The Rise of Giant Pumpkins
9 comments
·October 22, 2024pvaldes
082349872349872
I dimly recall a Daedalus DREADCO column which, starting from hydroponics, was exploring the limits of artificial vegetative growth, and came to the conclusion that under the right conditions, it was all a question of how much energy one was willing to pump in.
Maybe we need a fleet of satellites beaming formed microwaves down to our giant Cucurbitaceae?
(my wife kept prompting me to harvest my radishes this summer; by the time I actually got around to it, they'd grown to sizes ranging from a small potato to an entire fist)
joe8756438
I’ve had terrible luck growing pumpkins until this year when I put five root bound starts in the former bedding of my goose flock. All the starts were tangled together in a two gallon pot, didn’t even bother separating. Those plants easily produced 200lbs of pumpkins.
My neighbor, who gave me the starts and took much greater care with the plants, had all of his die from various pests and diseases.
smusamashah
> especially as they mature and gain from 30 to 50 pounds per day
That's about 0.25 grams per second. Or 15 grams per minute. If put on a scale, i am assuming you could witness it growing in near real-time.
adrian_b
The greatest part of that continuously added mass is just water pumped from the soil.
When you compute the added dry mass per second, divided by the mass of the plant, the rate is still big, but much less impressive.
adriand
That’s what I’m going to tell myself when I stand on the bathroom scale in the morning. “I’m not fat, if I just compute my dry mass, I’m in superb condition.”
sharpshadow
Would be fun if somebody would grow them in a big acrylic glass cube to make them come out square.
ReptileMan
And not a single Blandings Castle or Lord Emsworth joke.
(ehum... vegetable steroids -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibberellin ).
Genetic and care help, a lot, but there are fertilizers and "fertilizers".