45\u00a0 bar steady 30.06\u00a0 9mph\u00a0WNW\u00a0dewpoint 20<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Gibbous Moon of Winds<\/p>\n
There lives more faith in honest doubt, \/ Believe me, than in half the creeds. -Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet (1809-1892)<\/p>\n
I’d put the percentage higher than Tennyson, but his general principle strikes me as true.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0gro-light fluorescents switched on today at 10:00 AM.\u00a0 At the same time the small electrical heating pads began their function of warming seed mediums bottom layer.\u00a0 Earlier tiny lettuce seeds went into the small holes in the rock wool seeding mediums, soaked overnight in 5.0 ph water.\u00a0 Four peat pots, filled with miracle-gro potting soil, received two tomato seeds each.\u00a0 All the seeds are heritage seeds.\u00a0 After both trays went into plastic tubs they went under the lights and on the heating pads.\u00a0 The early phase, sprouting, requires a humid environment so a clear plastic hat went over the lettuce and tomato seeds.\u00a0 Now we wait, wait, that is, after remembering to turn the lights off after twelve hours and checking periodically to keep the seeding mediums moist, but not so moist that they rot the seedlings.<\/p>\n
This process is still unfamiliar to me, so I don’t know what to expect.\u00a0\u00a0 Managing heat, light, water and humidity exceeds by a factor of\u00a0four \u00a0what happens in outside gardening.\u00a0 Outside you have to plant where the new seeds will get enough light, but you don’t provide the light.\u00a0 You also have to provide water if there isn’t enough, but again, that’s rare.\u00a0 Unless you’re over eager and plant too early, you don’t have to worry about heat either.\u00a0 Humidity is fine here, at least during the crucial seed sprouting time.\u00a0 Outside, you provide decent soil (if not provided for you by the land) and plant at the proper depth.\u00a0 That’s it for a while.\u00a0 In this process you are the sun and the rain, the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
Over the years I’ve tended to plant perennials and of those almost all flowers or shrubs, so working with seeds is something I’ve not done often.\u00a0 As I picked up the tiny lettuce seeds with the pick-up (a medical device much like tweezers, but with a finer point, great for removing splinters and, it turns out, picking up tiny seeds), I marveled at how something\u00a0 so small can unfold and develop into edible lettuce.\u00a0 A lettuce seed is smaller than the inside of an o and not much bigger than the enclosed portion of an e.\u00a0 The tomato seed is a bit bigger, it would cover a capital O, but again, from something that size and almost flat, a 24″ plus vine and ripe tomatoes for the salad will emerge.\u00a0 And you don’t believe in miracles?<\/p>\n
This is why proteomics is still the hot new field.\u00a0 In that seed is the dna for a particular type of lettuce or tomato.\u00a0 The dna, once the seedling begins to sprout, switches on and off various genes in a finely orchestrated sequence.\u00a0 The genes, when switched on, express a protein which unfolds, literally, to form, say, part of a stem, or a leaf, or a fruit like the tomato.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The same process created you, dear reader, and me, too.\u00a0 Not only life had to come into\u00a0being, a miracle when inorganic chemicals\u00a0combined in such a manner as to respond to their environment rather than submit to it, but that life had to create as well a means of propagating that first miracle.\u00a0 Without reproduction, no future.\u00a0 Those\u00a0twisted\u00a0twin ladders that constitute our dna developed out of that\u00a0first dna, in other words, that first one-celled organism somehow managed to propagate itself in such a way that its future included a species that could look back on it and say, Grandpa!\u00a0 We are life with the ability to reflect on itself and its place in the cosmos.\u00a0 Pretty\u00a0wonderful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
45\u00a0 bar steady 30.06\u00a0 9mph\u00a0WNW\u00a0dewpoint 20 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Gibbous Moon of Winds There lives more faith in honest doubt, \/ Believe me, than in half the creeds. -Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet (1809-1892) I’d put the percentage higher than Tennyson, but his general principle strikes me as true. The\u00a0gro-light fluorescents switched on today at 10:00 … Continue reading A One-Celled Organism’s Progeny Looks Back in Wonder<\/span>