiple ears emerge from the same node as in the eighth photo...there are several examples of multiple ears on the plants...nothing uncommon about it...one thing is sure...teosinte has much more interesting support roots...

zea

the season is as finished for the teosinte as it is for its descendants in the field behind the big box stores so i cut down a stalk and propped it up by the house to provide another scale for its size..much larger than northern tepehuan teosinte with ears alternating down the main stalk...these are fairly large...about three inches in length and they resemble the ears on dense yellow #2 ( sixth photo )...unlike the single stalk field corn however, the teosinte has branches ( last two photos )...there are four coming off this stalk and each of the branches has ears aligned along it end to end ( like smaller northern tepehuan plants in shadier spots produce ) all told this plant had thirty-one ears and my experience of this variety so far has been that each husk contains two or three spikes of seeds wrapped in their own interior husks...could those separate spikes have mutated into rows around a cob...seems likely.

wild potatoes IIa

came home from work to find germination going on...two of the three bolivan accession i planted are up and running and there's movement among the argentinians as well...nothing from the russian seeds but it is early days...some folks had claimed germination if four days so i was a bit concerned since it has been eleven days since is tarted this batch and after the first failure i was wondering...i haven't had much experience with wild potatoes and direct seeding hasn't worked out well for me in past attempts..the hope here is to produce small tubers to plant in the community garden next spring along with domesticated potatoes to provide a morphological comparison...wheat grass and wheat along with teosinte and maize will make up the other parts of the trio of comparisons...these were the ones i was worried about and , if nothing else, i know i can start plants to transplant if the tubers fail to materialize...i am somewhat relieved...geeked too.