the cornage continues

when i got to the garden after work this morning the first thing i noticed was...

that grounds maintenance seems to have abdicated responsibility for mowing the garden's lawn...it borders on what the municipality i live in would term "rank vegetation"...there would be a citation soon...

further on...even from a distance you can see the maize has been ravaged...

the squirrels have been hard at it on the stalks...

and, even more brazenly, having a picnic lunch at the nearby table...i surmised this might be so by the detritus left on the table...then a tenant of the apartment building told me he actually witnessed the fiesta and "laughed my ass off" confirming the suspicion...

i saved half an ear and brought in two that were done ( that makes four i have harvested...four more than the last time i grew corn here )...the half is a rainbow of color and the other two...

and the two i harvested are purple flints...doomed to be decorations i am afraid...

in other spots around the garden the carolina horse nettle is thriving and still in full flower...although i have sen no fruits...

a somewhat startling visitor on a tomato plant...

and an errant bee that seemed unable to decide whether or not to land...at first i though the fact that i was pursuing it with a camera might have some contributory impact on its seeming diffidence..however i ran across the critter later when i was unarmed and it still was hovering about but not alighting...the season is getting late and perhaps it has had a long and difficult haul...i did not get the camera back out...enough is enough.

northern tepehuan silks

found the first ones today...hoping for a warm october ( even with the evil portents that may bring with it )...not earth shattering news...i am geeked anyway...

early september zea news

the maize patch out back is loaded down with bean vines that are causing the stalks to bend down at the top...this has not stopped them from moving forward with hat they grew to do...

and, unlike the squirrel ravaged maize in the community garden...

some of the untouched ears out back are finishing up...

the survival of the dense yellow #2 is no surprise...the gleaners skip it in the fields ( and so bean fields are festooned with volunteer corn )...leaving it be is a habit in the wild...it looks as if there has been some cross pollination going on with the heirloom maize ( which, with a longer season, is not finished yet )...colorful kernels sprinkled in with the yellow...i believe i will save them for seed just to see what turns up next season...

across the yard the northern tepehuan teosinte is churning out flowers and support roots...no ears yet though..and probably not til next month...if the weather holds...

meanwhile the zea mays mexicana has a lot of green seed showing...

and more than a few ears that have finished up and shattered...the stalks with shattered ears would be laying down on the ground now, spreading the seed away from the parent plant...if i hadn't forced them to stand up with bamboos and twine...

so i could collect what mature seed i could as the ears mature...one eighth of an ounce so far...eighty-six dark and mature seeds..i am seriously hoping for another warm october so i can collect some viable seed from the northern tepehuan... ( those plants are a second generation grown from seed i harvested in my yard last year )...i cannot find the commercially available anymore and the usda does not seem to have any..i have a supply in the freezer so an early frost wouldn't be a tragedy...still..i would like more..i am a bit greedy about teosinte.

catastrophic sexual mutation

while i was at the garden i ran across some ears of maize that had obviously finished their season so i took them off the stalk...

i was correct in my suspicion that they were flints since no one ( including humans and squirrels ) wants to crack a tooth trying to chew them and i ...grinding them to cornmeal is the only real option...

i left the husks on the other two ears because i wanted to have a look at something when i got home...these are heirloom varieties of maize, not the monsanto genetically engineered variety...well..actually they are genetically engineered but we will get to that in a minute...

what i found was a dozen husks arrayed in six tight fitting layers around an ear of maize with kernels stuck in the cob like they were set in concrete...there was no way those kernels were ever going to see the light of day without some help from a human or a squirrel...when geneticists and maize historians write about this they call it "catastrophic sexual mutation"...but it isn't a mutation the maize did to itself...it did not try to commit suicide...humans selected the plants for these characteristics so the ears would not shatter the way the ones its ancestor teosinte produces do...they wanted all those kernels for themselves...and the upshot is that now maize cannot reproduce without human help..humans vanish, so does corn...and since dense yellow #2 is feed stock for all those extruded hot pockets and the rest of the industrial menu we can't seem to do without corn...symbiosis...co-evolution...call it what you want we need each other...

even the volunteer corn that springs up in bean fields is germinated from kernels on cabs that have been broken open by the combine and left behind...un-husked corn is not going to germinate on its own ( which might be an interesting experiment if i have another intact ear of flint it might be a bit of garden fun )..it needs help...from humans or a gleaner that breaks it open and leaves some behind...

i will be drying these ears...the larger will, no doubt, be used as some sort of holiday decoration by someone around here...the smaller one i will keep for seed ( which is counter intuitive in terms of artificial selection...i should be keeping the larges for seed...i will be overruled ) and, eventually, i will pry those kernels out with that little french made carbon steel knife off to the right.

meteorological autumn

it is saturday so i was out to the garden early...it has rained overnight with enough precipitation to preclude the need to water so i stopped by just to have a look around just before the harvest days event rolls in on tuesday...( noon til two p.m. for the interested...unless there is inclement weather..which strikes me as odd since the weather is a serious part of the garden and the plants seem to take it pretty well in stride )...things were damp...

autumnal signs are multiplying...the cucumber vines are pretty much finished...the orange cucumbers may be holding some viable seed however...some are disintegrating in the beds...there may be no need to plant next spring...there may be multiple volunteers...

the asparagus is fine even though it has been invaded front and back by squash vines...no worries...those woody stems can handle it...

no new spears to report...however the berries ate still ripening...seed soon...

difficult as it may be to see in the photo, one of the potato plants in the back of the asparagus bed was finished..it yielded enough elmer's blue fingerling spuds to serve as a side with lunch sometime...and the smaller ones can be used as seed...

most of the cornstalks are still standing...

some are not...

most of the ones left standing have been worked over by the squirrels looking for lunch...except for that multi-colored dent someone opened but no one will touch...too much starch, too little flavor apparently...

as a final note, that marker of climate change...the non-native carolina horse nettle is thriving on the o=south end of the inland sea...it has moved in...colonized..and is here to stay...one presumes birds to be the vector of its spread to the area...however it arrived, it has settled in for a stay.