Showing posts with label pole beans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pole beans. 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.

Saturday, October 6, 2018

ancestors always look old in photographs

my rain gauge measured an inch and a half of rain in september and has measured nearly that much in the last two days...october has started with precipitation...it is warm, relatively speaking, for early autumn...the temperatures have not even nearly approached frost warning levels and are expected to reach highs near eighty ( fahrenheit ) this coming week...which means there is till a lot of movement out back...
the stand of northern trepehuan teosinte looks old...like an ancestor in a colorized daguerrotype...like it's october...
which is deceiving since the plants have invested their autumn energy in flowers, silks, ears, and seeds...the warm weather is a plus in their long season ( even if it is an index of worse things for humans as a species )...looking for another year of backyard viable seed production...
some ears on a descendant from earlier in the season for some morphology...
fungi seem to be enjoying the weather...another dryad's saddle has appeared on the elm at the back of the yard...the third one this season on this tree...
a hand for some scale...
there are still bean blossoms and beans making their way along the vines that have moved through the maize and teosinte...there will be beans fresh as a side dish for a while yet...
hot banana peppers are still ripening...
the winter rye and wheat are filling in...even if they have been pummeled by the recent rains...
not to be outdone by the beans the cherry tomatoes are still blooming furiously...the plants are producing still with varying stages of ripeness on display...
the heirlooms had exactly one bloom going...and a few tomatoes, which, as they have been all season, are reluctant to ripen...hopefully they will grow in size and, now that i have had the chemical mechjanism that drives it explained, i will put them in a brown paper bag to ripen when the time comes