seeds

both the surviving northern tepehuan teocintli plants out back...

have come out in plentiful numbers of green ears ( green being the key...immature...not yet viable ) with their requisite of, now fading, maroon silks...a third of october is gone...and while there is no frost in the near forecast that is bound to come and, as usual with this plant's long season the race is on to see which comes first...frost or viability...

the eight foot zea mays mexicana is becoming aggressive about its autumn lean as it tries to spread its seed as far as it can...

it has a multitude of green ears as well...however...

because it has a shorter season it has had an ear or two finishing up almost daily ( oddly, to me, it seems to be the ones farthest from the roots ) and so...

i have already collected several hundred seeds which i am sorting into light/dark categories...some to freeze...some to germinate for next year's crop...the dark/light is simply to see which germinates more readily...both types germinated this year...next year we will be seeing which ones have a hardier season...

i have also managed to harvest some of the "huskless" seed before it shattered...i am curious about this seed's germination rate and what the plants will bear in the way of ears next season...mapping a busy zea season in my mind...now to work on finding space.

pulling and planting

for what i believe is the fourth consecutive week rain has absolved me of the rseponsibility of watering at the campus garden...

not that there is all that much to water...cleanup has begun...

my bed is a mixed bag of green and brown...the alfalfa is still booming away...

the hot pepper is showing continued moxie...

and there are a couple of green ears on a tiller of the shattered maize..those won't last long and i pulled the two that have already been squirrel ravaged...

the teocintli has announced the end of its season...it is a fine tan color and the ears have split...

i was, however, able to harvest the remaining seed...a fair success in teocintli terms...

teocintli and maize support roots just for morphology's sake...

this spud was finished as well and, for an elmer's blue, yielded a fair handful of tubers...i was relieved to see the pile of compost/mulch had vanished from the proximity of my be with no contamination...the green manures are coming along and i will be adding more to the harvested spaces very soon...that of necessity since it is getting late...

the winter wheat i planted nine days ago is filling in fairly well...

so i sowed in some sweet clover to set nitrogen and keep the population of "natives" down...

it is time to plant the second bed of small grains so it had to be cleared..it has any number of "natives" as denizens...however there were af ew volunteer spuds that were unfortunately as yet very green...they had to to make way for the new...

harvested early, we could call them "new potatoes, even though the season is late...

so i cleared and turned the bed, added a layer of compost...

and the broadcast half the bed in winter rye...

and half in wheat thusly reducing my rye yield by half and, hopefully, increasing my wheat yield by fifty percent in an effort to achieve a more viable return in whole wheat flour next season...we will see if expanded tillage results in more grain...you'd think so...nothing is certain in this...

we will close with the obligatory autumnal photos of ripening tesocintli ears...

and the odd late season bee or two.

3 october 2009

this blog began a decade ago on this date mostly as a record of an experimental garden on the campus of indiana university northwest...

it was intended as an exercise in what dr. kathy forgey ( who never let me call her kathy...but whom i did not call dr. forgey either...she did tell me we were friends so i will take the liberty of referring to her as kathy from here on ) termed as "experimental archaeology" which was to explore why staple crops in agriculture are mostly annuals as opposed to perennials with the working hypothesis that annuals were more productive per unit of farmed area...more bang for the buck...greater return on work...

we grew wheat, spuds, asparagus, chinese yams, jerusalem artichokes, cow peas, tomatoes, and toecintli and eastern gamagrass as representatives of the ancestry of maize...and found that perennials, especially tubers, were every bit as productive as annuals in terms of return on work...so the hypothesis shifted to group mobility...annual seed is easier to transport than perennial tubers and root stock

unfortunately with the untimely passing of kathy and diane cutler of the i u northwest physical plant ( of whom i cannot seem to find a photo anywhere ) the garden was left in the hands of less sympathetic elements and met its demise in 2014...these things happen...i moved some the observations to the i u northwest community garden however i found that environment too open to ( unintended ) interference by outsiders so i moved most of it to my back yard yard which shifted the focus from the experimental to a look at everyday food...

i still grow maize ( left ) and teocintli ( northern tepehaun on the right )...

just to compare ( and be geeked by ) the morphology of the ancestor/descendant...

and i still grow wheat ) this year's crop of hard red winter wheat is sprouting and rooting away ) in a quest to see if i can produce enough grain to make bread from scratch...

all this gardening has brought the weather and the climate into a better focus...i pay a lot more attention to it..and how the plants behave because of it...and the insects and the birds...i am in the process of becoming native to my back yard because of it...not quite there yet...i know and see more than i did...it is a more complex process than i would have thought...doubtlessly more to learn...

all this gardening has me thinking about the food in the supermarket...how it is produced and where it come from...what's in it...and it has me paying more attention to what i eat...fortunately i live in a suburban/rural nexus and i can roam about nearby fields to have a firsthand look at industrial food's feed stock at its source ( these soy beans are nearly ready to harvest...if the rain stops )...

and all the above mentioned rain has had an impact on the industrial season..it is still standing in fields...

there is some dense yellow # 2 corn out there although most of the planted fields are in beans...

just as many are fallow and muddy...

while a few have been planted in a late crop of sunflowers...whether this is for harvest or simply ground cover is something i do not know...it seems late for a harvest...and if the rain holds up that may be moot at any rate...so it has been a decade of failures and successes...gains and some awfully painful losses...closer attention to elemental facets of life and a learning curve that becomes steeper and shallower depending on what i am looking at and how well cognition is functioning on a given day...four things i have learned for certain...all perennials are invasive, solanine from the nightshades ( potato and carolina horse nettle fruits ) makes my hands itch, teocintli plants look remarkably like maize even if their ears are not exact matches, and bees are very important critters...the rest is up in the air.