Because giant pumpkins are difficult to grow and work with, Hu smashed ordinary-sized store-bought pumpkins to test their strength and fed the data into the model. But the strength of these small pumpkins might be different than that of giant pumpkins. The model also lacks pre-stresses, forces caused not due to the weight of the pumpkin, but to anatomical features built into its structure that might resist gravity. Still, the general conclusion that some cells might be dividing faster than others is "not unexpected" said biomedical engineer Larry Taber, a professor at Washington University in St.
Louis, Mo. That's a lesson that Don Young, a prize-winning giant pumpkin grower in Iowa, has learned through years of experimentation. He knows that rain and other factors in the environment can play a huge role in shaping how fast the pumpkin grows -- and that steadiness is the key. To prepare his pumpkins for a coming storm, which could cause them to swell and burst, he gradually increases how much he waters them, slowly ramping up their growth rate. During the giant pumpkin growing season, which starts around April and lasts as long as days, or until the last frost, Young also collects soil and pumpkin samples every week and sends them off to a lab for analysis.
He wants to know which nutrients the pumpkin uses during different parts of the season. Once the fanfare has died down, the pumpkins technically could be eaten—but few would recommend it. The runners-up are often featured in carving exhibitions and other displays; Snyder has sold some of his giants to Disney World. Pumpkin growers are united in their quest for monumental produce, but are otherwise a sundry lot, Wolf says.
Few are actually farmers. He recommends that newbies find a mentor in their area who can give them advice tailored to their climate. So what does the future hold for giant pumpkins? Along the way, growers will fine-tune their control over the pumpkins and their environment.
This tells them how much of various nutrients the plant is receiving so they can adjust their fertilizing schedule. In future, soil moisture probes will become more common, Snyder says. Other fruits and vegetables may never match the most eminent pumpkins in plumpness or public admiration. But giant watermelons are gaining traction in the South, he says. Tomatoes and gourds are becoming more popular as well, while England is a hotspot for giant onions.
Knee-deep in the rising tide, a Tuvalu minister's COP26 speech makes a big impression. Sign up to receive Popular Science's emails and get the highlights. Growing giant gourds is a relatively new hobby for farmers and gardeners. The story, according to a Time magazine article , is that in , a farmer in Nova Scotia named Howard Dill grew a very large pumpkin and brought it to a fair near Philadelphia that was holding a weigh-off.
His At the time, it was a silly thing to do: bring a giant pumpkin to a contest to win a prize. The next year, his pumpkins were even bigger, the next year even bigger — which led to the beginning of the strain of now-famous giant pumpkin seeds known as the Dill's Atlantic Giant.
Pumpkins are an unusually size-variant fruit. Yes, scientifically speaking, they are fruits, though most don't think of them that way. Likewise, the pumpkins of centuries past were much smaller and bitter. This is not a concern for the giant pumpkin growers. In fact, giant pumpkins tend to be fibrous and are not considered palatable to many.
All that matters is size. So, how did giant pumpkins get to be so large? What physiologically separates the giant pumpkin varieties from their brethren destined for pumpkin spice lattes? The short answer is that giant pumpkin plants produce more phloem than do plants of other squash varieties Savage et al. Xylem is the other main component of plant vasculature, and its primary job is to move water and nutrients from the soil through the plant.
We discussed xylem function in our post on maple syrup. Squashes and other species in the squash family Cucurbitaceae are particularly suited to studies of plant vasculature, as Jessica Savage explains below in a special interview post to explain phloem function and how it helps us understand the evolution of size in giant pumpkins.
Question 1: How do you like to explain phloem and its function to a general audience? They achieve this using part of their vascular tissue, the phloem, which is specialized in transporting sugars. However, plants, different than animals do not have a heart to drive circulation of fluid in their vascular system, instead, they rely on mostly passive processes. Phloem function schematic diagram by J. This sugar draws extra water into the cells making them full and swollen.
In these locations, sugar concentrations are low inside the phloem. This causes water to leave the cells making them more limp. Because the source and sink tissue are connected, water moves from the full cells in the source to the more limp cells in the sink tissue. Question 2: Why do pumpkins and other cucurbits lend themselves to the study of plant vasculature? This makes them easy to see using a microscope. They also have some great properties which help us study their physiology, for example, the cells in their leaves are very connected.
This seemingly simple characteristic is very important because if we want to put dye into the phloem to watch phloem transport in living plants, we can put the dye in any of the cells in the leaves and it will eventually get into the phloem. Question 3: On the other side of that coin, how does understanding phloem function and its evolution help us understand how giant pumpkins got so giant?
In normal sized pumpkins, there are many small fruit and sugar is transport in different directions to feed them all. This is similar to traffic in the country where everyone is going to work in different directions and there is not too much traffic on any one road.
However, in giant pumpkins a large amount of sugar is going into one fruit.
0コメント