dichotomy

unmistakable signs of autumn are visibly creeping into the garden...along with the maize die-back ( aided by our furry friends ) the tomatoes are beginning o wind up and the cucumber/bean wall ( top two photos ) is beginning to turn...an improvident grasshopper ( third photo ) is prowling about for a meal...their presence is another indicator of the lateness of the season...and yet the garden isn't ready to call it quits for the season yet...the second spear the resilient asparagus plant threw up is beginning to "fern" and help feed the roots to ( hopefully ) winter over...and the sugar snap peas are producing...pods...so there's life out there yet...we will be getting out into the garden ( irregardless of the swarms of mosquitoes )over this coming weekend to begin preparing it for winter...removing those plants whose season is clearly over and creating space for green manures, cover crops, and for some fall planting red inchelium garlic...there is enough to provide at least twenty plants for next season...we will plant this weekend and then mulch the beds as the season cools...always work and planning going on...the garden never sleeps...just slows down a bit.

pod corn = zea

this pod corn plant ( top photo ) was in the community garden until about an hour ago ( i brought it home because i had no real way to clean off the root system and i didn't have a photo graphic scale either )...like every other maize plant in the garden it had been nailed by squirrels...it was broken in half and the eat is literally chewed up ( second photo )...evolutionary mutant or not it is still recognizably a member of the zea family...not only by the morphology of its leaves and the production of thickly husked ears ( like corn rather than the fragile husks teosinte produces ) but by the mass of support roots ( third photo ) it uses to give the stalk stability...every zea plant i have ever seen from maize to dense yellow #2 to teosinte has these structures and they are here in abundance...the bottom photo is of the root system with a scale to give an idea of depth...as an annual the roots are a bit shallower than a perennial...no need to go below the frost line to winter over...there will be more plants removed in the next few weekends as we prepare the garden for winter.

teosinte and garlic

the northern tepehuan teosinte in my yard is flowering nicely...there is a third plant with a flower just emerging and the single plant on campus has flowered as well so there should be enough cross pollination to ( hopefully ) produce ears before the frosts hit...the mail brought a box of red inchelium seed garlic from baker creek heirloom seeds...five bulbs with enough cloves to start thirty-five plants...there's another half pound on the way from sustainable seeds so there will around sixty plants worth altogether...enough to share around and begin fall planting in the community garden this coming weekend...so there will be bed clearing for garlic as well as green manures and cover crops in the offing...as a bonus they sent a packet of red romaine lettuce seeds...lettuce and garlic will be among the very first things up in the garden next spring along with a mix of snow peas and spinach as the opening salvo in a season-long rotation of crops for continuous harvest ( or, as continuous as we can make it )...this season isn't over but it's not too early to start a plan for the next.

alfalfa

shorter days, somewhat cooler temperatures, creeping die back in the garden = autumn...officially it begins two weeks form this coming wednesday but the time has come to begin preparing the garden beds for winter and, by extension, next spring...my intention is to get out into the community garden next weekend and begin removing the finished plants and prepare to plant green manures, cover crops, and the work with garlic, the first of the fall planters...to get a grip on what i will be doing ( never planted alfalfa before today ) i went out back first...alfalfa is a legume usually grown as forage but since it is a pulse it will set nitrogen as readily as any other...it will, if started early enough, also winter over providing some roots to hold the soil together...the second potato patch in my yard has been fallow and raising a crop of creeping charley since i harvested so this afternoon i dodged the mosquitoes and turned it over with a shovel...broke it up with the warren hoe ( top photo )...i have several packets of alfalfa seed ( second photo ) that i ordered last spring with the rest of the garden seed ( i have been planning this for some time...looking for a good green manure match ) they will cover one hundred square feet of bed and this potato patch was about forty...so i dumped about half a packet into my hand ( bottom photo ) broadcast the seed, and raked it in, adding a fair watering to help germination along...i will add the proper bacterial inoculant after the next rain ( forecast for wednesday )and...after the alfalfa has had time to establish itself...i will add in a bit of winter rye to aid nitrogen retention...i have enough seed left to cover five of the beds in the community garden...i also have ample winter vetch seed as well as dixie clover...so we can still cover all the beds...and it is probably just as well...alfalfa exhibits the curious trait of auto-toxicity...after a bed has been seeded with alfalfa it is difficult to reseed the next season, so like potatoes, the beds it is grown in need to rest and the crop rotated to another area...potatoes should be rotated out of beds for a minimum of three years ( not because of auto-toxicity, but because of viruses and pests )beds need only a year of rest from alfalfa...so the experimentation with matching plants to soil and climate continues...tuning takes time...we will get there...more on the alfalfa as it comes up.

gmo and artificial selection

all domesticated plants are genetically engineered by humans...which is not to say that their genes were spliced in a lab...nothing that clinical...but the plants were modified by humans through artificial selection...farmers bred crops from plants that had superior characteristics ...either they tasted better or the produced more or matured more quickly...whatever...the plants with those desired characteristics were encouraged to reproduce...those that did not weren't...this is how teosinte evolved from a plant that produced husked seed ears that opened and shattered, scattering the seed into maize which has such a thick husk protecting the kernels that the ears cannot open on their own, this placing the continued survival of corn in human hands completely ( that our food system is profoundly dependent on corn makes it true symbiosis in my book )...hugh iltus would call this "catastrophic sexual mutation "" i call it genetic engineering, albeit in a filed , not a lab...i have remarked on the peculiar spacing ( probably more than once ) of the corn in the field behind the big box stores ( top photo )...i thought the seeder was skipping at first but now i am not certain...some of these plants are only three inches apart ( second photo )...in the community garden we allowed at least twelve inches and perhaps more ( the seeding direction set one foot as a minimum )...these are far closer than that and yet both those plants produced two ears ( third photo )even though they should have starved on another...this is genetic engineering at it best ( worst? )...both produced one large and one small ear...the large ears are pretty standard corn ear sized ( bottom photo ) and that second ear will certainly aid the hot pocket population and put hfcs in all the pepsi you care to drink...so, while human domesticators were always monkeying around with engineering plant genes they did it outside and over a fair period of time...sometime accidentally finding "improvements" and sometime sweating the procedure...either way you slice it the corn behind the big box store is a lab spliced mutant that travels far outside the realm of natural genetic variation that supplied the original farmers with the tools to feed more and more people...i am nostalgic.

asparagus in two places at once and other garden stuff

the asparagus across campus in the pgp has thrown up some autumn spears as the day length has shortened ( top photo )...not to be out done by a cousin the asparagus transplant the i had given up as lost and which proved to be far more resilient than i credited it has done likewise ( second photo ) good news for the asparagus friendly in the community...and good news for the gardeners too...like the sugar snap peas in my yard the ones on campus have burst into bloom...pods are next in the natural progression...they are bush peas so will require no trellis...the cucumbers have been looking tired for a while now but today i notice some fall colors creeping into the pole bean plants as well..it will be time to finish harvesting, clean up, and plant fall green manures and cover crops soon...winter vetch, winter rye, dixie clover, and alfalfa will be joining the new zealand white clover in the garden for the winter...fall planting of jerusalem artichokes will need to be done and seed garlic is on the way for an opportune placement as well...the garden never sleeps...just slows a bit.

corner boxes, flowers, helianthuis, arborvitea

it's september but the flowers ellen and shannon planted in may are still blooming away in the corner box on the apartment building side of the garden...not being a flower guy i cannot name them ( beyond the bachelor's buttons ) so it is up to you to fill in the blanks left by my ignorance...helianthus i understand fairly well however and the corner box on the washington street side of the garden is alive with members of that family...they are not finished blooming either apparently...but we will be eating parts of some of them soon...the arborvitae is liking the wet summer and has overcome its original shock to add a few inches in height...the season is not over yet but barring unexpected disaster we can , i think, say it is happy in its new home...next season may call for a reduced watering schedule...provided the climate cooperates.