more autumn tubers

i planted these jerusalem artichokes three hundred and seventy days ago and they have been productive...not as productive as the one i harvested earlier in the month, but near enough...today's first plant required an excavation of an area of 39 X 20 inches to a depth of around 7 inches...that seems to be the normal depth for these things to grow at...it yielded seventy-six tubers of varying sizes...the second plant was right next to it ( these were two of the four plants outside the main sunchoke bed )so it was simply a matter of extending the excavation south...i ended up with a hole of around 36 X 48 inches, and the second plant came up with seventy-nine sunchokes for what i thought was a grand total of one hundred and fifty-five tubers...however i ran across another six as i was back filling the hole so we got one hundered and sixty-one from two plants...about eighty apiece...somewhat fewer than the nintey-one we got from the last plant that was harvested...but enough to tell me there are still hundreds left in the garden...i am preparing a few new raised beds here at home for some tubers, grains, grasses, tomatoes, and peppers...i believe i will be using them to store these jerusalem artichokes in the ground over winter rather than burdening my refrigerator, freezing them, or developing an uncontrolable tase for them...i can dig them up as the weather allows and compare taste as the spring approaches ( my reading tells me that the flavor changes, becoming sweeter after the first hard frost for instance)...an experiment in tuber cuisine.

chinese yams

i went and dug the yams this morning...and as i was doing so i picked up another twenty-five yam bulbs that were hiding by the base of one of the plants...the reading i've been doing said that the yams could be as much as thirty-six inches deep...i am greatful they were not...one set was about a foot down, the other eighteen inches or so which was good because the sandy soil under the garden is packed and hard as a bloody rock...which may explain why the yams weren't that deep...i ran into the odd jerusalem artichoke as i harvested the yam on the north side...i can't help but think i will be running into the odd jerusalem artichoke in perpetuity no matter what i am doing in the garden...i saw a multiplicity of red wigglers as i was doing this which is heartening...i have been returning organic matter to the garden as i harvest ( today it was some cowpea plants i put back in after the harvest ) and part of the area i dug up was where i put the remains of the potato plants in july...they have been processed into worm castings and that pleases me no end...putting the cowpea plants back in a green condition will enhance their nitrogen setting by returning what is in the plant to the soil as well as the surplus that was created by thier sybiosis with thier bacterial pals...i have also harvested several hundered seeds from these cowpeas so the process will be self sustaining...the season is almost over...some sunchokes to harvest and garden to mulch for winter...next season beckons.

winding down

the above-ground season for the jerusalem artichokes is over and it was looking a bit like an eyesore even by my " always appreciate things when they are on the edge of decay" rundown, seedy standards...so i took action and removed the stalks, leaving the multitude of tubers in the ground for a removal, replanting, and disbursment later this month...if the first plant was an indication i have alot to remove...the chinese yam vines are fading and doubtlessly it wil be time to harvest the yams soon as well....they are supposed to be about three feet down as opposed to the six or eight inches for the sunchokes and i am delaying a bit until the cowpeas mature...i harvested eight pods today, including the ones in the third photo...i bought a pound of cowpea seeds this spring and now i am reaping the next generation...reading tells me that the seed remains viable for two or more years so i shouldn't have to resupply my experement in "green manure"...the intital investment promises to be self-sustaining and that is philosophically sound for the garden...the tomatoes that have been poking along all season in the garden on campus and at home are starting to come around and now it's a race with frost...they are sub-tropical perennials and i cannot help but wonder if there was some sort of daylength issue going on...research has eliminated all but one non-potato andean tuber ( yakon ) as a candidate for growing in northwest indiana because of daylength problems and it could be that the same problem is ailing the tomatoes who seem to be responding to shorter days...we have done well in establishing the garden this year...made some mistakes and learned alot none the less...a bit more harvesting to do and then we will be mulching the garden for winter, doing more reading, and planning the second season...can't wait.

abundant reproduction

i've been to the garden twice so far this weekend...yesterday evening and again this morning...yesterday was the usual every-other-day run to do maintenance on the garden and i found that one of the cowpea pods was ready to harvest for seed ( they are probably mostly too tough to eat already although there are some small ones yet)...i counted seventy-six pods which is twenty more than there were wednesday...i saw a few that will be ready to pick next time i go and it remains to be seen how many we can harvest...but i won't need to purchase seeds for next season and that is part of what this garden is about...self sustainabillity...i can see we will have absolutely no trouble sustaining the jerusalem artichoke population...more the inverse actually...robust isn't a good enough description...i went out there this morning to dig up one of the sunchokes for tubers to plant here at home for next season and it was an education...i expected somewhat more in the way of tubers than the red nordlands produced and i wasn't disappointed...i chose the plant on the northeast corner of the garden because it was one of the ones planted away from the main body of artichokes and it was shading a clump of eastern gamagrass that i wanted to get into the sunlight...i initially found sixty-six tubers in the area immediately around the plant, and i assumed that was it...while digging i had exposed some of the gamagrass rootsysem and i thought i might clear away a bit more soil and take some photos of it...in the process of doing that i found another jerusalem artichoke attached to a rhizome...i followed it along and found another half dozen tubers just beyond the gamagrass...another sweep of the area was in order and since the plant was on the corner of the garden i began digging back under the university lawn and found sixteen more under their sod...so...eighty-eight tubers from one plant ( and i can't really be certain i found them all )...a shade over eleven pounds worth in all different shapes and sizes ( they look a lot like ginger roots )...with twelve plants still left to harvest i stopped to do some math...if that eighty-eight tubers holds up as a ballpark average for the remaining plants there are better than a thousand tubers left in the ground...stunning...at least to me as a novice to jerusalem artichokes...i had one raw with lunch...not bad if you don't mind bland...they would do well in a salad...haven't tried cooking any yet...more on that later

Vigna unguiculata II

the cowpeas are flowering...the top photo is from this morning...some fine looking lavender colored blooms with some darker purple highlights in the center...i noticed several buds on wednesday and as i examined them i saw there was a node just beneath them that was secreteting fluid and that there were three or four ants on every single one i found...i wondered what was up in an email to dr. forgey and she sent me some links to some articles...those tell me that ants play a minor role in the pollinization scheme cowpeas have evolved...they do polinate some plants, but most cowpeas in humid environments ( and i do believe we qualify) are self-pollinating...the ants , bees, and any other insects are a backup...the flowers open in the morning, close by noon, and fall off the same day they bloom so you have to be out by mid-morning or so to catch them...obviously they have been at it for a while as i am finding pods on the ends of some stems, a few of which are fairly large, so the plants are producing seeds...i planted the cowpeas to fix nitrogen, not as a crop, and i planted them rather late...some in june, around the asparagus, and some in july in the potato bed after the harvest...so i did not really expect them to reproduce...now it's a race with the first hard frost...it would be nice to be able to harvest any seeds from our own plants to use as next season's green manure...a sort of continuity from the first season to the second so i hope it will work out...i still have quite a few of the seeds i purchased this year, and my reading tells me that the seeds can remain viable for more than two years...but i'd still rather grow our own.

philosphical approaches

when i arrived on campus at 7:21 this morning the air positively reeked of nitrate fertilizer...not like someone had spilled some cleaning product, the way anhydrous ammonia smells in the cornfields...more like i'd stepped into a bag of scott's 20-20-10 turf-builder plus...the unmistakable odor of chemical fertilizer, and that's just what was going on...motorized spreaders were moving across the lawn flinging pellets of fertilizer as they went...i have written about the condition of the ground when we opened the garden in earlier posts...the bulk of the activity last autumn and of the early spring this year was devoted to ovecoming its chem-lawned sterility...from the addition of 3/4 of a ton of organic matter ( mostly compost and composted manure )to the worms and cowpeas there has been some effort to esablish and maintain soil that is fertile because it supports the life that makes it so rather than because it is chemically infused...the guy that was doing the lawn by hawthorn hall was very careful not to get too close to the garden ( because i was there weeding and doing a bit of watering? if you click on the thrid photo you can just make him and his buggy out ) ....he didn't do the strip of grass between hawthorn and the garden, and he stayed a good ten feet away on the south side so i do not think the garden was compromised by the chemicals...but it ceratinly does highlight the way the corporate and institutional worlds approach plant life and the more organic and self-sustaining philosophy we are trying to work out in the garden

a few more photos

just a few better ( i hope ) photos to illustrate a significant difference between Zea mexicana and Zea mays and some equally significant similarities...the top photo is of the tillers coming out of the base of the teosinte...teosinte develops branches as it grows, the maize does not...whether this was a trait selected against during domestication i cannot say...at least not now...more research...but it obviously disappeared along the way to its modern form...like teosinte, the maize develops alternate leaves from a central stalk, branching off on alternate sides as the plant grows...a close look at the photos of the maize shows that each plant has produced a single large ear...if the season were long enough for me to bring the Zea mexican to maturity it would produce multiple, much smaller ears, another significant difference that was doubtlessly selected for during domestication and which i will unfortunately have to find an illustration for from somewhere beyond the range of my own camera.