pulling and planting

for what i believe is the fourth consecutive week rain has absolved me of the rseponsibility of watering at the campus garden...

not that there is all that much to water...cleanup has begun...

my bed is a mixed bag of green and brown...the alfalfa is still booming away...

the hot pepper is showing continued moxie...

and there are a couple of green ears on a tiller of the shattered maize..those won't last long and i pulled the two that have already been squirrel ravaged...

the teocintli has announced the end of its season...it is a fine tan color and the ears have split...

i was, however, able to harvest the remaining seed...a fair success in teocintli terms...

teocintli and maize support roots just for morphology's sake...

this spud was finished as well and, for an elmer's blue, yielded a fair handful of tubers...i was relieved to see the pile of compost/mulch had vanished from the proximity of my be with no contamination...the green manures are coming along and i will be adding more to the harvested spaces very soon...that of necessity since it is getting late...

the winter wheat i planted nine days ago is filling in fairly well...

so i sowed in some sweet clover to set nitrogen and keep the population of "natives" down...

it is time to plant the second bed of small grains so it had to be cleared..it has any number of "natives" as denizens...however there were af ew volunteer spuds that were unfortunately as yet very green...they had to to make way for the new...

harvested early, we could call them "new potatoes, even though the season is late...

so i cleared and turned the bed, added a layer of compost...

and the broadcast half the bed in winter rye...

and half in wheat thusly reducing my rye yield by half and, hopefully, increasing my wheat yield by fifty percent in an effort to achieve a more viable return in whole wheat flour next season...we will see if expanded tillage results in more grain...you'd think so...nothing is certain in this...

we will close with the obligatory autumnal photos of ripening tesocintli ears...

and the odd late season bee or two.

spuds and ancestors

the campus garden is a bit less quiet than it was on my last visit...

there are peppers and collards in one of the beds...other seasons are underway...

there are forty-seven asparagus spears up...

some of them are three feet tall and woody as could be...

some are just coming up...

some have "ferned" and begun to feed the roots...

and some have been harvested above ground which makes me very unhappy...not the harvesting...the above ground...

leaving live stems above ground increases the possibility of insect and disease infestation/infection...so i cut them off at a diagonal below the surface...i see there will be more maintenance trips just to check up...

over in my bed there is some significant movement...

the younger alfalfa plant is booming along and the elder has finally recovered from the transplant shock and has some robust new growth...cool...bring on the bees...

the government spuds have all leafed...

and the morene...

tacna...

michigan purple...

and basadre are displaying some of the potatoes genetic diversity in their leaves...

in the other trench a bison and a few elmer's blues have begun photosynthesis...

when i got home and checked on the teocintli seed i found that both the zea mexicana and northern tepehuan had some ready to plant...

so i loosened the soil with a warren hoe...

and planted four of each...when the remainder progress far enough in the baggies they may find themselves on campus...

as i was planting i ran across some old friends and wanted to give them an opportunity to say "hey" and recognize the yoeman work they do in sustaining my yard...thanks.