Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
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Late Snack, Sandhill Crane, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 4, 2010
Catching up with my posts
Now that I'm caught up here I'm going to try to catch up with the posts I let slide while I was boondocking over at Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM without enough power to comfortably keep the laptop running. If you want to follow along, start with the December 6th post. You'll find some info in those posts about my experiences with winter boondocking.
Night camp
Site 8 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
- This is a spacious 65 site campground with most sites offering full hookups.
- Locate LoW-HI RV Ranch on my Night Camps map
- Verizon cell phone - strong signal
- Verizon Broadband - strong signal but often slow
- Check the weather in Deming NM
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.