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.

april showers

over the past two days my back yard has been pummeled with two inches of rain and last night it was bludgeoned with hail as well...fortunately with very little damage...mostly because it is early in the season yet...

things are moving along in the ramp bed...i count thirty-six up...they are coming into leaf and i am hoping for a robust florescence later this season...if that works out there wil be a scattering of seed...

the winter wheat is looking healthy...

and the winter rye has already topped six inches in height...

the black tip and emmer wheat i planted on, i believe, the twenty-fifth of march have finally put in an appearance...

while there is asparagus coming along among the strawberries, the eldest of my plants has remained inert which is disturbing...gardening teaches loss but this one would be unfortunate since it is asparagus grown from seed that originated in the perennial garden project almost a decade ago...the ones up and running are also in a direct line of descent from the pgp so it is not a complete disaster...perhaps there will be "berries" in the yard this year and there can be a further planting...

i found this mass growing in a crack in the patio where i was removing wheat and rye ears from the stalks last summer...my suspicion, having run across this sort of thing before, is that it is one of the two...you may remember puddles, the wheat that germinated in the basement...

she grew in the basement under the lights and then resurrected outside in the april sunlight to go on and reproduce...her container is still out there and, suspecting this may be another cereal grass, i replanted it there...we will be seeing what transpires as the season goes on.

varieties

the ancients...emmer...

and newly emerging einkorn...mesopotamia in the back yard...

nearly ripe hard red winter wheat...

and the long awned black tip wheat.