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Corn! Here are some of the first cobs from this year’s corn harvest in the Big Back Yard. On the top left is Delware Blue Corn, top right is Seneca Round Nose Corn, bottom left is 1,000 year old corn, and bottom right is Iroquois Hominy Corn. No matter how hard we try, there is always some cross pollination with the corn, so one of the Delaware Blue Corn cobs cross pollinated with appears to have been the Seneca Round Nose Corn. We just won’t save these individual kernels for the collections.
Tobacco! The tobacco have returned from their space journey and are settling into their home on earth. Come to the Big Back Yard over the weekend to see them. They’re under a sign labeled “tobacco” near the Hopi Red Dye Amaranth patch.
Squash! The squash has bounced back after its nearly devastating infestation by the squash vine borer. Even though we trapped well over 100 adult vine borer moths in our trap this summer, some seem to have managed to escape its captivating pheromones and laid their eggs on our squash. We managed to save parts of the plants by mounding dirt over the vine in several places, which then caused it to sprout roots. We then cut off the infected area, leaving the unaffected vine portions to grow. Hopefully we will be able to have a few more squash develop before the first frost in five weeks or so.
Trip to Tsyunhehkw^ at the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin
We were fortunate this summer to schedule a tour of the Tsyunhehkwa program run by the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin near Green Bay. Ted Skenadore gave us a warm welcome and tour of the amazing 83 acre organic and sustainable farm that the Nation began about 15 years ago. We learned about the entire process of planting their traditional white corn, harvesting, and finally processing. They also raise organic, free-range chickens and turkeys as well as cattle. This is a wonderful program for not only the Oneida Nation community, but the surrounding community as well and is a great example of the concept of Indigenous food sovereignty in action. We all highly recommend the tour. Thanks Ted!
We ended our trip with a visit to the very nice and educational Oneida Nation Museum.
Ethnobotany: It’s not just about the plants we eat
Ethnobotany is about how people use and interact with plants. Looking through the collections of the Science Museum we found inspiration in these Ojibwe sweet grass baskets. Having some birchbark and porcupine quills on hand and using the sweetgrass we grow in the Turtle Medicine Garden, we decided to try our own renditions of a sweetgrass basket top. We harvested and dried the sweetgrass which then had to be soaked in water to make it pliable again. As you can see in the pictures, Dahjiae’s and Mariah’s basket tops turned out beautifully!
This summer, we enjoyed a once- in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in NASA’s last space shuttle Flight STS-135. Tobacco seeds from our collection traveled 5,284,662 miles in 200 earth orbits aboard shuttle Atlantis. Jim Rock, Dakota educator and a member of the Science Museum’s American Indian Advisory Board secured us some space to test the extent to which their germination would occur in a microgravity and soilless environment in some very sophisticated test tubes (cell chambers seen above). Rock worked with John M. Cassanto, President Instrumentation Technology Associates Inc.who designed the cell chambers and was very generous to donate enough space for six of these cell chambers to house our seeds.
The seeds for the STS-135 mission were carefully chosen to meet NASA’s strict space requirements and hand-delivered by Rock to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. They were then transferred to Cape Canaveral for the shuttle mission.
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Covering the Corn!
To prevent cross pollination of our corn, American Indian O.I.C. interns Dahjiae and Mariah are making sure the fabric is secured to its frame.
Why is The Squash Foggy ?
Today we went to take some pictures of the garden, and the humidity was so high it fogged the camera up. As you can see that the squash is growing very well.
Be Gone Squash Vine Borer!
If you remember from last year, the squash vine borer, seen here in adult form, lays their eggs at the base of the squash vine. After they hatch, they bore into the vine and eat the entire insides of the vine, slowly killing the plant and stopping all nourishment to developing squash and pumpkins.
We just put up our squash vine borer trap two weeks ago and already we’ve trapped and killed nearly 40 of the marauders. The trap uses a pheremone (located just under the green top) to draw the adult moths who then fall into a funnel (the yellow part of the trap) and are asphyxiated by a chemical tape (in the bottom white part). We hope this will ensure a borer free growing season!
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