homegrown teosinte

it's new year's day and gunfire woke me up early...it's seventeen degrees fahrenheit outside and it snowed some last night ( though not as much as was forecast )...it's a holiday, i am not a sports fan, and i had time on my hands...the kinua and wild potatoes are doing okay and the yema de huevos replanting is on hold until the tubers produce a few more sprouts...time to start another winter project...so i went down in the basement and picked a few likely looking seed ears from the indoor teosinte...clearly they were ready since one of the ears shattered in my hand as i picked it...took them back upstairs and opened them and selected six of the darker seeds from the sixteen seeds the ears produced...normally northern tepehuan teosinte needs a cycle or two of cold to break dormancy and i usually sow them directly into the ground in mid-march ( which i will be doing in every garden i have a hand in this spring ) to accommodate this need...it's cold outside but i am trying to see if the seed the teosinte i grew last season will be viable for the next so i don't want to wait...so i soaked the seeds in a 3% solution of hydrogen peroxide for twenty minutes instead...i have no idea who figured this one out but i got the idea from dr. mary eubanks, who was a duke last time i contacted her and who has been exceptionally kind and helpful in answering questions from the laity...it has worked for me before when testing tesointe so the odds are that if this seed is viable it will germinate in the peat pellets i put the seeds in...if so some home made seeds will be going into gardens ( beyond the ones that i left on plants outdoors to shatter and reseed naturally ) along with the shiny store-bought ones...if these fail to germinate i will be going out back and getting seeds off the outdoor pants ( which should not need to be soaked...again, it's cold outside ) to see what they do...if anything...so more business in the basement...if these plants do take off i will be potting them and hardening them off to put out in the spring to give them that much more of a jump on the tesointe's one hundred and fifty-five day germination to flowering season...more as things come ( or don't ) up.

potatoes in boxes

the wild potatoes seem to be coming along fine...i have cut down their photo period and i am leaving them in darkness at least twelve hours a day...their vertical growth has slowed 9 actually you can see in the second photo that some have lain over like vines...but they seem healthy and they are producing both new growth and new leaves...the images i pull up on line ( a maddening process...you get to see a lot of sweet potato vines when you query "wild potatoes"...wild potatoes do not have smooth, heart shaped leaves...they look much more like a domesticated potato leaf...which only makes sense ) show the plants very low to the ground unlike the domesticates...as long as they continue to develop i will assume they are healthy...the storage project may be another story...the ollalas ( third photo ) and the early blue ( fourth photo ) are still solid but they are showing increasing numbers of sprouts...they have been in boxes for nearly four month which is the outside limit in traditional storage time...we still have a few month to go and i may be asking a bit too much of them...the roja narino in the fifth photo were only brought in in october and may stand a better chance of seeing spring...the only thing to do is maintain the best possible conditions and wait... i have the yema de huevos in a separate box waiting for them to sprout before i replant...they stand a fair chance of seeing the community garden as well to go along with some yukon golds...a domesticate/domesticate ancestor/descendant pair to have a look at.

movement in less than 24 hours

slow movement or fast..whichever trips your trigger...we have both in the 2014 season preparations tonight...the community garden ancestor/domesticate project has a new leaf on the way as one of the wild potato plants is sprouting a third one...i am pleased...geeked even at the prospect of another morphology display in the garden...they are still small and slowly growing plants and it may be weeks before they graduate into larger pots...the peat pellets seem roomy enough for now...the quinoa is another story...i have been reading up on the grain and, among other interesting tidbits, "lost crops of the incas" warns that quinoa seeds should be allowed to dry thoroughly before they are stored "because of the ease of germination"...that was no idle warning because in less than a day the seeds have begun to germinate...i thought winter wheat was fast...no contest here...the concern about birds may be valid..it may not...clearly this plant evolved in an area where fast germination conferred major survival benefits ( not that this trait couldn't have been enhanced by artificial selection during domestication...but the trait still had to be there )...whatever the reason this is a very fast result...it may be by way of an early payoff for later headaches...research tells me that seed heads on a single plant reach maturity at different times and that harvest timing is critical since seed heads that are allowed to go on too long shatter very readily..."if the harvest is not properly timed, shattering occurs with large loss of seed."...this will be interesting and an education in patience i'll warrant...more tomorrow if this sort of activity continues.

wild potatoes

earlier this morning i found a bit of time to initiate the attempt to germinate wild potato seeds and produce some tubers indoors to plant as part of the community garden ancestor/domesticate morphology comparison...if all goes well we will have tubers and perhaps even seeds...they are tiny critters and my fingers are somewhat of a disappointment when it comes to intricate maneuvers so it took a bit of time to extract three each of seeds from the bolivian and argentinian accessions...once they were removed from the small zip-loc bags they were planted in peat pots filled with a mixture of homemade compost and composted cow manure which should be rich enough to sustain seedlings readily...they were thoroughly watered and placed under the grow lights with their potato descendants...now w e wait...some research has turned up gardeners who say the germplasm they received from the same source has germinated in four days...we can hope...particularly since the bolivian accession claims 100% germination in tests in wisconsin earlier this year...the moment a green shoot is spotted there will be photos and a post...off to campus soon...more on the gardens in a bit.