Tomato Plants Care and Feeding
Posted by in Care Plant, Tomato Plants on June 26, 2011
The tomato plant is one of the easiest plants to grow in the garden and is a great source of food for the family, they are both delicious to eat and promote good health. Learn how to care for tomato plants and you will be able to produce a lot of fruit throughout the growing season.
There are a few basics to get right concerning both the tomato plant care and feeding so that you can ensure lots of juicy fresh fruit straight from the garden.
The first bit of advice for tomato plant care is to ensure that before planting tomatoes make sure that the last frost of the year is over with, neither the plant or the fruit have any tolerance to freezing, so all your preparation could come to nothing if the plants are exposed to a frost.
Next, prepare the soil, it is a good idea to dig a trench about 18″ deep, fill the bottom with a mulch, many people use newspaper to line the bottom of the trench, then add in a mix of high in nitrogen compost and soil to fill the trench.
The compost will provide the basic feed for the plants but can be supplemented with a tomato feed once or twice a week once the fruit starts to appear, this is important for tomato care as the fruit needs a lot of nitrogen to flourish.
Another important aspect of a tomato plants care is to ensure that the trusses are properly supported, this can be done as simply as pushing a stake in the ground and then tying off each truss, as it develops, to the stake with a soft garden string. Prune the tomato plant to remove lower shoots to prevent contact with the ground and to control the number of trusses, a good number is 4 to 6 trusses. Read the rest of this entry »
Intelligent Plants in Science Fiction
Posted by in Intelligent Plants on June 26, 2011
The weeping, talking trees in Virgil and Dante suggest that the idea of communication with plants is of great antiquity, but only in the sense of transmigration of human souls into plants; the subject is not yet real plant intelligence in its own right.
Then comes the transitional example in the early part of William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907). In the chapter ‘The Land of Lonesomeness’ we are taken to an island in which there is a wailing during the night, and evil trees are prone to wrap their branches round the unwary traveller. The narrative suggests that human souls are somehow sucked into the trees and then beckon for more to join them. The sense of horror is peculiar and powerful. The atmosphere is that of supernatural fear, but the work can marginally count as science fiction.
Then comes the great age of magazine science fiction, and all sorts of portrayals of intelligent plants blossom out into the literature.
Murray Leinster’s ‘Proxima Centauri’, dating from the early years of pulp SF, depicts malevolent space-travelling plants attacking human explorers. A more subtle approach comes from the planet-wide vegetable intelligence in the 1931 story ‘Seedling of Mars’ by Clark Ashton Smith, where humanity is subjugated by the promise of Utopia. Raymond Z Gallun, another vintage 1930s writer, produced a more evocative variation on this theme in ‘Seeds of the Dusk’, where this time humanity is gassed to peaceful death by an alien vegetable invader in the far future. In this last story, the reader is made to feel that the removal of the last degenerate humans is no great loss to the world.
As a change from these threats, in Clifford D Simak’s All Flesh is Grass (1965) we actually enounter a benevolent (though somewhat ruthless) intelligent life in plant form, though the form it takes is that of a planetwide biological computer that works through photosynthesis, and is only outwardly similar to the plant life we know. All Flesh is Grass is one of Simak’s best novels, a joy to read. Proclaiming the brotherhood of all species in his gentle, humane, inimitable style, there is nevertheless nothing soft or flabby about it, and it contains plenty of excitement, menace and that impingement of a strange cosmos upon ordinary life, which is the hallmark of a certain subgenre of science fiction – what one might call the small-town cataclysm. Read the rest of this entry »