unscheduled indoor move...ready or not the season begins

this mashua plant out in the half barrel is still looking good...the first frost will end that...they are not cold tolerant...one of the three had died back and i dug it up yesterday and...disappoitingly...i found zero tubers...so i decided to act...

i mixed some potting soil and vermiculite in a container...

and dug the third plant up out of the barrel, leaving as much soil around the roots as possible ( it has been raining so the soil was soft and the plant came up readily ) to avoid root shock...

and i planted it under the lights...i brought in a trellis from the barrel to give the plant a place to vine and i festooned it with some of "puddles" garland for good luck..that was a mighty long lived resilient plant...

we will be growing her offspring from her seed in spring...

a...i am uncertain how to term it so let's say twig...broke off the plant in transit so i dipped it in rooting hormone and planted it with the rooted plant...sometimes this works...sometimes not...we will see...

it's october and milkweed pods aren't all i will be collecting...i have a dozen butterfly weed pods to harvest and share...

and the delicate yellow blooms on the sweet clover...

are producing delicate little seed pods...

the teosinte has produced many ears...there is a threat of frost this week...so i will bee covering the clustered plants and leaving the outlying ones in the open...to save work and materials and to act as a sort of control to see if the frost exposed seeds come out viable...making a virtue of a necessity i imagine.

gone at a loss

i missed the harvest in the bean field by the supermarket...the president says soybean prices are up...he is mistaken and i believe it is purposeful because politicians lie from expediency...actually soybeans have lost 140.60 per metric tone since last april and $63.68 since the thirtieth of last month...it must have been worth the cost of harvesting the beans, however i am not sure by how much...it might have even been at a loss but better than letting them rot in the field...i do not have enough data to give a clear conclusion...

there were a few stems with pods still attached lying about...

and the odd bean or two dislodged from a pod...

on the whole though the beans were scoured out of the field a lot more efficiently that the dense yellow #2 was last autumn...seems they got the bulk of the beans...

in a side note, the milkweed pods in the berm of the field are ripening and this one had split open..i collected a few and will go back for more..there will be milkweed in the yard and re-wilded and i have someone to send some off to as well..the filed may be harvested but i am not finished there just yet

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.