ancestors always look old in photographs

my rain gauge measured an inch and a half of rain in september and has measured nearly that much in the last two days...october has started with precipitation...it is warm, relatively speaking, for early autumn...the temperatures have not even nearly approached frost warning levels and are expected to reach highs near eighty ( fahrenheit ) this coming week...which means there is till a lot of movement out back...

the stand of northern trepehuan teosinte looks old...like an ancestor in a colorized daguerrotype...like it's october...

which is deceiving since the plants have invested their autumn energy in flowers, silks, ears, and seeds...the warm weather is a plus in their long season ( even if it is an index of worse things for humans as a species )...looking for another year of backyard viable seed production...

some ears on a descendant from earlier in the season for some morphology...

fungi seem to be enjoying the weather...another dryad's saddle has appeared on the elm at the back of the yard...the third one this season on this tree...

a hand for some scale...

there are still bean blossoms and beans making their way along the vines that have moved through the maize and teosinte...there will be beans fresh as a side dish for a while yet...

hot banana peppers are still ripening...

the winter rye and wheat are filling in...even if they have been pummeled by the recent rains...

not to be outdone by the beans the cherry tomatoes are still blooming furiously...the plants are producing still with varying stages of ripeness on display...

the heirlooms had exactly one bloom going...and a few tomatoes, which, as they have been all season, are reluctant to ripen...hopefully they will grow in size and, now that i have had the chemical mechjanism that drives it explained, i will put them in a brown paper bag to ripen when the time comes

drive

i was out at the garden and it begins to take on more aspects of autumn..there is, however a distinct dichotomy as well...

the asparagus has begun to show signs of dying back for the season...

at the same time it is still working on "berries'...

and, even though they were closed in the morning cool, the plants have produced a multiplicity of late blooms in an attempt to create more...

the tomato plant in my bed is clearly dying back from the bottom up...

clearly the top of the plants is clueless about what the bottom is up to...it is relentlessly blooming...

and producing fruit...

it isn't the only tomato plant in the garden pursuing the same late season goals...

the peppers haven't turned into october slackers either...they are blooming...

and they are producing away...the lesson is that reproduction is the imperative in the garden...delivering produce to humans is a very secondary activity even in the utterly artificial environment ( we could start with nature doesn't plant just one variety of plants in a given area and nothing is in rows and move on from there ) of the garden...even that artificiality can't blunt the drive.

corollary to "the beans are done"

the out of sync, two years in a row, bean filed behind the big bpox stores is pretty much done too...the green canopy has shriveled here as well...exposing pods...

although this field had been sprayed with herbicide at one point in the season there is green topping out above the beans and more than a little queen anne's lace in the rows...stubborn stuff it is not easily intimidated by humans or roundup...

queen anne's lace or not there is as large a multitude of harvest ready beans here as there are next tot he supermarket...and suffering from the same depressed prices...

the field has been for sale for a number of years ( in fact since i started writing about it ) an effort by the municipality to zone agriculture out of suburbia...keep them moving south..this may be bias...it may be aspiration...the results of over-extended aspiration will come up at the end of the post..but first...

the field across the street burdened with dense yellow #2 is for sale as well...more aspiration...

even though the majority of the plants were only three fingers ( which works out to two and a half inches by my tape rule ) they all produced exactly one large ear...

somewhat surprisingly, even when the planter skipped and the plants sprouted around a foot apart...

each plant still produced only one ear...limits to monsanto's engineering?

how long has the road to nowhere been in existence? i'd have to mine the blog...however i am inclined to say it has endured four years of patient waiting for the aspirations of sterling creek road to be realized...

it's still there...nicely improved...fire hydrant, double yellow line, an almost virgin sidewalk...waiting for the economy to catch up.