You can't grow cool-climate plants in hot climates
(crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.com)145 points by surprisetalk 3 days ago
145 points by surprisetalk 3 days ago
On the upside, since Trump's tariffs are going to make importing tomatoes/etc from Mexico in winter unaffordable, maybe winter here will become warm enough that we can grow them here!
The Iowa corn crop may start failing, but we can start growing pineapples instead. Cows eat pineapples, right ?
The author has a highly amusing, off-beat Instagram feed: https://www.instagram.com/crime_pays_but_botany_doesnt
His youtube channel is great! I love his Bay Area hikes and plant explanations.
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
Any other folks you saw at nerd night that I need to read and follow?
Wouldn't a hydroponic setup help the author with this?
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)
All of these things are possible, but the cost difference between “put the plant in the dirt” and “put the plant in a specially constructed climate and humidity controlled box” are why large-scale hydroponics are only really used for high profit margin crops for which there’s a good reason not to just plant them outside.
You can do hydroponics outside, but it will still be warm at night. And with hydroponics, you need to prevent the water from getting too warm -- the roots will rot. So you might have trouble during the day, too.
[This guy][1] does a bunch of hydroponics and hydroponics adjacent projects outdoors.
do you mean greenhouse?
I guess in this case it would have to be greenhouse with good AC?
This is why it’s important for us to develop C4 alternatives to existing C3-using food staples.
https://c4rice.com/the-science/engineering-photosynthesis-wh...
What's the connection? I thought the Ci would be Koppen climate classification but it's actually alternate carbon-fixing photosynthetic processes
Plants build three-carbon sugars during photosynthesis by fixing a CO2 molecule onto a two-carbon chain with an enzyme called RuBisCO. In a typical "C3" plant, this happens relatively directly. But RuBisCO can screw up and fix an O2 molecule instead, and the erroneous result costs the plant energy to repair.
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.
C4 is more efficient than C3 photosynthesis and allows plants both to produce more energy and to do so with less water which is an adaptation for hotter, drier climates.
Yeah, ok. I read about half the article and it was just talking about growing tomatoes in Texas rather than their homeland of the northern Andes.
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?
Not that you’re wrong, but I find it darkly amusing that rather than than cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing, it would make sense to instead bio engineer a bunch of plant life to deal instead.
What is the proposed mechanism for implementing a cut back? A global population with 8 billion people and 1950s carbon emissions implies an average living standard somewhere in the realm of the 1900s. Are you volunteering to move back to the horse and buggy?
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.
CO2 emissions are not the driving force behind economic development. Energy is. And energy generation has been decoupled from CO2 emissions in almost every major economy, including China. Heck, in many countries economic growth has been decoupled even from energy use, with economies growing while energy use shrinks.
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).
“Horse and buggy”. How dramatic.
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.
> The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
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!"
btw, Jared Diamond's "Collapse" begins with a chapter on Montana gold mines. When I first got it I thought "oh no, this is gonna be boring af", but his depth and breadth of knowledge made even that captivating. I also learned later in the book about the Greenland Norse and their ups and downs, and that was also revelatory. Reading that book was one of the top edifying experinces of my life. I highly recommend it.
> The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
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.
We could start by banning things that explicitly waste resources such as proof of work cryptocurrency and adjust tax incentives to punish huge energy consumers for things like AI. Make the energy cost factor in the long-term externalities and maybe companies will hesitate before burning the world for things that aren't necessary.
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.
Notably, I’d count ‘technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions’ as cutting back on the crazy.
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?
> cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing
How would you get grant money for that?
That's a good practice anyway. Focusing on the capability to flexibly adapt our agriculture ensures long-term survivability. Focusing on hyper-efficient extraction that assumes a steady state gives a high-output but incredibly fragile agricultural industry. One black swan event, like a few volcanic eruptions, and we're all toast - and of course, the climate is constantly shifting even in the absence of such events and human inputs, just more slowly.
As someone very naive on this topic, can you elaborate on where he pushed boundaries? I follow his YT channel and he obviously pushes boundaries from an activist perspective, and I'm a fan[0], but I'm not able to judge his scientific credentials.
[0] (love that one video where he shows how to get away with replacing poorly chosen non-native plants in public parks that will inevitably die out within a few years with native species that will thrive; basically, put on a yellow vest and dress like a gardener and nobody will bother you)
This isn’t true. You can grow - it’s just the seasons are different or offset. In the warmer climates you actually have a longer growing season than say New England. Your local extension office can explain.
For example, here is the UFIFAS which is very good
https://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/media/sfylifasufledu/orange/hort-r...
I think you're overstating his point.
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.
> author is not talking about vegetables
He's talking about growing tomatoes all the way through the article. Nothing but talking about how tomatoes grow
He does have one paragraph about tomatoes, but he also talks about Andean cacti like Browningia candelaris, "plants from places like cloud forests of Central America", Solanum pennellii, and "plants from (...) the Páramo of Ecuador".
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.
> He's talking about growing tomatoes all the way through the article. Nothing but talking about how tomatoes grow
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.
Apparently I have cool climate plants: apple, avocado, lavender those are germinated from seeds and blackberry, and fig from cuttings also living in a hot and humid climate. Definitely they can grow here, but can they be farmed? Of course not without expensive climate controls
Wait, avocado and lavender are supposed to be cool climate plants?
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.
Blackberry and it's variants like dewberry are very common in the south and do fine in the high heat and humidity. It's almost impossible to kill. I have 4 different varieties growing wild and in planters at my house.
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.
Are you talking about the southern US? How can there be native apple varieties? I thought they were all originally from around central Asia and a quick look on wikipedia confirms this
"Native" might have been an excessively strong term. I should've said there are varieties that are unique to the region even though their ancestors originally came from Asia.
Great blog I bookmarked it. It’s so hard to find articles written at this level.
You can, if you keep them cool with shade and water if it's not excessively humid.
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
Well ok, if you modify the environment to have a different climate then you can grow things that grow in that modified climate...
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.
Can you tell us a bit more about your greenhouse/hoop house? I’m in the CO front range - so very dry, cool nights, but quite hot in the sun. Our patio is getting re-done and I’m thinking about how I might rebuild our planters to better support growing tomatoes.
Sure. I intend to put it in a blog at some point.
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 started a tomato patch in MA early on this season but they hardly grew and are just now delivering fruit. Are they negatively impacted by high temperatures? This is the first time I have a plot in full sun, and all instructions point to tomatos doing well in full sun, but I wonder if the sun was a bit too full this season :-D
1) did you start them indoors or buy seedlings? Getting a late start could delay things.
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.
Thanks for these insights!
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.)
It's kind of a fine line with tomatoes because they really really do not like cool nights nor cool soil.
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.
And you can not grow hot-climate plants in heating up cool zones, as the swings winter to summer remain. We need to transport possible neophytes that wont survive in the bulbbelt up the temperature zones and help them via selective breeding to acclimate.
I assure you people who live in Phoenix grow things like Tomatoes and Lettuce perfectly fine in winter months. The OP would learn more visiting his local gardening center than vomiting up a bunch of wikipedia facts.
I’m looking into building a shadehouse. I think I need that a lot more than my greenhouse, especially as the climate changes. Summers are just brutal and my garden plants getting some shade some of the day under trees are doing a lot better than ones in full sun.
Plant metabolism depends on temperature and light in a way they can't control. If it's too warm and/or sunny, plants "run too hot" and exhaust themselves to death. If it's too cold or shady, they can't "run enough" and die from inadequate fuel and other biochemical precursors.
In southern Sweden the vast spruce forests are starting to die because of the spruce bark beetle. You can see it everywhere now.
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.