Food factory
Some of the stuff I planted has been growing reasonably well…
This tomato plant was grown from a seed in an Aldi bought tomato. I much prefer trying to grow stuff from the “industrial” varieties found in supermarkets, rather than some “local” variety or ones bought in seed packets. Through my own foolishness I left this tomato plant inside a plastic mini-greenhouse on extremely hot days when it was a mere seedling and managed to burn off half of both its first leaves. Amazingly it managed to pull itself together and keep going, even when many of the other plants exposed to those conditions gave in. I have high hopes for some decent yield off this guy. He has started to flower:
I have another Tomato plant derived from the seeds on an Aldi tomato. This is a good example of the “positive non-interventionism” gardening philosophy! In general I try to avoid excessive intervention to artificially protect my crops from the woes of the world. A certain level of stress will encourage stronger and more rigorous growth, by activating defense mechanisms and outright killing the weakest of plants, preventing them from passing on their genes which are unsuitable for the conditions in which I grow them. For instance, when tomato plants are exposed to strong winds they build up thicker stems to resist being blown over. These are also useful later when they set fruit as the tomatos themselves can be quite heavy. If a plant was kept under sheltered conditions the stem would be much weaker and if ever exposed to more severe conditions would run a much higher risk of snapping.
But in this case the wind exposure proved too much for one of my plants. His stem snapped at the bottom during a particularly windy day. The market fundamentalists would at this point argue that as a failed institution, the tomato plant should be left for dead to be liquidated by his creditors (it might be fair to imagine the Earth or at least the soil as the ultimate creditor, with the insects and bacteria being the bankruptcy lawyers or other officials who manage the liquidation process). But one must look at the real consequences for the system as a whole from these actions. Since I have only two tomato plants of this variety, it is difficult to really say whether it was genetic weakness or some other factor which caused this plant to fail and the other to survive. They were both in different locations and different sized pots. If I had twenty of these plants and only a few snapped, one could more reasonably assert that it would be quite likely that in culling the ones that snapped, one would be at least somewhat bluntly selecting for a more wind resistant future variety. In any case this debate is somewhat moot as these tomatos nearly always self fertilise, meaning that there will be no genetic recombination among their offspring. So the seeds of the snapped tomato could just not be planted and one could rest assured that because of the inbreeding nature of these plants, the snapped tomato would not have contributed it’s genetic material to the offspring of other tomatos through fertilising the flowers of those plants with its pollen. As I have noted, even if these plants were outbreeders, it would perhaps be unreasonable to draw much conclusion about the genetic weakness of a plant to the wind when there was only two plants in the sample.
So I ordered a decisive and rigorous government intervention to bail out this tomato! A quote on positive non-interventionism is in order! “Haddon-Cave goes on to say that the “positive” part means the government carefully considers each possible intervention to determine “where the advantage” lies, and although usually it will come to the conclusion that the intervention is harmful, sometimes it will decide to intervene.”
I drove a massive stake into the ground right next to the plant and tied him upright right against it. The goal was to prop up the plant while it tried to repair itself. As the roots and leaves were now only connected by a thin part of remaining stem, it was not clear whether or not the support would be enough to allow the plant to survive. However it seems that the intervention was successful, with new leaves growing on the plant over the past week or so. In a somewhat unsettling move, the plant has started to flower:
This has given huge ammunition to the free market lobby who insist that the flowering of the plant is evidence that it no longer needs government support. They further point out that the cable tie between the stem and the wooden stake is damaging to the stem by being over tight, potentially restricting water and nutrient flow to the leaves. But to remove government support this early would be reckless in my view. The balance of risks is clearly skewed against such action. Removal of support risks another catastrophic collapse, destroying all that has been saved. Keeping on the support risks restricting growth and moderate damage to the location where the tie is wrapped around. I think that is a small price to pay for insurance against outright collapse. The time may come later in the season when support can be removed or at least loosened, but my hand will not be forced by reckless ideologues!
I also planted some seeds of Tomatos bought in Lidl:
These were planted significantly later than the Aldi tomatos, but have grown with the utmost vigor. I suspect they benefitted from not being placed in that disastrously over heated plastic mini-greenhouse that I mentioned earlier.
This chaotic tomato was grown from a seed in a packet of “cherry tomato seeds”:
He expands wildly in all directions, with his leaves often competing more with his own other leaves than the leaves of other plants. While perhaps counterproductive, I am starting to think this plant might make an excellent manager of the commanding heights of a communist economy, as he demonstrates an ability to create huge amounts of intra-organisation competition. I’m surprised at the amount of flowers he has created and since each flower will turn into a tomato, I am somewhat apprehensive that he may have gotten over ambitious and may not be able to output enough glucose to meet the demands he has placed on himself. He has the privilege of being the first tomato plant under my control to begin production of an actual tomato:
These next two tomato plants were given to me so I don’t have any idea how they will end up:
Interestingly when I transplanted these two plants, they were both around the same size but the first one had a much larger root system. As time has passed the first one has grown at an extremely quick pace while the second one seems to be limited by its inferior root system and has not grown nearly as much. What happens below ground is just as important as what happens above.
On that point it would be good to mention these two carrots:
I selected them both when they were young as my prized specimens to be raised separately from the others in case my patch was destroyed for any reason. The smaller of the two promptly rapidly slowed its rate of growth and was an utter disappointment. But the larger one grew at an amazing pace. I was worried that it might be unsustainable and sure enough it suddenly ground to a halt. When I decided to transplant them into this bigger pot I found that the bigger one had completely saturated the soil of the small pot it had been in with its roots and they had wrapped themselves around the inside bottom of the pot many times over. Root capacity constraint! It would seem that this was the cause of the sudden collapse in the rate of growth. The ability of the vigorous carrot to expand was initially limited by its leaf area but as that was continously expanded the capacity of the roots began to become the limiting factor. Eventually, without room to expand the roots, leaf growth could not be maintained and it entered a prolonged era of low growth. Sounds like the Japanese economy after the unsustainable bubble at the end of the 1980s. But despite transplanting it into a much larger pot, from what can be seen above ground, it does not seem to have grown much. It could be that the roots have been growing vigorously and that it will soon launch a renewed leaf expansion, but so far there has been no evidence of much progress. The smaller guy is a useless as always, big pot or small.
On to my potted onions…
These three were planted in pots as another sort of insurance against something disastrous happening in the plot. I don’t know if they got squashed by something or attacked or something else, but as can be seen things are not going well. This other guy is doing ok on his own though:
These guys are a mix of various alliums:
They haven’t done so well either and I’m at a loss as to why.
This onion was found sprouting in a press so I planted him in the hopes of him flowering and producing some seed:
He seems to have stalled at this point though. Luckily I have these two heroes of the orient to do the job:
The guy on the left is an onion I grew from seed last year while the guy on the right is another one I found in the press. They are both “yellow” onions but different varieties. They’re sending up seed heads at the same time so it’s looking like they’ll flower together. This will be my first chance at genetic manipulation! Hopefully I can cross pollinate them and take the seeds with me to Japan for the next growing next season. What wondrous new variety shall emerge from this combination!?
And finally the great industrial farm:
There are several varieties of onion as well as some leeks and carrots planted randomly. Some have done much better than others, but on the whole growth has been much better than I anticipated. The transplanting process I put them through was brutal and reckless and I thought most of them would die. But perhaps only 10% have actually been killed since planting. I also put some more Lidl tomatos and some Lidl bell peppers at the back of the patch. The bell peppers haven’t grown all that much though.
The carrots are fattening up:
The garlics I planted out the front have mostly died down:
I might dig down and see if they have actually made any cloves, though I don’t dare to hope for much.
As for my experiments planting Japonica rice, they all ended in disaster. I’m not sure if it was trouble with the rice seeds I was using (could’ve been processed in some manner that damaged its ability to grow into a proper rice plant), or trouble with the soil they were in, or over/under watering or cold/cloudy spells killing them off, but they all died before exceeding much beyond 5cm in height.