There's a nice article about him, he is a full-time train engineer who drives train shipments all around the west coast and while he was traveling he got curious about all the plants he would see from the train so he started going to the libraries on his breaks from work to learn about plants.
https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/books-media/botany-joe...
Interesting chilean high-elevation rare carrot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdodZcrFIPM&t=2s
old growth redwoods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbma869jMQY&t=4s
For example, here is the UFIFAS which is very good
https://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/media/sfylifasufledu/orange/hort-r...
He's talking about growing tomatoes all the way through the article. Nothing but talking about how tomatoes grow
My mother was able to grow tomatoes successfully in Pohnpei, which is at 3° latitude and never gets outside the temperature range of about 23°–32°. https://weather.com/es-GT/tiempo/10dias/l/cc8849a0250ec854cb.... They were pretty leggy though; she had a hard time keeping them alive.
This is flat-out wrong. (And the comment you replied to is also wrong.)
He mentions tomatoes only 6 times in about 1500 words. These words appear half-way into the article, in only 2 of the roughly 16 paragraphs. Three of those instances are in direct reference or comparison to the wild ancestors of tomatoes.
While not specifying, the article also mentions high-altitude, tropical plants and cacti.
While you can grow them in, lets say, Houston, they're not easy to grow. They get infections at the drop of a hat, and if you so much as turn around, some sort of insect will munch through them. They don't yield much fruit, and the fruits they do yield generally leave something to be desired in the flavor department.
This is his point. The plants don't have much energy to fend off infections or predators, and they don't have much less energy to put into their fruit.
If you put a tomato plant in a more suitable climate, the things are nearly weeds. You put them in a bucket, make sure they get enough water, and you a few months later you have sweet, juicy, flavorful fruit with basically zero effort.
While we've bred cultivars that can be grown in places like Houston or Florida, the plants don't particularly like it.
We're in the AI age after all.
I practice zone denial with a shade house and have things like rhubarb, cilantro and lettuce growing right now. It's been over 100F many days this summer and these would not make it outside. I also have many varieties of tomatoes and pretty sure I'm the only one the region who does because they would not set fruit outside in these temperatures.
If it's a dry climate and you have water and shade, you can turn it into a moderate or cool climate.
My tomatoes a week ago or so https://youtube.com/shorts/wRHiiCCICmc?feature=share
I take the zone denial the other way as well and have tropical plants like banana, mango, dragon fruit, pineapple etc. that I protect in the winter from snow and freezing temperatures.
But if it's too hot they will not set fruit. You get blooms but they just drop.
Some tomatoes are more adapted to cool and others to heat. I have found Roma and cherry tomatoes set in hotter temperatures (generally) than many others.
2) did you water them enough?
3) did you have good holes for them? Tomatoes do well if they can root deeply - giving them a 2-3' deep hole filled with good soil and compost helps.
4) cages: indeterminate tomatoes can grow huge, So give them a cage with plenty of space - the crap little cages you get at Home Depot do not suffice. If they were determinant, this does not apply.
Tomatoes do well in full sun but need quite a bit of water if it's dry. And possibly some calcium - we compost our egg shells as one source.
I did get seedlings this season, and even planted them mid May. I thought I did pretty well not being late this year.
The only thing I can think of is not enough water; I had a thick layer (1-2 inch) of straw for mulch, and figured that would let me water less frequently. (Though I did do a finger check every few days).
Interesting you mention the cherries; it's the only plant with fruit even this late in the season. The others are assorted regular size varieties like Cherokee or other heirloomy types.
(edit: correction: it was mythrwy in the sibling comment that mentioned the cherry tomatoes! Thank you as well.)
Which is annoying because they're so much more work to cook with. :)
I don't know why the post title doesn't include the "Why" prefix from the source. Which is really a botany explanation rather than simple horticultural complaint.
I'm several hundred miles due south of you in SE New Mexico, also right along the rocky front range, so similar climate with intense sun and day/night temp swings, although we are much warmer obviously.
The frame of the shade house in the video is cattle panels and the cover is called "aluminet". The cattle panels are hooped and tied to a wooden frame with posts sunk in the ground. It started as a simple 10'x20' structure but I kept adding rooms and and other portions are not hoop type. Someone gave me a 10x10 frame that is very tall from an old "greenhouse" so I tacked that on. The doors are used screen doors also covered with aluminet. It's been an ongoing process over years. But it hasn't been expensive, I would say under $1000 for the entire structure including redoing the cover once. The cover is secured with a zillion zip ties and has nylon straps to keep it from flapping (we get extreme winds).
There is a lot more I could say on the subject but hopefully that gets you some things to look into.
I also have many apple trees and they do struggle - even the native varieties. I think that's mainly due to fungus, aphids, and the poor soil though.
No idea about avocado.
I sowed apple seeds from the supermarket apples (Covid time) so probably that’s why they adapted well. They definitely love the sun and heat.
They grow like weeds around here. The tomatoes the article cites don't grow as well, but are still perfectly farmable.
Besides, people have been adapting species for other climates for millennia. I don't think it makes sense to talk about entire species that way.
The Iowa corn crop may start failing, but we can start growing pineapples instead. Cows eat pineapples, right ?
Dumb question, but is it difficult to setup a temperature and humidity controlled box or room where you could stow away the plants at night? A possibly dumber question, why do hydroponics always seem to involve indoor/UV lighting? Why are there no container-sized setups that you can place outdoors, but the climate and sun-light is controlled, and it's all powered by solar energy?
(sorry for all the dumb questions, i don't know anything about this topic)
I guess in this case it would have to be greenhouse with good AC?
[This guy][1] does a bunch of hydroponics and hydroponics adjacent projects outdoors.
Supposedly due to warmer summers.
And new planatation replace spruce by larch or leaf trees.
Luckily they don't seem to affect pine trees, but they have their own climate expectations.
TimorousBestie•3d ago
https://c4rice.com/the-science/engineering-photosynthesis-wh...
lazide•3h ago
griffzhowl•3h ago
How would you get grant money for that?
lazide•3h ago
squigz•3h ago
griffzhowl•26m ago
We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"...
It doesn't seem to be economically compelling for people in the UK or US who are getting tomatoes in January, living in a house made from bricks mass-produced in the third world, and clothed in threads made in Bangladesh.
I hope things can change, but it will take people waking up to the fact that their comfort is bought at the expense of many people far away suffering through long ass work days, and even if they then recognize it why would they change their habits?
I want everyone to live in sloth gardens - just reach out, grab a leaf, and there's your food.
It's a dream but that's how we grow <3
lumost•3h ago
Bear in mind that the industrialized world of 1950 was only inhabited by a small portion of the global population at most a billion people.
The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
bix6•3h ago
dingnuts•2h ago
JackMorgan•2h ago
It encourages helplessness and fatalism. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
bix6•1h ago
lazide•5m ago
They had war, rapes, atrocities, tragedies, plagues, shittiness, famines, etc. too you know.
At least from what we’ve been able to gather after they mostly got wiped out.
It is no picnic living in a preindustrial society.
dr_dshiv•3h ago
I’d be completely happy with technological innovations that allowed us to restore heat balance (solar radiation management, marine cloud brightening, etc). That can buy time for transitioning from fossil fuels.
tcoff91•2h ago
oorza•1h ago
https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-...
This is the answer to carbon storage by the way, people just do not know about it. There's more than enough reactive mineral sites on the planet. The process is basically just dissolving CO2 into water, heating it, and soaking basalt in it to allow crystals to form. The water becomes heavier than ground water and can simply be poured into the Earth. The unsolved problems are optimization problems: direct air capture of CO2, using saltwater, that sort of thing.
If the world's billionaire class decided to buy carbon sequestering, we could have global CO2 levels returned to 1900 levels within a decade or two. The technology exists, the economic willpower does not.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43789527
> Potentially, basalt could solve all the world's CO2 problems says Sandra: "The storage capacity is such that, in theory, basalts could permanently hold the entire bulk of CO2 emissions derived from burning all fossil fuel on Earth."
Having said all of that, this is likely the most dystopian option. It's the "tech bails us out, yet again" solution because we could deploy it thoroughly enough that we can solve climate change without addressing any of the existential issues that got us here. The right combination of corporate+government partnership commercializing this technology and making it mandatory is a very plausible way to arrive at "there's 4 corporations on Earth that run the show" a la Aliens.
lazide•1h ago
Not only is there no way to hide trying to do something about it at that scale, there is no single site (or even multiple sites) that could handle that amount of sequestration - we’re talking hundreds.
And even Elon Musk could not afford it, even if he dumped everything he had into it.
oorza•1h ago
I think you could prove it out at a scale that people could measure on planetary CO2 sensors for a couple dozen billion dollars, then take that data to a sitting POTUS you're friendly with and work out a multi-trillion dollar commercialization plan, using the USA's global bullying power to immediately establish a global monopoly.
A particularly cynical view would be this CEO buying global laws that dictate carbon neutrality while simultaneously also making it impossible to achieve without his CCS. Then merely canceling a sales contract topples a regime and you've arrived a global corporatocracy.
lazide•30m ago
tcoff91•1h ago
The other options mentioned like messing with the atmosphere to make it reflect more heat into space will likely cause wars due to lack of global consensus
marcosdumay•9m ago
There's a sibling with the long-form reasoning. The problem is that we are pushing a lot of new carbon into the atmosphere, you just won't be able to scale anything enough and there's a really big opportunity cost to try to push the tide away.
manoDev•2h ago
If at least the US got in line with the rest of the world, we would be half-way there.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
The problem is not the 8 billion people, is the handful that have an disproportionate impact.
dingnuts•2h ago
regardless, horse and buggy isn't dramatic, but since you decided to blame the US without mentioning Canada or the Chinese trend line on the chart you linked I actually think the point of your post is just to stir up more anti American sentiment
there's a LOT of that on HN. maybe you're a bot, even
I need to quit this site. if only it wasn't designed to keep me addicted. oh well
ekianjo•2h ago
China and India would like a word with you
cityofdelusion•1h ago
griffzhowl•57m ago
It would be good to have a graph showing where the ultimate products of these emissions ended up.
tfourb•27m ago
You will notice that the picture does not change radically if you include emissions from trade (which is what you were asking).
Turns out while China expects a lot of stuff to the us, it doesn’t have that big of an impact on net emissions.
griffzhowl•9m ago
Arainach•2h ago
Things don't have to be perfect - you start with the biggest polluters/consumers and use trade incentives to convince other nations to join. We've seen this work under Democratic administrations (China's outputs are dropping) before Trump etc. threw it all away.
exoverito•1h ago
The climate goes through natural cycles, we are actually coming out of a global temperature low after the ice age. Cold eras are actually far more dangerous throughout human history, for example the Little Ice Age during the Dark Ages which caused widespread crop failures and famine in Europe. Warm eras are correlated with the golden ages of civilizations, such as the Roman Warm Period. Zooming out over geological time, the Earth is currently near an all time low in terms of surface temperatures.
Cryptocurrency functions as a decentralized means of exchange outside of the control of centralized powers. Governments have been feverishly debasing their fiat currencies, which has fueled inflation, pricing many young people out of owning a home. It would seem you would rather trap people in an inflationary monetary paradigm, justifying it with secular eschatology. Millenarian Marxists have similarly latched onto climate change as their justification for abolishing private property, policies of degrowth, and other anti-human initiatives.
Energy per capita is tightly correlated with living standards. We saw broad wealth increases up until about 1970, after which energy per capita flat lined, and income inequality started worsening. Europe has implemented many of the polices you want, and has achieved nothing besides deindustrialization and irrelevancy.
China's CO2 emissions are increasing dramatically, and they continue to build more coal and natural gas plants. The USA and Europe reduced their emissions mostly by offshoring manufacturing to China.
It seems you're deeply confused about how the world works.
anon84873628•1h ago
Yeah, and hot eras kill civilizations. There's a famous one called the 4.2 kiloyear event. Does modern mesopotamia seem like a great place for the birthplace of agriculture?
I don't necessarily agree with the parent's politics, but you seem to be completely ignoring the categorical difference of CO2 emissions and associated risks of climate tipping points to our civilization.
oceanplexian•57m ago
Actually yes, if not for the massive cultural and political dysfunction.
Modern Day Mesopotamia would be one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world if managed. Like the California Central Valley and Central Arizona which share similar climate classifications and are the most productive regions (per Acre) on the planet.
roelschroeven•1h ago
Go to the Wikipedia page on the Little Ice Age, have a look at the graph Global Average Temperature Change, and explain to us how current climate change is at all comparable to the Little Ice Age, or the Medieval Warm Period for that matter.
Or have a look at https://xkcd.com/1732/ (scroll all the way down) to get an idea of the rate and scale of temperature changes throughout human history.
ethanpailes•1h ago
keyringlight•1h ago
keyringlight•1h ago
lazide•1h ago
I’m pretty sure that’s long forgotten now in the list of national priorities eh? Definitely in the USA. With war on their borders even the EU is reconsidering plans eh?
griffzhowl•1h ago
Jared Diamond said a funny thing in his book 'Collapse', when talking about the last person on Easter Island to have cut down a tree.
Easter Island had at one point been densely forested and supported a dense human population. When Europeans found it there were no trees and it was sparsely populated. It's thought that their famous Moai statues were rolled to the shore on logs, and trees were found plentifully according to the pollen record there.
Anyway, Diamond envisages the person cutting down the last tree as thinking "It's ok, technology will save us!"
griffzhowl•47m ago
tfourb•33m ago
And while technological innovation is always nice, we always possess all the technology we need to get rid of the vast majority of emissions today. It’s just a question of implementation (ie the political will to spend some money and maybe reduce the share price of a few fossil fuel companies).
deadbabe•3h ago
Amezarak•2h ago
griffzhowl•3h ago
colechristensen•3h ago
i_k_k•2h ago
As the temperature rises, so does the error rate. At a high-enough temperature, the plant loses energy overall, which it can't survive long term.
C4 plants separate this process into two steps spatially. They build a four-carbon molecule in a much less error-prone way, then move this to a part of the cell where it's broken down into CO2. RuBisCO is again used to build the three-carbon sugars, but because the relative concentration of CO2 to O2 is so high, the error rate is low. There's some additional overhead to this process, but it pays off in warm climates.
Incidentally, there's another warm-climate metabolism: CAM (crassulacean acid metabolism). CAM works by temporally separating parts of the process. At night, they open their stomata, and use CO2 to build an acid. During the day, they close their stomata, cleave CO2 off of the acid to increase the concentration, and let RuBisCO its thing.
I believe RuBisCO is the most common enzyme on Earth by weight. I find it striking that Mother Nature has had to find all these hacks to get around its shortcomings, but hasn't found a way to simply fix the enzyme so it doesn't make so many errors.
thfuran•1h ago
i_k_k•57m ago
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.19.633714v1
anon84873628•2h ago
griffzhowl•1h ago
Now I see in the last paragraph it says C4 photosynthesis is more efficient in hot climates and C3 more efficient in cooler climates.
I don't see though what's the benefit of bioengineering C3 plants to operate with C4, rather than to utilise C4 plants where the climate is suitable for them?
thfuran•1h ago
TimorousBestie•48m ago