Veggie Garden, July 27, 2020

I did a quick tour of my garden in April and June. I am amazed and thankful every day that I live on a planet where this can happen. Here is the garden at the end of July. I made a couple of remarks toward the end. The discovery of the invention of corn is a true tale. Inhabitants of the Oaxaca valley cross-bred a variety of tall grass, teosinte, that did not shed its kernel, with a primitive corn that did shed its kernels. I wrote an article for Whole Earth Review in the early 1990s with the title "Corn is my spiritual teacher" -- but it does not exist in digital form. The other remark about the beans is a symbiosis story: the beans harbor fungi in their roots that in turn provide a home for bacteria that fix nitrogen into a form that the corn uses, the corn stalks provide a scaffold for the beans to grow. The Indigenous people of Mexico grow corn in little hills, milpas, in which corn and beans are joined by squash -- the leaves of the squash plant conserve water and shade out weeds.