Month: May 2026

Thigmomorphogenesis

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Squash seedlings in a stiff breeze

Squash seedlings in a stiff breeze—gale-force wind would’ve made for a more dramatic image, but thankfully not. This bending and fluttering of leaves is another benefit, besides the sun, of taking indoor-started seedlings out into the real world.

Movement, like blowing in the wind, triggers the catchily named thigmomorphogenesis process in plants, where they dramatically toughen up after getting a little pushed around. It could be wind, a pummeling rain, animals or hands brushing by or moving them about. Makes perfect sense for them to armor up.

I’m not particularly into the details of how they change, develop sturdier stems and whatnot—tougher seems to sum it up just fine—but it’s good to know about (I used to use an oscillating fan in winter). And I really like the term. For most of my life, my casual thought was that knowing everything would be cool, kind of like AI tries to today. At one point, though, conveniently marked by a certain blog post, my thinking flipped to often wanting to know less. Not cheering for ignorance, just comfortably sticking with what’s necessary for the moment. So, thigmomorphogenesis—long, unwieldy, yet surprisingly easy to pronounce after a couple of tries!

The water is high

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Standing puddle means water table still high

If you live in a big North American city—the kind of cities I’m familiar with—the average ground is asphalt and concrete, and water table is not a household term. If on the other hand you rely on a well, or a smaller town water processing plant, or you grow things at some scale, water table is a big deal. You know the term whether or not you understand it beyond the basic idea of either abundant water or water shortage, and drought.

The puddle zone in the photo, in a particularly low-lying area of the field that my path to the veg garden cuts through, is my own local water table indicator. Earlier in spring, with snow melt-off and the ground still frozen quite far down, it starts out as a shallow pond, to be sloshed through in rubber boots. As the ground unfreezes and the water seeps off, down goes the puddle pond, until it disappears leaving dry ground. This is the water table level, like an underground lake or ocean that’s everywhere, except unlike when it breaks out in an open lake, here the water is running through soil. The lower the table gets, the drier the ground and the less water there is around. When you see a river dramatically drop in a droughty summer, that’s the water table, going down!

This year, the puddle has been dry for a couple of weeks, but after nearly two inches (5 cm) of recent rain, it’s back! Nearly a whole day later, it’s still pretty big, which means, lots of water right at the surface. At this point in the year, its main meaning to me is that lower spots in the field will still get a little flooded, so don’t plant there for a bit! Later on, since there’s no open water near the garden field, if we haven’t had rain for a long while, I’ll start checking the level in the dug well—lower down the string!

Bed prep: Step 1

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Overgrown garden bed after a first pass with the wheel hoe

Here’s a chunk of this year’s tiny veg garden, looking particularly rough in the harshly slanted evening sunlight. As unlike seeing for yourself as this photo may be, it does accurately capture the wild and not ready look of it all. Lush dandelion, prickly thistle and grass already starting to soar, mixed about with the dry dead stems of last fall’s overgrown then winter-killed weeds—that’s step 1 of hand-prepping the bed, completed. It’s not at all like what the rototiller on the tractor would’ve done.

For this first pass, I used the up-for-anything Valley Oak wheel hoe. It’s probably not intended for hacking through this sort of cover, even so, it does the job amazingly well, moving forward and pulling back, using both sides of the blade to slice through tough spots. The green, intact-looking plants have actually been cut off just below the soil level—a day in the sun and they’ll all be fairly dried out, shrunken and browned. Next step, raking it clear, then, another pass with the wheel hoe. Tomorrow!

Peering down a rabbit hole

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Not a literal rabbit hole, instead, the one that I encountered when just for fun I looked into sunburned leaf damage, like what appeared today on a single squash leaf. Sunscald during hardening off isn’t what you’re aiming for, but it happens and it’s never been a big deal. So long as the seedlings are well-watered and the roots aren’t getting cooked in their containers, they’ll be fine has been my experience. Still, since only one leaf among around three dozen squash and melon plants got burned, after several full days in the sun, and yesterday half overcast, I took a mild interest—if I was a lot busier, with hundreds or thousands of seedlings on the go, and everything else looked fine, it wouldn’t get a second thought. Odd one-offs happen all the time.

A bunch of reading and skimming of farm and garden blog posts, university agricultural extension papers, science mag articles, and scientific studies, and no answers. The sunburn itself seemed unusual, especially after a half-cloudy day. Of course, our SPF sunscreen-and-skin cancer training has told us that UV is still strong on cloudy days, but why did only one leaf get so toasted?

Then I discovered the UV spike. Not so widely written about, not as confidently stated as ~80% of UV makes it through clouds, but a real thing. When certain types of cloud pass in front of the sun, like perhaps the fluffy cumulus ones that floated by most of yesterday, the fringes of said clouds can act as a magnifying lens or filter that focuses and directs UV straight down, resulting in an intensity spike of maybe 25%. Could it be that one big early leaf hadn’t been shaded by the others on previous days and gotten more exposure and hidden damage, and just couldn’t take a day of high-powered UV micro-blasts, a few seconds each as the sun disappeared and reemerged, over and over. Hmm, that sounds maybe fairly reasonable…

Soon after, I lost interest—WHY would I want this explained? I could think of no good reason. I’ve found with tiny farming that learning is continuous and great, but what you choose to take in is also critical, sucking up everything is a waste of attention. The one burned leaf isn’t a mystery, it just clearly happened. And unless more similarly unusual things appear, I’m not particularly curious. The real thing to remember: harden off, a couple hours max outdoors the first day, and keep them well-watered and not boiling in their pots! When they get into the real ground, small ups and downs along the way will be forgotten, they’ll spread their roots and do just fine. Conditions in the field being favorable, of course!

The tree at the end of the field

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The sun’s almost set but the howling wind and bursts of heavy rain aren’t slowing down. It’s pretty wild out there, with ankle-deep marshy wet patches hidden in the grass. Stepped out for a last look around, and the tree at the end of the field caught my eye as it usually does. It stands in the middle of a large pasture, far from the woods, at the point where the main veggie beds end. It seems quite independent, holding back on the leaves when the other trees are already green, exactly the same shape year round, with leaves or without. Lots of big trees, sheltered in the surrounding forest, were snapped like twigs in the big wind and ice storms of the last four-five years, but this guy remains unbothered. I’m glad because it’s a central part of the tiny farming scenery here these last many years. Would be sad to see it snapped!

Pot experiment

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Which pot is better for tomato seedlings, the narrower, deeper, or the shorter, wider one? This is an experiment I’ve started probably half a dozen times over the years, then got so caught up in everything else going on in a typical growing season, I never followed up. Maybe in this quieter repair year, we’ll get to a result!

The general idea is simple: roots like to grow down, looking for food and water. Give them a headstart in the down direction, and you should get better results. Earlier fruiting, bigger fruit, overall more productive plants, especially good if you have a shorter season like here, where fall frost will put a halt to the toms. But there’s a big tiny farming BUT.

Labor is that big thing. If you have hundreds of toms to transplant, especially in our heavy soil, digging that extra couple of inches actually takes time and effort that adds up. Having tomatoes a week earlier, if that proves out, won’t offset not getting the transplanting done on schedule in the first place. Adding extra work for a cool idea is a tough one on a hand-run farm that’s not optimizing in terms of thousands of tons of produce like a big commercial, mechanized farm.

I’ve usually gone the other way. Grow toms in plugsheets that would seem ridiculously cramped and tiny compared to the substantial home garden seedlings available for five bucks a pop at the garden center. Get them in the ground early, buried up to their first leaves. Frost risk? There’s always row cover! Let them get on with it from a young age.

Still, experiments are fun, and when you learn stuff by trial and error, first-hand, the knowledge usually finds a way to become useful. Hopefully this year, there will be a solid deep pot vs shallow result!

Weed tree

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Box elder aka a weed tree

This volunteer tree started growing there maybe four or five years back, and is now almost literally trying to eat a table where I work on gear and put out seedlings, blocking the morning sun, getting in the way. Plus, what’s that dense little micro-environment hosting that might crawl or fly directly onto the veg plants?

It’s known as the box elder, a scrappy, scrawnier member of the maple family that’s described unaffectionately as a weed tree, or even a trash tree. That’s cold, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t know or wouldn’t care about what people call it. It’s too busy growing at an insane rate for a tree, at the same time spreading its multiple stems. In some countries, it’s officially classified as invasive, a menace to society.

Cut it off at the ground, which I’ve done every year since it appeared, and its resilient root system cheerfully sends up more. I don’t have time for a root excavation and eradication project at the moment. You’d think I’d have gotten to it earlier, but this growth snuck up in the last week or two, as the weight of the new leaves bent its weak and spindly stems over the table. Guess I’ll chop it back again for now. Carnage!


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