Wednesday, January 21, 2009 - Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM
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Acequia and Rio Grande River, Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM, January 21, 2008
Water inlet hose repair goes awry
Working at Home Depot turned out to be a good idea. It took several trips into the store to finally come up with a collection of parts that would work in the confined spot I had available. The repaired inlet should work but I'm not really satisfied with the kludgy make-do nature of the repair.
Water tank inlet, January 25, 2009
Night camp
Site 11 - Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - good signal
- Go to Leasburg Dam State Park website
- Locate Leasburg Dam State Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.