first hundred ears

last saturday i brought in the black eagle wheat and hung the sheaves up in the plant room...in the course of the past week i went down and cut off one hundred ears of wheat...this morning i finished threshing it and then went out into the heat and winnowed it ( after i vacuumed up the awns Jean )...one hundred ears rendered 2 1/8 ounces of clean grain ready to be milled into flour ( about 1/3 cup by volume...if a cup of grain renders 1 1/2 cups of milled flour we should be at about 1/2 cup of flour from this grain...bread from scratch will be a process )...the next hundred are already cut ( and actually started )...how many hundreds there are i do not know..haven't counted them...several more than there were of rye seed heads would be my estimate...the work should give us enough flour for several loaves...i have purchased three pounds of organic wheat to practice milling on ( and probably bread making ) before i risk all this work on a debacle...results are forthcoming.

bird tape

the bed of black eagle wheat out back has taken some shots from critters and the weather...but that hasn't stopped it from carrying on its season and it is beginning to ripen quickly...while the birds seem to be fairly indifferent to the rye the wheat is another matter...energy dense seeds ( why we use them ) they are starling magnets and i have been seeing them around..so i decided to deploy some bird tape...metalized polyester, it is shiny and has a prism effect...i stretched it loosely across the bed from the corner posts and put a couple of twists in it before tying it off to the opposite corner...when the breeze blows the tape moves distracting and deterring the birds...the sun glints off the metalized surface as well adding another layer of bird deterrence...it makes them nervous...for a while...like a scarecrow, the tape will need to be moved about once a week to keep the little dinosaurs from acclimating to it to the point hey can ignore it...it is effective and non lethal...two pluses to outweigh the fact that it's plastic...on the north side of the house the ramp flowers are just about fully open...sometime in august ( these are slow movers...one of the sloths of the plant world...once the seed matures and works its way into the soil it can take two years to germinate...no record but slow none the less )those buds will flower and by late september into october there will ( hopefully ) be round, black seeds to harvest...the season progresses...more as it comes up.

eleusinian mysteries

the wheat, despite being battered down in a corner by something ( critter? ) is coming out in ears of grain...soon enough it will be time to put out the bird tape to discourage the starlings and any other avian predator...there will be "bread from scratch" for Jean and i yet...the last three photos are zea morphology..the first of the three is the "wild and weedy" ancestor teosinte...the second is bear paw maize in the back yard and the last is some dense yellow #2 in the field behind the big box store...stay tuned to see the divergence in development.

a short tour

when i was done planting i took a bit of a tramp around the yard...the ramps in the top two photos are a fair sampling of the fifty or so booming along out there...we have taken out some trees and i am worried that they may be overexposed to sun this summer...a sunshade of sorts may have to be rigged...the locust trees they are planted under are finally coming into leaf but i am not sure they will provide the requisite shade...the wheat bed has filled in well in the last six days ( the third photo was taken on the second of this month ) tillering away...there will be bread and speaking of bread there are nascent seed heads on the winter rye in the fifth and sixth photos...we may just have rye flour as well...finally the winter vetch will be putting out its purple blooms soon...that means seed for next autumn...there will be more as it comes up.

wheat and potatoes

i have a few potato plants under the lights that are seriously pot bound and desperately unhappy...they have been down there for a number of weeks, and while there is still a chance of frost to be faced, it had become a matter of plant of perish...so i planted...a couple of german butterballs ( top two photos ) an early blue ( third and fourth )...and the smaller huaycu that was hardening off on the deck...i wouldn't call it desperate...not yet anyway...just necessary...there is good progress over in the wheat bed...beyond the coleoptile tillers, the wheat has begun to develop tillers growing from auxiliary buds along the main stems now that many of the plants have four leaves...it has obviously been cool enough to stimulate tiller growth ( something i was concerned about...i am at the southern end of the area in the state where spring wheat is a viable corp ( the other wheat crops i have grown for actual use have been winter wheat and that is where we will be going in the autumn with this bed ) and so it is something of a relief to see tillers popping out in such abundance...so far so good but there is along way to go before blue potatoes to ship off, cottage fries, and bread from scratch for Jean and me...stay tuned.

early spring

it snowed here saturday...and it was sixty-six degrees ( fahrenheit..what? about eighteen celsius? )..and when i got home from work and went out to take these photos before i covered the beds ( twenties forecast for tonight ) there were flurries out there...shcizo weather at the south end of the inland sea..but it is still early april...what else would you expect? the good news is the spring wheat needs the cold to stimulate tillering so it has come at a fortuitous time...there were quite a few germinated seeds earlier in the week and today there are shoots popping up all over the bed...so the bread from "scratch" project jean and i are working on is progressing well so far...i an looking forward to a good wheat season and have prepared bird defenses to deploy as the grain ripens...i will hold off the starlings even if i have to net the wheat...the ramps are booing..forty-five up now and that is closing in on the entire planted population plus the ones from last year...something browsed the only seeds the single plant that flowered produced last season...hoping for more seeds this year..hoping for bunching too...i would like to fill the beds and move some itno the "wild" directly under the trees...we will be seeing how that works out....it will be summer...eventually...right now all you get is cold hardy...hang on..we are just getting started.

more germination

clouds have delivered 1.6" of rain in the last 24 hours...i am not displeased...it is a good sign given how dry the winter was...the plants continue to sprout...there are now 32 ramps up in the beds...this is a good thing as well...the intent is to leave them to bunch, separate them, and establish a native population to use in cooking next season..a self-sustaining wild leeks in the yard...that is the goal...today's big news i that the black eagle wheat my friend Jean and i are growing to make bread from true "scratch" has begun to germinate in its assigned bed...hard as it may be to see in the photos there is green there...there is frost forecast for the weekend...wheat is a cool weather crop but there will be frost cloth out there...we are just getting started and need no setbacks...this is a high profile project with long term implications..at least i am hoping it is...last photo is of the twenty teosinte seeds i soaked six day ago...thirteen have germinated...i am simply fine with that...i have gone form being concerned about getting seed to germinate to being concerned about finding enough room...i foresee container grown teosinte...more as things develop...