silks, seeds, green manures, and a bee

tramping around the back yard after work it seems evident that more teosinte seeds are becoming visible as ears separate from the stems and begin to shed their husks in preparation for maturation and shattering...the silks in the third photo tell me there are more ears on the way ( which doubtlessly means more photos )...around the corner from the "wild and weedy" ancestor i discovered a nearly inert bee on a sunflower...my friend fern the bee keeper tells me it has to be at least 55 degrees fahrenheit for them to fly...it's 57 out there right now and i am not sanguine about this bee's ability to find the hive tonight...not a good prognosis for a social insect...along side the sunflowers a patch of green manures is rolling right along with yellow peas, winter vetch, winter rye, alfalfa, and rd clover all in that shot...fall is here...we aren't nearly finished yet.

i was never an iltus fan anyway

"...the report concluded that american soil still eroded at an alarming rate more than four decades after the dust bowl. in the 1970s the nation lost four billion tons of of soil each year, a billion tons more than in the 1930s." "dirt: the erosion of civilizations" david montgomery.____not, perhaps, because americam agricultural methodology had lapsed back into some primitive state...it was never very good to begin with apparently....soil degradation as a driver of manifest destiny doesn't get a lot of air time in history books but it was an issue...but because of the whole earl butz " fence row to fence row" business of bringing marginal land into production to produce more grain to use as a geopolitical weapon in the nixon/kissinger years that carries over to today...so what's the field by the supermarket got to do with that? well it may not be marginal land but it is feedstock for the industrial food sector..but earl butz...and even hugh iltus...is not what this post is about... the biomass that permeates the rows will be something of a challenge to the combine i'm thinking but all that mulch and all those roots down the rows will certainly cut down on any erosion going on...like a no til field there is less disruption of the soil ( growth medium? ) and so less loss...not that there's none but there wouldn't be as much...and hugh iltus does figure into this post a bit...the husk one of the ears on the closely spaced plants has clearly split open exposing the bright dense yellow #2...and the ear on the neighboring plant has fallen over from it's standard upright position and ha a split husk as well...there are quite a few of them out there actually and, if the gmo people haven't spliced in a suicide gene ( the say they don't but they lie a lot...capitalists after all ), these could reseed themselves as autumn progresses...an end, perhaps, of the symbiosis between humans and corn? maybe ( if anyone cares...bet monsanto would ) but not the end of dense yellow #2 as feedstock and as a weapon.

roads to nowhere

"enough american farmland disappeared beneath concrete to cover nebraska in the three decades from 1945 to 1975. each year between 1967 and 1977 , urbanization converted almost a million acres of u.s. farmland to nonagricultural uses. in the 1970s and 1980s over a hundred acres of u.s. crop;and was converted to nonagricultural uses every hour. "dirt: the erosion of civilizations" david montgomery_________the pioneer shave made progress this late season...the bushhogged field wasn't going to stand empty for long...thistles are trying to bloom in october and the false chamomile ( an aster family member...which makes sense given the time of year ) has succeeded...some of the other "weeds" are going to seed for the spring...and the plant in the sixth photo is queen anne's lace if it's anything...and the project that killed the crop of no til soy beans that would have been here this season? so far it's the gravel bed of a road that curves around to end in another pile of fine gravel...a curved road going nowhere...i'm thinking anything like a building isn't going in until spring.

gradual slowdown ( we never close )

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container spuds

after i got home form the community garden i noticed a couple of potato plants in the containers on the south side of the house had finished so i pulled thme up and found multiple tubers in the root balls...a fair collection from a couple of varieties ( red pontiac and the hardy ollala )...along with a collection of smaller tubers that may or may not be mature enough to germinate clones...we will see since they are a bit small for eating...a but over a pound a plant from each container...they will go into the bin as soon as they dry...the seed potatoes will go elsewhere