The BBC wrote about somebody who had successfully grafted a tomato plant onto potatoes, so you can get two crops from one space.
Bit of a problem though:
"It has been very difficult to achieve because the tomato stem and the potato stem have to be the same thickness for the graft to work," he said...
The firm said the plants last for one season and by the time the tomatoes are ready for picking, the potatoes can be dug up.
Well a fat lot of good that is then, if they only last one season. The extra hassle of the trial and error grafting them is probably not worth those few extra potatoes/tomatoes.
But this reminds us that tomatoes and potatoes are from the same plant family and are native to Central/South America, so sooner or later, they'll be able to splice the DNA together and make plants which will grow again and again or from seeds. (You'd have to be careful which up you plant the seeds though, if you put them in the wrong way up, you'll get potato flowers growing on tomato roots, which is worse than useless.)
The list of useful plants in that family is very long:
Perhaps the most economically important genus of the family is Solanum, which contains the potato (Solanum tuberosum, in fact, another common name of the family is the "potato family"), the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), and the aubergine or eggplant (Solanum melongena). Another important genus Capsicum produce both chilli peppers and bell peppers...
Nicotiana contains, among other species, the plant that produces tobacco.
So in a perfect world, you'd have a plant which produces potatoes under the ground and tomatoes above it, with leaves which you can dry and smoke. Result!
Other useful plants which are native to Central/South America, although not in the same family, are cocoa/chocolate and coca.
Which all makes me think that life in Europe must have been pretty grim until they started importing these plants/products a few hundred years ago.
Europe/the Middle East actually only has one major useful native plant, wheat (and rye, barley and so on), which you need to make beer and pizzas.
The other plant which make life worth living is from Ethiopia (coffee), which is a bit closer to home, but they didn't even work out how to make it until a few hundred years ago.
Saturday, 26 October 2013
TomTato
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16 comments:
"Europe/the Middle East actually only has one major useful native plant, wheat"
and even that has a major drawback, in that it is an annual plant. Many of the grasses are perennial (like the grass in your lawn). If wheat etc had been perennials, the amount of man-hours saved over the centuries in not ploughing, sowing and weeding would have been immense.
What about tea!?
"..and even that has a major drawback.."
Two. Are you forgetting ergot? ;)
Yes, I am, but these days wouldn't that be considered a benefit?
where do the brassicas come from - they interbreed quite promiscuously (I suspect JuliaM has an article about the intermingling of chard and swede)
Hmmm... dopeheads used to tell me they could graft cannabis roots onto hop plants and get smokeable leaves from something that just looked like hops.
So when they ban tobacco growing, a bit of careful grafting could get us aubergine cigars?
Worth looking into.
Graeme: brassicas are old-world crops, at least since a few hundred years BC.
Bayard: there´s not many grain crops that are anything but annual. That also goes for corn/maize and rice. You want a crop that gives a yield every year, and even if preparing the soil every year is sort of a hassle, overall the practice pays off, or it wouldn´t have been the standard practice since civilization started. Which goes for all civilizations, even in South America.
Even with perennial grasses for fodder, it´s standard practice to break up and reseed every now and then, for the sake of yields. It´s all about succession. Standard development in temperate, high-rainfall Europe is from bare land to forest (largely), with crops what you are doing is keeping the succession at the first stage; vigorous growth of annuals.
"or it wouldn´t have been the standard practice since civilization started."
Not necessarily. Wheat and other cereals would have been bred from the grasses with the largest seeds, which just happened to be annuals - it would make sense that annuals would have evolved to put more effort into seed-making than perennials. If everyone started with the largest-seeded grasses, which also seems likely, then everyone started with annuals.
Otherwise agreed on the advantages of annuals over perennials, although grassland can be and is fertilised without breaking up the turf. There is also the advantage of the lack of soil erosion if a turf cover is maintained.
B, no, being an annual is a big advantage because you can carry out selective breeding much more quickly, and if the crop fails one year, you can start again the next. If your tree or perennial dies, you are buggered.
See also Kj's comment.
L, tea is way down the list of "things which make life possible".
JM. ergot grows on rye, or do you include that as wheat?
G, those are both members of cabbage family I think so v. closely related and you can probably cross them to your heart's content, like with dogs.
LI, you can only graft things in same plant family, so apples and pears is OK, tomatoes and potatoes is OK.
I don't know about hops and cannabis. Why not just smoke the hops? And aubergine cigars, I think you can forget that one.
B:
Otherwise agreed on the advantages of annuals over perennials, although grassland can be and is fertilised without breaking up the turf. There is also the advantage of the lack of soil erosion if a turf cover is maintained.
Yes, but as long as the land is ploughable, it´s standard practice (depending on rainfall, erosion-risk) to establish the grassland anew with a few years between. Even if you can fertilize it for a couple of years, maximum growth often decreases after year two/three, and so does nutrititional yield on an energy-basis. But ofcourse you can have long-term grassland if it´s appropriate, but it stabilizes at a lower yield level.
There´s a slight apropos to "efficient" land-use and LVT here. Large farms/ranches through history, of the latifundo / highland estate - type have been "efficient" from the point of view of the owners, because it takes very little effort to hire a few herdsmen to herd animals around. But it´s not efficient on a alternative-cost basis, or at least not at certain times of history, as productivity could have been increased with labour/capital efforts.
"being an annual is a big advantage because you can carry out selective breeding much more quickly, and if the crop fails one year, you can start again the next. "
Perennials produce seed every year, so seeds can be bred (albeit you would have to keep ploughing and treating the perennial as an annual until the optimum breed is reached), also seeds can be kept in reserve, and a perennial is far less likely to fail to grow and if a perennial fails to set seed, is killed by drought, or the seeds are ruined by rain, you would be just as buggered with an annual.
There was a part of Italy where the inhabitants made flour from sweet chestnuts, which saved them a hell of a lot of work.
B, this is not my area of expertise, but I believe that annuals have certain very subtle advantages, i.e. they produce more seeds, or they produce less stalks and wood, or maybe it's just that there are subtle disadvantages to perennials, such as you have to harvest the seeds more carefully, with annuals you can merrily chop down the whole plant and then thresh it.
But clearly there are such advantages or farmers wouldn't have specialised in annuals.
MW Tea may not make life possible, but, IMHO it's one of those things that makes life bearable...(especially with crumpets and butter...)
"MW Tea may not make life possible, but, IMHO it's one of those things that makes life bearable...(especially with crumpets and butter...)"
More than bearable. As far as food and drinks goes the only thing worse than life without tea, would be life without marmite!
Perennials produce seed every year, so seeds can be bred (albeit you would have to keep ploughing and treating the perennial as an annual until the optimum breed is reached), also seeds can be kept in reserve, and a perennial is far less likely to fail to grow and if a perennial fails to set seed, is killed by drought, or the seeds are ruined by rain, you would be just as buggered with an annual.
If you are using nuts as example as in below, they are notoriously unreliable in yield from year to year.
There was a part of Italy where the inhabitants made flour from sweet chestnuts, which saved them a hell of a lot of work.
There was probably some part of Kent that neighboured large hazel coppices that could survive entirely on the nuts harvested. Equally, I can get a full years supply of firewood from a small patch of forest at my parent´s house. That doesn´t mean the world can run on hazelnuts from Kent and firewood from my parents´.
There are plenty of research done into perennial grain crops, especially in the US. But noone is pretending that they can get the same yield, quality and flexibility as you can with annuals. The goal of such research is to make plants that are appropriate for large-scale drylands farming ala North-Dakota or Montana, where each pass with a tractor takes a week, and yields are a quarter of what you can get in the UK.
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