Showing posts with label chinese yam vines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chinese yam vines. Show all posts

Sunday, June 14, 2020

second sister

made the short trip to the community garden in portage this morning and bed six seems fine...
the spud corner has some blooms opening and the probability of more on the way...a sign of fair health...
the turnips, kohlrabi, and celery are moving their season along...
the peas will be wanting a trellis soon...
some jalepeno and sweet peppers have joined the population...which is all good but not the main focus of today's jaunt...
the maize row begins to resemble a john stewart curry painting...
and the plants have all reached the requisite six inches in height...
to allow the planting of the "second sister"...
so i did...a few inches in front of each maize plant...a ready made trellis for each bean...all we do now is water and wait...
in the meantime out in the back yard the egyptian walking onions are beginning to bloom...
as is the bittersweet nigthshade...
which is attracting some agile bees...
the spuds, which are the bittersweet's cousin...are blooming here as well...
unfortunately, so far, the blooms are just falling off...there doesn't seem much chance of potato fruits this year...spuds are finicky about producing seed...
the asparagus is in full bloom...
while the alfalfa is just starting...
and the rye and wheat are done with all that and will begin to ripen directly...
and while we are talking wheat, ancient dna has cropped up again out back as the very old variety emmer is still producing ears around ten thousand years after it was first domesticated...
no one should have expected the jeruasalem artichokes to give up...in the past two weeks they haven't...
then again, they have not intimidated the onions holding their own out front of the horde..or the chinese yam vine that has taken to the trellis and will be producing aerial bulbs soon enough...another relentless colonizer, this one has stared down the sunchokes for years...
and finally...there are bees in the hawthorn...
and an old friend dropped by earlier in the week...always something going on out there.

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

vines and stolons with a few stems

back home i had a look around the back yard...the first photo is of the ramp bed a month ago..lots of green...the second is toady..all the green is in the eighteen stems that will hopefully flower as the summer goes on...the teosinte ( fourth and fifth ) at home continues to do well and clearly shows its parentage of maize more and more..the daughter plant in the pot is leafing well ( sixth ) and the stolon ( seventh ) that rooted and created it has moved on to reproduce again...some of the strawberry plants i put in last friday seem very unhealthy...and a few are exhibiting new growth ( eighth and ninth )..all i need is a couple to survive and there will be daughter plants...meanwhile the chinese yam is vining all over..they are entwining with the cage around the pepper plant and with one another...( tenth through thirteenth )...there will be aerial bulbs soon enough.

Monday, June 5, 2017

a variety of plants and places

i ran out to the community garden after work to water the teosinte mostly...the soil was dry and the well established one was showing some leaf curl from transpiration ( first photo )...one of the replacement plants is till visible ( second ) but not leafing and the other has failed completely...there may be a solitary plant there this season...interestingly in the next bed over one of the carolina horsenettles has flowered ( third and fourth ) clearly showing its membership in the solanum ( and so nightshade ) family...it would be interesting to see if it fruits and what they might look like...the jerusalem artichokes are up to my waist..a good sign...the back yard meanwhile has alfalfa blooming ( fifth and sixth ) while the northern tepehuan teosinte ( seventh ) is looking distinctly corny...there is new growth on one of the wild strawberries ( eighth ) and finally the chinese yam's new vines have finally become large enough to be photogenic ( ninth through twelfth ) including one that is just about to latch onto the tomato cage around the pepper plant...there will be more.