This is excellent. Now that it’s fall and the trees in my city are bearing, I’m always bummed out by the lack of free and open fruit trees, which very often fit the profile of the trees planted in city parks. The only difference is prettier springs and more fruitful falls (lit+fig). This particular experiment is made possible buy the sterile fruit trees planted as part of a city initiative, but the guerrilla planting of fruit trees is always possible, as well as finding older fruit trees and grafting new varietals on to create a healthier tree.
This is just glorious!
For anyone who doesn’t grow, grafting is a trick you can do with many plant species. Because plants have no immune system, you can cut a branch from one tree and attach it to another tree, and that branch will continue to grow. Bind the two plants at the join for long enough, and the two will grow together, giving you, basically, a Frankentree. Sometimes the plant tissues will even grow into each other, so you end up with single branches that have living tissue from both plants in them, like some kind of chimeratree.
They don’t even need to be the same species (though they do need to be compatible). A lot of plants you can buy from professional growers are actually grafted. It’s quite common to take a plant with a strong root system and graft the top half of another plant to it – this can let you grow plants in environments which wouldn’t normally support them. If you ever see chilli plants on sale, it’s quite common for them to be grafted. Look for the join, low down the stem, a few centimetres above the soil.
You can be audacious with this kind of thing, and grow fruit branches on trees that wouldn’t normally bear fruit, or you can even grow one tree with multiple types of fruit.
This is actually pretty exciting. They’ve found a way to turn plastic into food.
Mushrooms are such amazing things. Most are decomposers, meaning they break stuff down into its original components. Some break down dead wood, or animals, others can break down toxic waste, and apparently this one can break down plastic. How cool is that?
Pestalotiopsis microspora (a mushroom found in the Amazon rainforest) consumes polyurethane, the key ingredient in plastic products, and converts it to organic matter.
Further, Pestalotiopsis microspora can live without oxygen, which suggests enormous potential for feeding on, and thus cleaning up, landfills.
It takes just a few weeks for the mycelium to start breaking down plastic, and in a few months’ time, the plastic is completely broken down, and all that’s left is a white puffy mushroom. Even if not eaten or used for anything else, the mushroom could be composted and turned in to soil at a much faster rate than that of plastic, which is estimated to take 400 years to decompose on its own.
“Aspergillus tubingensis, which was found in Pakistan, is capable of eroding plastics such as polyester polyurethane, which is often used in refrigerator insulation and synthetic leather.”
