Skip to main content

Top of the crops


Much like the Wombles, plants are overground, underground, and taking up space in one, without generally doing much of use in the other.

Not any more.

News came in this week that green-fingered boffins have created a Frankenplant, which is tomato up top, and yummy spuds in the muddy stuff underneath.

Before those of a sensitive disposition start fearing that this is one of those genetically modified plants, and we’re just a short step away from Triffids turning the tables and having us for lunch instead of the other way around, fear not. This ‘Tomtato’ plant (see what they did there? Heh!) is in fact not the product of some cellular-level fumbling, but actually harnesses the long established process of splicing, whereby you take two different plants, chop them up, and stick the bits together. Preferably the bits you want, if at all possible.

It sounds simple, and I even possess one, although admittedly it is two varieties of apple on the same tree, which unsurprisingly is as freaky as it sounds to look at, especially when one variety of fruit is red, and the other one green.

This lab-coat induced new hybrid took a fair bit of work apparently, as making two different bits of plant work together is not dissimilar to supergluing Cameron and Milliband to each other, shoving them in a darkened room, and assuming they’ll be best mates in no time.

Think of the space that can be saved. Now you can grow two crops in the same patch of ground, and in this case, you’re half way to a nice salad.

As a keen haughty... hortycolt... gardening person myself, I can see much potential in this concept, and hope to get twice as much out of my allotment in the near future, if only I can be bothered to dig it over, get rid of the weeds, and go there occasionally.

So I have some suggestions for the Splicers, that I’d like them to get onto as soon as possible:

The Applegette: Up top, we’ll have lovely apples, whilst at ground level courgettes will spring forth. True, this will make your average apple tree look like it’s got feet and is about to march upon your town, destroying all in its path, but you really shouldn’t be so paranoid.

Beetnanas: Everyone likes bananas (except me) and beetroot, so let’s put the two together. Better still, what about the bananas being purple? Then everyone could hate them, not just me.

Raspbegarlic: All the deliciousness of raspberries, with the benefit of multi-purpose garlic nestling below ground, plus the added advantage of knowing your soft fruit will be unaffected by sudden vampire attacks.

Celersprout: Celery is hideous, stringy, salad-ruining, pointlessness, and sprouts have all the repellent nature of cabbages, condensed into a smaller area. The advantage of this one is that ‘accidentally’ trampling on them would only take half the usual time.

I’m exhausted thinking about this. I wonder if a nice cup of Teacoff will help.

This post first appeared in my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column in the North West Evening Mail on the 4th of October 2013. You can view the version used by the paper here, where it had "Frankenplants are" added to the front of the title, and saw a couple of trims reduce it's length by 22 words.

This one was firmly in my writing territory, and came fairly easily. I seem to have a choice of subjects already lined up for next week, but might wind up using none of them. We'll see...

(Compilation CDs continue: today I'm on "Music of the Millennium 2", which is a bit of a cheeky title, as it features nothing before the sixties, and only 'popular' music, but I might be verging on the pedantic here, so I'll stop.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...