2/28/2010 PERMALINK
Root or shoot? Altering plants so you can grow all your own veggies with almost no labor. Hydroponics is an incredibly efficient way to grow vegetables. With a small 5' x 10' hydroponic system in my Southern California backyard, I was able to produce more veggies than my wife and I could eat. All with only about five minutes of labor per day. One problem I encountered had to do with roots. Most veggie plants could figure out that they had a perfect nutrient flow. So they need only grow a few roots, before concentrating on producing veggies. But a few species weren't smart enough to do that, sometimes blocking my hydroponic system's grow pipes with excess roots, so I couldn't grown them. But now it seems, researchers at the Salk Institute have figured out how to alter the 'root & shoot' genes in veggies to fix that problem. So hopefully, very soon we will all be able to grow any vegetable we desire in our own back yard hydroponic units with just a few minutes of labor daily. Because oh do those freshly picked pesticide-free hydroponic veggies taste ever so much better than their week-old, prematurely picked and chemically ripened, store-bought cousins.