zea and solanum

with a day off i found the time to wander by the portage garden to see what was up...and what is up is the maize...

this is an heirloom flint corn, not sweet corn or dense yellow #2, so the plants all have multiple ears irrupting along the stalks...i counted thirty-one ears in an unscientific survey ( in other words i may have missed some...or, given how thing are these days, double counted one ) so we will have maize i believe...

on the other side of the bed one of the remaining potatoes ( there are still half a dozen holdouts refusing to finish ) announced it was done and it produced three healthy tubers which i took home...

rinsed off...

and weighed...this brings me up to the neighborhood of twenty pounds so far from two-thirds of a four by eight foot bed...we may see thirty if we're lucky...we will see.

stood up

a short but reasonably sharp line of thunderstorms came thorugh here saturday eveining and knocked down some of the zea out back...zea in general and teosinte in particular either wants to ( teosinte ) or doesn't mind ( maize ) falling over...

so i stood it back up...albeit, for some, with the help of some bamboos and twine...for the most part however they simply stood back up when straightened...i worked sunday and so did not have time to make it to the portage garden so i went out there this morning...

i found there was a gap in the maize row as one of the plants had been knocked into the spuds...

which are still blooming prolifically and whose production of actual fruits is seeming to be of a low order of probability...these things happen...

the fallen plant is fairly large so i drove in a garden stake...

and with the help of some jute twine returned it to what will have to pass for verical for the nonce...it may straighten...it may not...as long as it still pollinates the silks it is of little importance...

the stalk has two ears in progress and there are signs of a possible third...

altogether i count seven ears out there and a few coming along out back...perhaps some corn meal and definitely seed for next season...

on other news from bed one, the row of happy beans is now engaging in bean production as well as blooming...cool beans.

more nightshades

i was out at the community garden today looking at carolina horse nettle and then i came home and had a look at their cousins the spuds...the first photo is of horse nettle buds and the second is of buds on the potatoes in my back yard......the third is a horse nettle bloom and the fourth is potatoes...the similarities are obvious to see...while i was out at the garden i put on gloves ( fifth...as a word of caution...gloves really are not proof against these thorns...grasp lightly...they will come though if you do not ) and harvested a few more fruits ( sixth through eighth )...the rest i will leave to "ripen on the vine" so to speak and see how large they may get.

andean tubers and microclimate

potatoes are genetically diverse and there are thousands of varieties that are adapted to some specific climates that the andes mountains provide from spuds that can tolerate dry conditions at the foot of the mountains to tubers that produce gylcoalkaloids as antifreeze at high altitudes ( and must be freeze dried to remove the poisonous alkaloids before eating ) so there may be good reason why the ollala potato in the first two photos produced such small tubers ( including the fact that they were on a shadier end of the patch ) and the german butterballs not three feet away produced some normal sized tubers...it may be the shade was the culprit but the butterballs got shade as the day progressed as well...didn't seem to impact them that adversely...i have ollalas in containers in the sun on the south side of the house...i see them as a fair comparison when they come in...meanwhile these small spuds are destined to be seed potatoes and i am willing to wager they find their way under the lights next winter...other andean tuber are thriving...the yacon in the fourth and fifth photos are looking robust as is the mashua in the last...comparison coming up as soon as the spuds tell me they're ready.

a diverse lot

the top four photos are of some pretty standard looking potato plants that have been in the container about a month and a half...easily recognizable as spuds to anyone familiar with the plant's physical traits...they are special to me because they are what came up from the tubers in the fifth photo...those tubers came from the viney looking plants in the sixth photo which were grown from the potato seeds in the seventh...we'll get to the last photo in a minute here...so the whole thing is a matter of morphology...they are all potato plants...all solanum tuberosum...but they have very different traits when grown from seed as opposed to being propagated from tubers...the seed generated plants are all very vine-like...trailing along the ground ( not that potato plants grown from tubers won't lay over when they get past a certain height...from too much shade for instance...but they don't start out trailing along the ground...they start out upright ) and the tuber propagated stand upright like the plants we know and love...the thought occurred to me that the vining might be from the artificial light they grew under in the basement over the winter...so i started some seeds again a few weeks ago and put them outside to see if natural light would make a difference...the last photo is of one of those plants trailing across the soil in the container..my conclusion is different starts = different traits...same plant or not.

elmer's blue, picasso, huaycu.

a look in some other bags found spuds chitting away so they went in too...the two elmer's blue ( top photo ) were split up...one into a peat pot for a trip to the community garden ( second photo ) and one into a container to spend the summer in my yard ( third photo ) the picasso in the fourth photo and the two "primitive cultivars" huaycu went into another container ( sixth photo ) a second picasso is not as far along a s the one on display here and it will also be going to the community garden...that will be a full bed before i am through.