in some distant sci-fi future, when 2 robots… bob and sarah… meet randomly for the very 1st time, and we assume that they recognize the benefit of sharing information, then what happens? i don’t think that they would talk with each other like humans do. perhaps they would wirelessly communicate. maybe they would start off by sharing their metadata (information about their information) with each other…
bob
+cars: 46 terabytes
+plants: 867 petabytes
+sci-fi books: 254 gigabytes
sarah
+astronomy: 285 gigabytes
+engineering: 12 petabytes
+plants: 999 petabytes
they would virtually click on “plants” in order to drill down to see the subcategories? or would they simply exchange all their plant data? bob wants to watch each and every one of sarah’s garden visits? she wants to read all the threads, articles, papers and books that he’s read? i dunno.
all our plant information isn’t equally useful, so we should prioritize sharing the most useful information. hmmm… what’s my most useful plant info? some possibilities…
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don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. can you imagine a form of life that isn’t capable of colonization? somehow it just stays in the same spot forever? not really, perhaps it wouldn’t take long for the tiniest landslide to kill it. extinction by… one pebble. sharing cuttings of your favorite plants is only magnanimous if doing so doesn’t function as a backup in case you somehow lose those plants.
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sowing seeds. we’ve all eaten bananas, but how many banana seeds have you sown? if all our favorite fruits were seedless, would we really be better off? not really. variation is the source of progress.
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seedling slavery. we use seedlings as rootstocks for named varieties, which only exist because they were not used as rootstocks. take a loquat seedling, snip off the new growth and wait for it to branch. leave one branch alone and use the other branches for grafting. when the seedling fruits, if it isn’t better than any of the grafts, then graft over it. if the seedling is better, name it, sell it and we will give you positive feedback in the form of money. it’s hard to imagine all the benefit that we’ve missed out on because people still do not understand the actual problem with (seedling) slavery.
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hybrids are better than species. since variation is the source of progress, and hybrids will have more variation than species, we will make more progress with hybrids. for example, maybe a passiflora species will start colonizing your area. eventually, either by humans or nature, it will be crossed with another species in the same area. chances are good that there’s a combination of both species’ traits that is better adapted to your area than either species. right now my passiflora phoenicea x caerulea is about to bloom for the 1st time. i will pollinate the flowers with caerulea pollen. chances are good that among all the seedlings will be one that is better adapted to my climate than both species. out of all the trait combinations possible from all the possible passiflora crosses, it’s a given that the winner for any given climate will be a hybrid. therefore, we should hybridize the heck out of our favorite fruiting plants in order to facilitate their colonization.
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plants trade with each other via fungi. we should strategically arrange plants so that they benefit from each other’s differences. two of the fastest growing volunteer trees in my yard, an elm and an camphor, were both right next to a rotheca myricoides. coincidence? the rotheca has super thick, juicy and succulent roots, what thirsty tree wouldn’t want a close relationship with it? if a rotheca is right in between an elm and a camphor, then the rotheca would have the upper hand. just like an elm would have the upper hand if it was right in between 2 or more rothecas. rotheca grows really easy from cuttings. unfortunately, i think most of your climates are too cold for it, so you’ll have to find rotheca substitutes.
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humans don’t have a monopoly on markets. @a_Vivaldi doesn’t consider the above to be a market because… plants aren’t sentient. imagine he goes to a plant sale and he’s very disappointed because there’s only one vendor with a small selection of uninteresting plants. it’s a crappy market. now let’s imagine a fig tree with only one basically useless plant next to it. again, it’s a crappy market. both scenarios involve markets, regardless if only the 1st includes sentience. the happiness of both a_Vivaldi and the fig tree can be maximized by surrounding them with the most beneficial options to choose from.
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markets are the best way to fertilize. a_Vivald said “It’s just not something I’d count on as an effective and reliable method of fertilization.” recently i sowed around a dozen jabuticaba seeds each in their own pot. in half of the pots i mixed in osmocote granules. in the other half i put numerous seeds of nitrogen suppliers (mimosa and palo verde), enough so that each jabo seedling would have the upper hand. anyone else ever conducted any experiments like this? I’m sure that there’s always a market that can beat osmocote. practically, finding this market might be harder than using osmocote, but it will be worth it in the long run.
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drainage hole optimization. the pots in the above experiment were 50oz water bottles that i cut the tops off of. i also cut 2 drainage holes, on both sides around an inch above the bottom. the elevated drainage holes create a small reservoir of water. my medium drains really well. it’s generally safer for the medium to drain better, but this also means more frequent watering, which i’m not always the best at. so it shouldn’t be a surprise that elevated drainage holes are more useful for me here in relatively dry southern california. but i’m guessing that most of us probably grow a few plants in pots that are sitting in dishes that function as reservoirs.
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natives are usually inferior to non-natives. chances are good that there is a non-native species that is better than all the native species at any given ability, such as water storage. a cosmopolitan market will always be far more productive than a local market. there’s no chance that any country will win all the gold medals in the olympics. the same is true if there was a plant olympics. why isn’t there a plant olympics?
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we need more guerrilla gardening. last week in san fernando valley i planted a capulin cherry (prunus salicifolia) and a catalina cherry (prunus ilicifolia) near a public drainage ditch overgrown with willow. i placed both fruit trees close enough together that hopefully when they bloom this spring they will be cross-pollinated and the hybrids will do better than both species at naturally filling the area with fruiting trees. when i planted each one i added a handful of different plants in the same hole to create a market, such as dragon fruit, elaeagnus, chaya and so on. today i plan to do the same with some guavas which i’m guessing need to be planted closer to the ditch.
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optimizing information prioritization. if each of the above bullet points had a heart next to it that you could click, then we’d see some metadata about each one. imagine some technology at a plant market that made it just as easy to click a heart button next to each sales plant. a plant vendor would think, hmmm… the pomegranates have the most hearts, but i’m selling far more persimmons. next time would he bring more pomegranates or more persimmons? he’d bring more persimmons. whether we’re talking about plants, or plant ideas, markets should always be prioritized by actions more costly than clicks.
prior to joining this forum, some of the threads from here showed up in google search results. not sure what the tipping point was for me becoming a member of this group, but here i am. i haven’t really dug through all the old threads to find all the most useful information. you’re more than welcome to share it with me here, of course. but it seems kinda inefficient to do so with every new member. other forums have stickies that they keep at the top of the page, and some forums are kinda ridiculous because they have so many stickies. ideally we should be able to sort threads by their usefulness, again, defined by meaningful actions. this could be accomplished by donations to this forum. not only would this help support this website, but when any new individual finds it, be they human or robot, they will be able to quickly find the group’s most valuable information.