transitions

no matter how early or late it is in the season i can always find movement...which isn't surprising since life is movement and mutability...some plants out there are moving towards their "adult' selves...the nasturtium in the first photo and the bogota market mashua in the second are showing a family resemblance that will increase with time..the larger red seedless grape vine has latched onto the trellis with a second tendril ( third and fourth )...that is gratifying after last season's debacle...the lone asparagus plant is prospering well enough to afford a second spear ( fifth )...about three inches tall now..it will "fern" soon...both the northern tepehuan tesointe ( sixth ) and zea mays parvaglumis ( seventh ) have produced a fourth leaf...big news in the zea world...the winter rye ( eighth and ninth ) is coming along well...and there are multiple ears of wheat ( tenth and eleventh ) around the periphery of the yard that promise hours of threshing and winnowing fun...finally the last photo shows that for some of the very early starters changes are coming that mark, not an end, but a shift in the cycle...the leaves on the ramp plant in the last photo are clearly dying back leaving the stem for a bloom exposed...energy shifted from production to reproduction...hoping for many seeds.

tendrils and a little morphology

i built a trellis from wood and galvanized wire cable this spring to replace the abortive steel and electrical wire contraption of last year ( top photo ) and today the larger if the seedless grapes ( second and third ) showed me i was finally on track as it reached out and grabbed the uncoated cable with a tendril ( fourth )...gratified is too simple an adjective...and while we are on the subject of tendrils, vines, and trellises, the chinese yam is firmly anchored to the cage around the pepper plant ( fifth ) however the vine has cleared the top of the cage by a good two feet( sixth )...the holiday weekend will, in part, be spent providing it something to anchor to...the seventh photo is of a newly hatched mashua blanca leaf while the next two are of leaves on bogota market mashua plants...the tenth through twelfth photos are of newly minted nasturtium leaves...they are young but share characteristics that will become more obvious with age...i will eave it to you to pick them out...finally:

one of the pepper plants is flowering...these, along with potato flowers, prove vegetable blooms can be extraordinarily attractive....just saying....and i see the sixth and sevwenth photos are in the incorrect order...blame the gardener.

bogota market

the season out back is coming along with more movement and new additions...both of the bogota market mashua plants are up ( first and second photos ) and their kinship to nasturtiums is plain to see...no word on the mashua blanca yet...i am all anticipation...the walking onions are beginning to "walk" ( third ) and the aerial bulbs continue to look alien ( fourth )...the asparagus plant in the back bed is doing fine ( fifth ) and so is the new spear ( sixth )...the dying back ramp leaf in the seventh photo is sheltering a stem that will ( hopefully ) produce a bloom and then seed...finally the eighth photo is of some winter rye ( which is actually in focus to the left ) and the ninth is some hard red spring wheat along the margins of the back yard near the alley where a stand has irrupted from seed i scattered there in spring 2016...wheat has viability seemingly near that of maize..more as it comes up.

"climate" addendum

i found an emer's blue chitting away behind the barometer on my bookshelf...so i planted it ( top three )..looking around out there afterwards i found a pepper plant blooming ( fourth )and took a better photo of the chinese yam vine ( fifth )...sixth photo is northern tepehuam teosinte getting grounded and the seventh is zea mays parvaglumis...another variety of teosinte...see the resemblance? the ramp in the eighth photo is dying back to invest mor eenergy in the flower that will top the green stem in the middle in a month or two ( ninth ) i am done in the yard i think...there are other things to do.

climate

thursday when i got home from work it was ninety-one degrees ( fahrenheit ) in my back yard ( first photo )...friday it was nearly fifty ( second ) ..and today it has moderated to a more seasonable sixty-five or so ( third ) ...none of this has stopped the rains...which continue to fall at different rates in a suburban back yard and in the same pattern...the gauge farthest to the east has measured 3.5" of rain this month ( fourth ) the gauge neat the middle of the yard has 3.9" ( fifth )...and the one on the north side 4.3" ( sixth..and that total represents a shade over 11% of the annual precipitation average for these parts...in 21 days )...a vacillating temperature regime hasn't stopped growth out there either with more wheat coming in ( seventh and eighth...no activity in the emmer or syrian dwarf wheat...this is pacific blue stem and hard red spring wheat we're talking )...the egyptian walking onions continue to unfurl their aerial bulbs ( ninth ) and the red clover is blooming and setting nitrogen all at once ( tenth )...meanwhile the chines yam has easily topped the cage around the pepper plant and is looking for anything to anchor a vine to ( eleventh )...the heart shaped leaves are growing ( twelfth ) and there will be areal bulbs here too soon enough...far more than the onions will ever produce...there is a season out there and there will be more going on...where it will end up at is anybody's guess...part of the excitement.