It turns out that if you leave them alone long enough, garden plants are happy to do their own thing. This week, Ari LeVaux explores the aesthetic, philosophical and biological joys of the bolted garden in “Going to seed.”
seeds

Music
Rooster Roundabout: This week’s music highlights

Food for Thought
Going to Seed
Enlightened chaos in the garden

video games
Webgame Wednesday on Thursday: Flooded Village
Dig a trench from the river to water the plants and float the boats. Don't drown the people. Sounds simple enough, but the grid-based puzzler Flooded Village throws enough twists and turns at you to keep the old think-box working overtime. Further impediments (like ice) rear their ugly heads, forcing you to make more convoluted excavations in the landscape. What are you waiting for? Get digging!

Alibi Picks
More Exciting Than Regular Seeds
Southern California artist Martin Facey is fascinated by life and the forces that come together to create it: light, time, humidity, heat. In his new series of paintings, Pluck, he explores the fragility and interconnectedness of life, primarily through the image of the seed. And these are some big kernels. Facey used paint, fiberglass, fabric and other materials to construct the works that fill Bright Rain Gallery. A professor of art and art history at UNM for 20 years, Facey has a piece in the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History's collection and three in the permanent collection of the University of New Mexico Museum. See the seeds revealed while pecking at hors d'oeuvres on Saturday from 4 to 8 p.m.

Food for Thought
Swapping the Love
On food and seed exchanging
Early spring means different things in different places. It's called mud season in some regions. Elsewhere it's the fifth month of winter grief. In warmer climes, winter can be so mild and summer so hot that spring is little more than a fleeting end of tolerable weather. But everywhere that winter is significant enough to interrupt the growing season, early spring has a special meaning among locavores. For cooks, gardeners, hunters and mead-makers alike, it's time for swapping.

Mina's Dish
Ready, Set, Grow
CelebrateSeedNM

Feature
Crop Art
Reviving an ancient farming tradition starts at home
Sarah Montgomery holds an ear of corn in each hand.
"These look like two ears of white corn to most people," she says. "But they're totally different."
Montgomery is the founder and director of The Garden’s Edge, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable agriculture within the state and in Guatemala. A central piece of that puzzle is preserving an ancient farming technique that's endangered: seed saving.
The corn in her left hand is Hopi, she explains, a dry land variety from New Mexico. "Farmers plant it far underground to get the moisture, and the seed is adapted to getting rained on only a few times a year." The other ear is Guatemalan. It's the Hopi corn's opposite, she explains, which is eager to soak up tropical rains and moisture. "Each one is adapted to its particular bioregion."

Food for Thought
Kitchen Garden
The path to growing your own food is lined with good seed catalogs
Gardening season starts when you open your first seed catalog in the dead of winter, and it doesn’t end until you’ve dug your last carrot, plucked your final Brussels sprout or eaten your last pickled pepper of the season.