General Update

Corn is now over 10 feet tall in some areas and producing tassels and ears, dusting the 28 acres of furrows with a layer of multi-hued pollen. The central path is a favorite photo opportutnity as well as a great place to stroll through swaying, towering corn plants.
News media members appear on a regular basis. Construction at the site office continues with a 30 foot yurt and a new sci-fi deck covering. This photo was taken on Tuesday, October 04. See more photos here.

*entry updatd 10/12/015

Field Tasseling, Earliest Corn Drying

Jaime Lopez -- whose photos sometimes accompany the entries in this blog -- is also the Not A Cornfield gardener. His responsibilities include tending the cornfield's hand-planted "eye." This morning, Lopez delivered a general update on the progress of the field at large, and the "eye" in general.

"As we enter [deeper into the] month of October," Lopez said, "the Cornfield has gone through yet another transformation. The entire field is now tasseling and the air is full of pollen. At the "eye," a visitor can at once witness all the corn's stages of development, from seedlings to developing plants to fully ripe and harvest-able ears of corn."

Lopez noted that some of the corn planted in the "eye" on June 25 is now drying, harvested; meanwhile, the seeds planted nearby as recently as September are still small, and likely, in Lopez's estimation, to remain that way.

The photograph above fits in the former category.

The Road Runner As Metaphor

From Not A Cornfield consultant, art writer and curator Janet Owen:

"On Friday September 30, Lauren Bon spoke...on a subject that fuels the NAC project - the need to apply principles of sustainability to cultural institutions. Proposing that traditional ‘building on a hill’ models will be superceded by organizations that take a sensitive approach to human and earth-based resources, embrace sustainable revenue generation, and ‘grow’ as and where needed, [Bon] offered the
Road Runner as example and metaphor for such organizations in Southern California. Not least because the roadrunner scavenges water from its own feces and is, consequently, able to survive independently in a desert terrain."