spuds and maize

a short shift at work left me with time to drop by the portage garden to see how the plants faired in the storm the other evening...the maize is unfazed...and somewhere about twelve feet tall...rivaling the industrial...

and with at least as many ears per plant...

i would surmise the presence of some robust support roots were of some use in all the wind...so the maize is fine...on to supds...

mixed indices there...more plants have signaled the end of their season...

while others ( of the 120 day sort one imagines ) are still producing blooms...so...

i dug what was ready...

took them home and cleaned them up...eight pounds five ounces...so closing in on seventeen pounds and the bed is not done just yet...i don't know about you, but the gardener is pleased.

delay can be costly at times

when i was at the campus garden a week ago it was in a downpour of rain...the photos i took were clearly blurred by the excess of water around and, because of the rain, i elected not to harvest the remainder of the einkorn wheat...this was error...

error because when i arrived at the garden this morning the first thing i noticed was that the starlings and grackels had beaten me to the harvest...

what was left was so thoroughly picked over i lfet it for th birds...fortunately i did bring in enough to plant nest spring so it was not a dead loss...

the bed is in the process of being colonized by japanese bottle grass so nest trip out i will be cleating the bed and planting some sort of cover crop...not rye grass since what i did plant in this bed failed so perhaps field peas to turn under in the autumn...

on the other side of the bed the asparagus has put up another summer spear...so things seem in order there...

over in my "official" bed the hopi turquoise is looking robust...

flowers are emerging and we will be looking for ears soon enough...while we are talking flowers...

the alfalfa is still blooming, however...

there are signs of fall as the fertilized blooms die back and begin forming seed pods ( alfalfa is a legume after all...there will be pods )...and in further flower/fertilization news...

the garden is home to a flourishing bed of carolina horse nettle, complementing the plants scattered throughout the garden lawn...and the blooms...

across the bed...

are being happily worked over by what was, by my unscientific survey, a dozen bumble bees...and the result of that work ( aside from well fed bees )?

a secondary reproductive system to complement their spread by rhyzomes...like palmer's amaranth, carolina horse nettle has found a home here.

zea in july

i was deep in the more rural area of the suburban/rural nexus today picking up a truckload of hostas and so had an opportunity to view some industrial fields...king corn...

with this shot where the camera was at eye height you can get an idea of how tall these plants are...

acres of dense yellow #2 planted six inches apart in rows spaced ( probably, however i did not wade out to measure ) thirty inches apart...

with each plant producing one...

or, at most, two ears...a lot of plant work for high fructose corn syrup...although some will be used to produce ethanol and the shredded stalks and leaves will become feed at some cafo ( "the cattle just love it"...until it gives them acidosis )...closer to home (i.e. the back yard )...

some teosinte...

and some hopi turquoise maize are just begining to flower...

while some the teosinte that was planted earlier...

and some galss gem maize are further along...no sign of silks, much less ears yet...then again these are heirloom domesticate varieties ( actually the teosinte is wild ) that are not being goaded along by some genetic tinkering ( beyond the original domestication that is...all early farmers were genetic engineers )...give them a few more weeks.

einkorn

"at first people adjusted to drier conditions by turning to small seeded-grasses and other stand-by foods. in about 10,000 b.c. they took the next logical step, attempting to grow grasses to expand the wild harvest. the first domesticated seeds appear in the village, rye, einkorn ( a variety of coarse grained wheat ), and lentils..."brian fagan. "the long summer:how climate changed civilization"

an early run to the campus garden showed...

that the asparagus was upright...

and that a fair amount of the einkorn was ripe enough to harvest...

so i brought in a small sheaf ( not that the harvest of all the grain would have rendered a large one )...

einkorn is nearly as ancient as agriculture and it retains numerous "wild and weedy" qualities...true it turns amber when ripe...however the "waves of grain" would be rather short...the tallest of the ones i brought in measures...

a shade over twenty-nine inches from its roots to the tip of its awns...

the largest ears are around two inches long...

the smallest ones are not...

the larger ear produced a dozen tough little husks...

which produced nine grains of wheat ( three were empty duds )...

the smaller one just one...it took me three minutes to extract the grain from the larger ear...and these are recent arrivals...the husks only become more difficult to remove as they dry...that should provide enough information to estimate how long it will take to process the sixty-one ears i have...like most agricultural work einkorn is labor intensive...conditions must have been dificult ( if not desperate ) to try to utilize it as a sort od staple...humas are adaptable however adaptation isn't always simple...

in other garden news the hopi turquoise is looking robust...

the alfalfa is still blooming away...

so is the carolina horse nettle ( in a quick, unscientific survey i counted more than one hundered plants )...

the bumble bees are still mugging it...

they will bear more fruits.