usually seeds in the tomato family have little tiny hairs on them you can see under a microscope and sometimes they’re even big enough to see with the naked eye but today at work we got tomato seeds in that were LUSCIOUS. hair so dense it looked like fur. hair so immense it muffled the sounds of the seeds when they hit each other and the metal pan they were in. On God you could have shampooed and conditioned them like a little white show dog. the person planting it brought it to me because they thought there was something wrong with the sample and I was like no those are jyst nature’s toupees

it just dawned on me that how is there not a hades and Persephone au of elsabela

reblog for a larger sample size pls etc etc i'll pass u a strawberry 🫶🏽

Thinking about pivoting to seedposting

I Eat Antivaxx Parents

this is UH john .... honestly

today i toured a USDA plant introduction station where they grow/maintain seed bank seeds and every so often (can be like 15-30 years depending on how many of the stored seeds are still alive) they need to grow the seeds out and document the plants/fruits and get fresh seeds to put back in the vault. they do a lot of gourds/pumpkins at this station and those are Huge Guys which all need to be documented and broken open for their seeds as a group without getting mixed up, and anyway you can only imagine my delight when i learned they store their fresh gourd harvests in giant wheeled metal cages with tags and barcodes all over them like they have rabies. like theyre going to Get you

miscommunication at my workplace a few months ago led to an unknown persons disposing of untreated soybeans in the wrong spot, which then became a soybean disaster zone when a skid loader picked up said soybean pile on accident and spread soybeans everywhere in the sloped parking lot while backing up over bumps like a comedy skit, which then caused cars to drive over them regularly until they got crushed into tiny soybean pieces that often ended up on the curb by a grassy area with a couple trees. as you can imagine this has been huge for the local birds, the dark eyed junkos specifically. the moral is that sometimes you just hit it big as a little guy

the world is really fucked up and it’s insane that the squashes and gourds growing happily in their snug high-humidity, high-warmth chambers at my workplace don’t know it. they don’t even know what a country is. never even seen a newspaper. could you imagine

i DO enjoy when seedlings start pushing their way through the soil but they havent gotten big enough to break the surface yet so all you see is a little dirt lump that wasn't there before and its like ohh shit watch out world here they come in a short 8 to 48 hours!!

if theres anything ive learned about science communication both online and offline its that people love unusually large or small versions of a creature. nothing really reaches across the barriers of age, education, or language like that does. if it has another interesting factor that seems mildly upsetting or surprising but not offensive to broad human cultural norms, that is a plus but its not required because even then for a single moment everyone is like damn, yeah, thats pretty big or small, and then even if they remember nothing else they might remember that the creatures are coming in Sizes. you know

today at work a guy i work with came over to me with the seeds he was planting and was like 'hey do we have any bigger equipment?? these garden beans are too big' and i looked over and was like gadZOOKS!!! because he had the largest, Phattest, most accidentally mislabeled lima beans id ever seen.... you could have minted those bad boys and called them currency..... throw them off a high enough building and it would have set off car alarms.... we're talking 2, maybe 3 ants needed to carry just one bean, depending on the species of ant, and well ive never seen a 4 ant bean if you catch my drift. they could have used those as bullets in the civil war on god.... what a bounty. nature's doubloons

today i found a plant growing in an alleyway downtown that gave me this delightful little seed pod that looks like a little banana about an inch long but it splits down the front to reveal hundreds of flat little seeds with little papery wings seed wings and theyre all stuffed into neat rows in a way that makes the pod look like an overfull expanding file and if you run your finger over it seeds fall out. the plant had like 6 of them going overhanging this one sidewalk and some of them were huge, like multiple inches long. anyway plants are still just making stuff outside it seems

there’s an agronomy professor at my work who can take a common crop seed, let it soak in chemicals that dye living parts of the seed shades of red, and then can cut it open and tell you WHY it’s rotting instead of germinating AND can give an approximation of what stage of the growing/harvesting process might have gone wrong to kill it and honestly I’m just struck by how much of an incredibly powerful niche skillset this is. just incredibly valuable in any context, not just in dystopian monoculture corn reality where well-bred/treated/engineered crop seeds are incredibly expensive commodities to be bought and sold but also like, for most of human history? like is this not something kings and emperors and civilizations through human history would put you on courts and councils for. person who can tell you why the crops aren’t growing. remarkable

obsessed with seeds that are slowly inventing the square. like could you imagine being a seed in a rectangular fashion

just had the most heartstoppingly terrifying hour of my life at work trying to fix the machine we use to water the stuff the plants grow on (am 24) (do not know why I am in charge of this) and listen. i fixed it but for a fleeting 10 minutes I thought I broke this expensive piece of lab equipment like ACTUALLY actually, for real. and like. i don’t really know what to take away from this because if I HADNT been able to fix it I would be like, just a reminder to stop while you’re ahead #realwinnersquit, but somehow I found the problem whilst creating more problems and then resolved all of them and now the machine is running like nothing happened. so