2. In your section on photoperiodism (https://jrcpl.us/contrib/2020/gardening-for-engineers/#photo...), it seems the examples are backwards. Ie, lettuce is a long-day plant that flowers when days are long, mung bean is a short-day plant that flowers when days are short.
naejin 1 hours ago [-]
Growing food is very complex, probably too complex for our brains. And I believe we will have to learn again how to grow food without our current support systems one day. I'm building projectcanopi.com toward that goal.
david_shaw 1 hours ago [-]
> Growing food is very complex, probably too complex for our brains.
Can you expand on this?
I'm no expert, and I fully agree that growing food at scale can be difficult. It also requires a lot of space.
But what do you mean by saying it's "too complex for our brains"?
jack_pp 43 minutes ago [-]
maybe he means it's too complex for science to rediscover. maybe rediscovering/using ancient wisdom regarding this domain is better. but this is just intuition
>Crucially, there is a tradeoff between growth rate and growth quality. Higher temperatures can result in faster growth but also thinner stems, weaker roots, and less flavor.
Doing the calculus graphically, we should expect this "quality optimum" lies just uphill of the inflection point of the curve (between T_base and T_opt), yes?
johnthedebs 58 minutes ago [-]
I think the quote taken at face value is misleading, or may just be wrong.
In my own experience (quite a bit over the last ~8 years), if high temperatures (T_opt, not T_max) are accompanied by longer and more intense daylight as well as adequate water and nutrition, it will consistently result in thicker stems, stronger roots, and better flavor. And since higher temperatures in the summer typically coincide with longer days and more intense sunlight, this is the most common outcome. Lacking water or nutrition under these conditions, plants will usually stall their growth rather than grow thinner or weaker.
The only times I can think of that the quoted statement is true is with, eg, indoor seed starts that are given a warm environment with plenty of water and nutrition, but that lack sunlight or artificial light, or light-adapted plants grown outdoors in too much shade.
The clearest counter example that comes to mind is tomatoes, which IMO taste their best, and are by no means thin or weak, when they are growing the fastest.
jatorre 2 hours ago [-]
I went down exactly that path with an outdoor bed: 8 soil probes, a weather station, a camera, and a drip valve. The fun part turned out to be not the automation but letting an agent decide the watering every morning and write down what it expects, then check the probes the next day to see if it was right. Fixed schedules kept being wrong in ways that needed context (forecast, last week's response, leaf wetness).
It's still humbling: it missed caterpillars on the broccoli until I made it look at full-resolution photos. Wrote it up here: https://jatorre.github.io/garden/
emidoots 3 hours ago [-]
The brain asks:
> I am currently exhibiting overwhelming stress from deeply technical work being part of my every day life, and feel I am missing the 'nature' element of life. What should I do?
The brain responds:
> Gardening! A wonderfully complex system that will just 'live' without me! A delightful escape!
The brain asks:
> Yes, gardening! But how? There are so many variables! What are the parameters? Where is the specification outlining the success criteria? What defines a living organic system?
kokey 1 hours ago [-]
Just pick one thing, learn to grow it for a season or two. It's incremental learning, a bit of making mistakes and learning from the mistakes and research along the way. The knowledge accumulates over time, and after a while you can manage food crops, flowers and timber if you want.
emidoots 3 hours ago [-]
Sometimes, life is better as a complex, chaotic and misunderstood system that just happens to work out OK or not.
schiffern 2 hours ago [-]
To engineering! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
Hehe. I recently donated a whole bunch of plants to a school. It was amazing to me how naïve the principal and staff were about plants. I had to explain that, no, no 'ground preparation' was necessary (in fact it was probably harmful) and yes, these plants would be fine once stuck in a hole without any attention: in fact they had evolved for millions of years to live right here!
Standard veggie gardening has very low ROI. Basically you need land (hyper expensive in cities), time, patience, and when you do get a crop it's in peak season and ~free at the shops. That's not to discount the experience or the cleanliness or the taste benefits of organic home grown veg: but from an engineering standpoint, you're better off not bothering. Hydroponics are a completely different beast. We're all lucky our society is no longer agrarian in nature. Hunter gatherers lived far better lives than agrarian peasantry.
mirpetri 3 hours ago [-]
Gardening is expensive. Good I stopped at plants and didn't go for chickens.
Every year is different.
First you fight the snails on the strawberries.
Then the aphids on peppers and roses (this is each year).
Next the mold attacks the tomatoes.
And if you don't have enough, the starling will eat your blueberries.
lukan 2 hours ago [-]
Which is why the next time I go into gardening, will be a fully or mostly automated (the fun part) greenhouse. Snails stay outside.
gardnr 2 hours ago [-]
When people discover that I work in tech they ask me what they should buy. I tell them that they should buy seeds.
antisthenes 2 hours ago [-]
How many of them have gone and bought a torrent seed-box after this?
docotronic0711 31 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 19:59:09 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
A couple points of feedback that I noticed so far:
1. I wrote a comment here in response to what you said about the tradeoff between growth rate and growth quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50415982
2. In your section on photoperiodism (https://jrcpl.us/contrib/2020/gardening-for-engineers/#photo...), it seems the examples are backwards. Ie, lettuce is a long-day plant that flowers when days are long, mung bean is a short-day plant that flowers when days are short.
Can you expand on this?
I'm no expert, and I fully agree that growing food at scale can be difficult. It also requires a lot of space.
But what do you mean by saying it's "too complex for our brains"?
In my own experience (quite a bit over the last ~8 years), if high temperatures (T_opt, not T_max) are accompanied by longer and more intense daylight as well as adequate water and nutrition, it will consistently result in thicker stems, stronger roots, and better flavor. And since higher temperatures in the summer typically coincide with longer days and more intense sunlight, this is the most common outcome. Lacking water or nutrition under these conditions, plants will usually stall their growth rather than grow thinner or weaker.
The only times I can think of that the quoted statement is true is with, eg, indoor seed starts that are given a warm environment with plenty of water and nutrition, but that lack sunlight or artificial light, or light-adapted plants grown outdoors in too much shade.
The clearest counter example that comes to mind is tomatoes, which IMO taste their best, and are by no means thin or weak, when they are growing the fastest.
It's still humbling: it missed caterpillars on the broccoli until I made it look at full-resolution photos. Wrote it up here: https://jatorre.github.io/garden/
> I am currently exhibiting overwhelming stress from deeply technical work being part of my every day life, and feel I am missing the 'nature' element of life. What should I do?
The brain responds:
> Gardening! A wonderfully complex system that will just 'live' without me! A delightful escape!
The brain asks:
> Yes, gardening! But how? There are so many variables! What are the parameters? Where is the specification outlining the success criteria? What defines a living organic system?
https://imgflip.com/i/b5dvkg
Standard veggie gardening has very low ROI. Basically you need land (hyper expensive in cities), time, patience, and when you do get a crop it's in peak season and ~free at the shops. That's not to discount the experience or the cleanliness or the taste benefits of organic home grown veg: but from an engineering standpoint, you're better off not bothering. Hydroponics are a completely different beast. We're all lucky our society is no longer agrarian in nature. Hunter gatherers lived far better lives than agrarian peasantry.