if it were eaten i'd call it predation...

instead i may just call it vandalism...

something was rooting around in my maize and teosinte beds so i put deer fence up around the bulk of it...however i did not cover all of it since there are a few places out there with only a small number of plants...

the digging had abated for a time...it has begun again and i found a broken maize plant and an uprooteed on in one bed that was prone to attack...

the uprooted plant was around eleven inches tall and as i dug around it to get it out to transplant to a safer spot...

i found one long root longer than the plant was tall ( and i am not cetain i dug it all up ) which struck me as odd for such a small plant..but then what do i know?

i dug the plant a new home close to some kin...

and planted him...

with a little extra company i ran across...

this plant was perilously close to the digging so i went back...

popped him up...

and put him in with his kinfolk...it may be a bit more crowded there, however, it is better lit at night and may keep whatever is digging out there a bit further away...one hopes...one hopes a lot in a garden...or a yard...or whatever you care to call this

10 june 2023

it is in the eighties ( fahrenheit...somewhere in the upper twenties for the rest of you ) which is about the sort of weather the tesointe and maize ( and something has been rooting around in both...i have replanted maize...tesointe may have to ride out its fate this season )...so here are some photos of the relatives...

teosinte...

maize...

teosinte...

maize...hopefully they will reach maturity...there are no guarantees...elsewhere back there...

guess where some pumpkin shells were composted last autumn...

the everbearing strawberries are ever blooming...

the mulberries are still green...and still growing in size...

the concord grapes in the fir trees are coming along well...

as are the seedless grapes on the trellis...

and the alfalfa continues to bloom in anticipation of the bees' arrival this month...there's more...the jerusalem artichokes are still relentless and the chinese yams are defying them, while the new york import wild strawberries have set about escaping them...the asparagus is in full flower...

and being mugged by the bumblebees...there's mooseberry...and ramps...onions and more...we will get to that soon enough.

the long and short of it

last year the sweet corn ( first photo ) reached a height of around six and a half to seven feet..the hopi blue ( second photo ) topped out at over eight feet in most plants and one spectacularly tillered ten footer...the jerusalem artichokes are pushing up over eighteen inches right now and will hold their own height-wise with the hopi blue...eight to ten feet of big yellow flowers and then multitudes of tubers...the cucumbers ( forth photo ) probably won't get anywhere near the height of the others...but will make up for it by vining profusely and producing loads of succulent fruits...there should be quite a bit of production in these seven beds...the plant population to date breaks down like this: asparagus-12, brassica ( unsure to this point if it's kohlrabi or cabbage...but they are surely brassicas )-4, cucumbers-27, garlic-6, jerusalem artichokes-9, maize-40, mashua-2, onions-7, peppers-4, pole beans-1, potatoes-40, tomatoes-6, wheat-13. 179 plants up and running...if it's possible we would like to collect as much harvest data as possible...numbers and certainly weights...since this is a community garden and open to the public that my be impossible but we will collect all we can to try to establish some sort of productivity index for future comparison...information about food production seems as vital as the food itself if we are going to make this a viable and sustainable project.

maize

the beds in the community garden are getting greener by the day and chief among the green providers is maize...the sweet corn in the second photo is of an eighty day variety and will be ready in august...more on that as it develops...sharing as well...the plants in the two last photos are showing telltale signs of being hopi blue maize because they are tillering...the one in the third photo has a tiller on the left and the one in the last photo on the right...each should produce a secondary stalk and an ear of corn...we are not familiar with the habits of dakota black or apache red, but this is behavior that we have seen before and that means the seed from the maize we grew last season in the old garden is viable...a connection between the old and the new...and a traditional heirloom crop...more as it grows and the ears "blue"

husked ears

members of the same family with the same sort of reproductive mechanism...except the teosinte husks are much more fragile and break open to allow the seed heads to shatter...the hopi blue doesn't have that luxury and is pretty much dependent on human intervention to reproduce...we have monkeyed around with its genetics for generations until it is almost symbiosis ( have a look at the ingredients labels on most processed foods and tell me we are reliant )...from ancestor to domesticate takes quite a bit of artificial selection...as a species we don't seem able to leave much of anything be...i'm wondering how much we have "improved" things for the rest of the ecosphere with what we've been up to for , at least, the last ten thousand years.

bluing

the exposed ear of hopi blue maize is giving us an insight into the progression of its season...a much longer season than sweet corn, it has another month to run...from top to bottom these photo were taken on the twentieth, twenty-second, twenty-sixth of this month and the last one was taken this evening...two days has made a colorful difference...more on this as it progresses.

predation afterthought

here's a photo of some hopi blue at the community garden that has shed its husk for some reason or other...why isn't the salient point..it is the appearance of the ears themselves...much more developed than the ones in the back yard ( they are older ) but still not blue...a greenish sort of cast to them but not the deep blue of last season's ears...so..developmental stages or have they cross pollinated with the sweet corn? there is no sweet corn in my yard but hat doesn't mean someone nearby doesn't...it will, perhaps, be instructive to watch the exposed kernels to see if there is nay change with the passage of time or if there is some gene flow going on here.

resilience

the hopi blue maize plant in the top photo had its leaves and flower ravaged by starlings who were using it a perch as they ravaged the intermediate wheat grass from kansas ( which the powers that be there told me would not be an issue...but they are in kansas and this is indiana...hoosier rules apply )...still it soldiers on....producing at least two ears of corn...determined dna adapting to conditions...the third photo is of perennial teosinte because this is my blog and i think it's cool..in the bottom two photos you can see that those weird spherical blooms on the yam vines are giving way to yam bulbs as the plant prepares to become invasive...i have been hacking back unwanted yams all season and they are still popping up even after i recovered hundreds of them from the garden last autumn...all perennials seem to be invasive to a greater or lesser degree...this one is nearly as aggressive as jerusalem artichokes.