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| Apparently this is not working too well. |
History shows again & again how
nature points out the folly of men ...
Driving through Gold Rush country, Cantisano points out a 120-year-old pear tree standing tall between a community hall and a gas station.
"It's thrown [sic] huge crops every year in the drought. It doesn't get diseases, it doesn't get insects. Nobody prunes it, nobody waters it, nobody fertilizes it, and it is just prolific as heck. I've picked over 500 pounds of pears off of it," he says.
He says these resilient heirloom trees have lessons for today's California growers, where highly tended crops face drought, pests and disease.
"If we can figure out how to take those characteristics and meld them into modern agriculture, we're going to have a more sustainable agriculture," he says.
Most of the trees I scrump fruit from are heirlooms. The mulberry trees I plunder are the remnants of a failed Bronx silkworm 'ranch'.
ReplyDeleteYou mean to tell me that breeding the shit out of trees to make them produce more/larger fruit has unintended consequences like susceptibility to disease and predation?
ReplyDeleteI'm shocked, SHOCKED I tell you!
Un-Natural Editor:
ReplyDeleteSince you put it that way I am shocked. Mostly because I've never given it much thought, but I can see inbreeding not being good here. (Or in the South — RIMSHOT!)
Silkworm ranching, the chinchillas of their day.