a little more shade ( perhaps )

yesterday i was in the corn heartland...today a run to the supermarket to resupply the work larder led me tot he industrial field next door and a few, mostly subjective unscientific, observations ( you will need to go somewhere else for deductive reasoning...i don't have time for it...i am being inductive and always will be...is suspect the deductive of manipulating data to fit hypotheses...why karl popper invented "falsifiability" right? that wouldn't have had anything to do with his politics...oops! perhaps the rant blog would be a better venue for this line of thought...back tot he cornfield please )...the wild grapes in the berm ( first ) seem to be beginning to produce ( second ) we will have to keep an eye on that...meanwhile the outer row od dense yellow #2 seems to have outgrown the shade cast by the biomas in the berm ( third )...the preponderance of plants in the second row in are producing two ears each ( fourth though seventh )...however, even though i looked until my shoes were thoroughly soaked on a dewy morning, i could not find a plant in the outer row with more than one ( eighth through tenth ) so did the slower start provided by the berm's shade impact yield in the outer row? informally and unscientifically i have to think it did...i will go back and look for second ears and my whole hypothesis my prove to be falsified..if that's what happens then popper's correct despite wittgenstein's brandishments.

industrial growth

there has been growth in the field by the supermarket...last week the corn was about up to my waist ( first photo )...a week of torrential rains and hot weather have spurred the plants on to about eye level in some places ( second )...there are still differences in height in the rows ( third ) however the leaves are beginning to close the arches over the space between the rows ( fourth )... while there has been growth in the shade ( fifth ) it hasn't been much ( sixth )...in fact the entire row along the berm of the field is stunted by comparison with the rest of the field ( seventh )...and while we are talking berm, it is more heavily populated by wild grapes ( eighth ) than i had suspected...and they are taking some hits from japanese beetles ( ninth and tenth )...still looking for them to produce fruit...the season is moving along...the time has come and they are running late...or i am just not looking in the right places...more as it irrupts.

just seeds

autumn = seeds...the top photo is of some wild grape seeds i came across...the fruit, which isn't nearly as large as domesticated grapes, has desiccated leaving a hard shell around the seeds...so i put them in some distilled water to soak until the coating softens...i will clean them and stratify them along with the seeds i collected from this past september's grape harvest and germinate them in the spring just to see how well it works...the third photo is the ramp seed head...only one seed has found the soil and it did that some time ago...have to wonder what the others are waiting for...the rest of the photos are of more emergent teosinte seeds ( and a photo bombing ant )..doubtless there will be more.