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Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates

crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.com

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Re: Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates

#81

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #71

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…

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.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@Hoocho

Re: Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates

#82

Post by oceanplexian »

PicassoCTs wrote: post #42

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.

Re: Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates

#83

Post by kragen »

griffzhowl wrote: post #64
jt2190 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is not talking about vegetables but various non-food plants that require cool overnight temperatures.

> 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.

Re: Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates

#84

Post by TimorousBestie »

griffzhowl wrote: post #62
anon84873628 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article it explains why.

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…

Some areas are already running short on arable land suitable for some C3 species. Check out the napa cabbage harvests from Japan and South Korea, for example. Japanese rice production is also struggling, though that’s a more complicated example with several causes.

Re: Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates

#85

Post by griffzhowl »

griffzhowl wrote: post #75
lumost wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 famo…

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.

Re: Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates

#86

Post by chimpanzee »

griffzhowl wrote: post #64
jt2190 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is not talking about vegetables but various non-food plants that require cool overnight temperatures.

> 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'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.

Re: Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates

#87

Post by mythrwy »

bikelang wrote: post #74
mythrwy wrote: post #15

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 temp…

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.

Re: Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates

#88

Post by roughly »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #71

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…

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.

Re: Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates

#89

Post by tfourb »

lumost wrote: post #11
lazide wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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).

Re: Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates

#90

Post by lazide »

oorza wrote: post #65
lazide wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you don’t understand the true scale of the problem. Just the additional fossil carbon being put in the atmosphere by the US alone is trillions of KG/yr. Not only is there no way to hide trying to do something about it at that scale, there is no single site (or even multiple sites) that could handle that amount of sequestration - we’re talking hundreds. And even Elon Musk could not afford it, even if he dumped…

No, but you could do enough of it in secret with Elon Musk resources to prove that it's both planetarily viable and doesn't cause catastrophes by existing and then lend your political weight to having it scaled up globally. By the time the public heard about it, it would already be a done deal. I think you could prove it out at a scale that people could measure on planetary CO2 sensors for a couple dozen billion doll…

Mind doing some math and showing your work?
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