Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Hope, Gravity, And Beans


I planted beans. They're already beans when you plant them and I think you could just cook them up, but instead we bury them and have them go through this whole thing so we have beans. They were bashful about germinating. Finally one brave scout poinked its little nose in the air and stood like a protestor defying a tank. Well, that kind of courage comes naturally to plants. They're rooted. Anyway it must've called the all-clear because the rest of the row showed up later.

You can tell they're beans because they're all lined up where I planted them. Otherwise it can be hard to identify a plant at the poink stage. They come out with little blobby leaves that don't look like the finished product. It's a starter set, the cotyledons, and across the seed-plant kingdom they look kind of similar. You have to wait for the prima donna leaves to unfurl like ballerinas to tell the rest of the story.

The leaves in the starter set don't count as real leaves though. Cotyledons are actually part of the embryo. (Yes, plants have embryos, a little something you should think about if you like to eat seeds, which you should totally leave alone until the plant bursts into the air, at which point they're fair game and the Supreme Court doesn't care what you do with them.) The purpose of these cotyledons is to raise a flag of hope to the anxious gardener, a little arrival announcement to the world--and prior to that their job was to glom onto the nutrients stored in the original seed. Once they've gotten the show on the road, as it were, they are sort of done. They figure if the "real" leaves want to spend the rest of their lives sucking up sun and working for the whole enterprise, they're welcome to it. The cotyledons have done a heck of a job, getting the plant to kick its way out of that tough seed coat and head off in the right direction, and now they're retired.

That "right direction" part is cool. Every kid learns that you can get a working plant out of a seed even if you plant it upside down, no matter how dark it is down there. They don't just send out shoots willy-nilly and hope some of them hit the air. Plants react to gravity. They detect it because they have little starchy packages floating around the gooey bits of their embryos, and those sink to the bottom like a load in a diaper. "Ah, that way is down," the plant intuits, and the part of the plant that aspires to being a root gets the drift and goes that way. And the other part, the shoot, goes the hell in the opposite direction out of sheer tribal hostility to the root, a little botanical friction that has worked out well, evolutionarily.

If anything more massive than the earth were nearby, the root would go that direction, but we'd have problems of our own and probably wouldn't notice. That's all gravity is, a mutual attraction between things with mass or energy, and the only reason the earth's gravity is so much more impressive than ours is it's bigger and more opinionated. But our planet is attracted to us, too, and don't let anyone tell you different. Everything is attracted to everything else, even Republicans, and yet we still can't get a decent bill past the Senate.

I'm certainly attracted to this bean plant. I check on it daily, and hope someday it will be full of beans, just like Mitch McConnell.

26 comments:

  1. I could never understand vegetarianism (let alone vegans) because of the fact that EVERYTHING one eats is alive at some point. Why is the life of a cow or chicken more "sacred" than the life of a soybean plant or kale? Because they have eyes? That's rather arbitrary.

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    1. Because they have self-awareness and the capacity to suffer.

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    2. The reason I find most compelling, and which has caused me to cut way down on meat, is that modern animal agriculture is devastating to the environment and unspeakably cruel to the animals. But there are lots of reasons people eat what they eat. I never liked vegetables much until the last ten years and now that's my favorite thing. I don't even eat much fruit--love me some yams. At least one thing that should be said for vegetarians and definitely vegans is they're thoughtful about their consumption, whereas most of us don't care how our food got in its plastic packaging!

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  2. I wish Mitch McConnell was full of something else besides beans... maybe dynamite, with a 3 foot detonating cord hanging out his back end! Anyway, enjoyed reading about that garden of yours Murr, sounded positively cosmic. And the older I get, the more shame I feel for eating anything animal. Yesterday on the news, I saw where all these dogs had been rescued from a South Korean processing plant. Felt such surprise & dismay they're a popular meat there, meanwhile here I am, feasting on other meats.

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    1. I wonder what dog tastes like.

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    2. "Just like chicken," no doubt... I have to admit I have eaten rabbit, and it really does taste like chicken. But ugh, I couldn't eat a dog. I've also stopped eating pork because pigs are as smart as dogs or more so. Still working on the rest of it.

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    3. People are supposed to taste like pork, and that's a sustainable substitute.

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    4. I've eaten rabbit and it didn't taste like chicken, more like veal in my opinion. These days I no longer eat veal or baby lamb either, those poor babies hardly get any life at all before they get slaughtered for someone's table.

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    5. Some years back my wife convinced me to stop eating octopus.

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  3. I drove around the grounds of the LBJ ranch once and there was a cow, unfenced, munching on grass. It thought, "How can anyone kill these animals?" I eat less beef than I used to, and if I, an old dog, could learn new tricks (vegetarian cooking) I would feel better about things.

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    1. I started cooking only a few years ago and it's not NEARLY as hard as I thought it would be. I mean, I could follow a recipe, but knowing how to get everything to come out at the right time and somehow managing to get something on the table EVERY NIGHT FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE seemed undoable. It's not. I figured it out: you try 20 recipes and discover eight of them are really worth repeating and eventually you have sort of a rotation you don't have to think about much, plus you can try new things every now and then.

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    2. Also, I am a big fan of Mr. Freezer. Bake one lasagna and have eight squares to freeze individually.

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    3. OH YOU SAID VEGETARIAN COOKING! I meant cooking at ALL. I'm sure you know how to cook.

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    4. Murr, I found that prepping everything before you even START cooking is a real time and sanity saver. Get all your ingredients together, in the proper measurements, processed as called for, and set out in the order used. Yeah, I know it sounds anal, but it makes things go very quickly.

      And, yeah, I'm a big fan of cooking in batches and freezing also. It's just as much work to make a huge pot of chili as it is a small one. So I make enough for four meals for the two of us (plus some left over for Paul to take to work) and I have delicious home-cooked meals for when I don't have the time/inclination to cook.

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    5. I'd say it sounds anal retentive. Now chitterlings — THAT sounds anal.

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  4. My night-scented stock is coming up...

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  5. When and wherever I tried to grow vegetables, the beans were always the most successful. I remember being able to sit in one spot and pick enough beans for dinner when we were feeding six people. I always had plenty of beans in the freezer. which was a good thing, because my pea plants never produced enough of anything but powdery mildew.

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    1. This is the first year I haven't planted sugar snap peas. Somehow I never kept up with it properly.

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  6. (Yes, plants have embryos, a little something you should think about if you like to eat seeds, which you should totally leave alone until the plant bursts into the air, at which point they're fair game and the Supreme Court doesn't care what you do with them.)!!!!!

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  7. Well, call me a nerd, but my favorite part was when you described the “little starchy packages floating around the gooey bits of their embryos”. BECAUSE this explains the mechanism behind a very cool physics demonstration I saw a number of years ago. Some high school kid had planted beans in little cups that were glued to the outside edge of an old record turntable. He set the turntable at 45 rpm and let it run for how ever many days it took to get the sprouts to pop up a couple inches. Using a couple trig equations, he calculated the angle that those little sprouts needed to ‘lean’ in toward the center of the turn table so that they were growing “up”, or what they would have sensed as up. It checked out! Who knew sprouts could do trig!

    OK, I’m a nerd.

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    1. Viva el nerd! One of my kids did more or less that very experiment in middle school, but without the trig. I can't recall what the rpms were, it was three decades ago...

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    2. And now you just downshlorp your music into your pocket box, or something. No hope for science there.

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    3. I'm trying to picture a mung bean growing in a cup sitting on a smartphone. Nope, no hope.

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  8. This should be read by the True Facts guy and somebody animate it. It would win an award. Your agent needs to get cracking.

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