I’m growing some vegetables in the garden, and with a recent heat wave i’ve been introduced to the idea of leafy greens bolting. You may have heard of this… your leafy greens, like any other plant, want to reproduce. So, if you aren’t careful, they will eventually grow a little taller and then attempt to put out flowers. A total loss… the greens get bitter and you are forced to pull the plant and rattle around your seed bags looking for a replacement. Funny, don’t you think, that our mission with spinach and lettuce is to prevent the stuff from reaching adulthood. That way, we keep eating it.
So spinach is like dogs and cats. Stick with me here.
Somewhere back in the attic of memory, i recall sitting in some biology class or another where they discussed the term “neoteny”. Look it up. It’s this strange state of something being adult but retaining juvenile characteristics. When i first look at the definitions – retaining childlike features into adulthood/attaining sexual maturity at childhood – the definitions seemed a little at odds… but the basic idea is that there are juvenile (or larval!) characteristics that end up being the adult state. Weird, eh? Why would this happen?
Well, in the case of dogs, (cats might be a bad example, the stuck-up little bastards) it’s because we’ve bred them this way.
Wolves make bad pets – Territorial. Piss on stuff. A lot of attitude. Jaws with enough pressure to break your femur. You get the idea.
Dogs, however, are goofy. Compared to the wolf, they are ” a babe lost in the woods ” (Shut up Donnie, you’re out of your element). Big eyes, eager to please, couldn’t catch a cold (except for deer in the east, but then again a babe lost in the woods could kill one of those rats). The domestic dog is cute, cuddly, and safe. In effect, it is a domesticated version of the wolf, bred for characteristics that resemble a wolf pup. Neoteny. They resemble a wolf pup throughout their years, to the point where an aged dog would still make a wolf cock its head with the classic “what the…” reaction. Big eyes, goofiness… it makes babies cute and dogs loveable.
And spinach edible. Keep pruning it back. Breed it to bolt only at the last moment. Strange to propagate a plant so that it will never reproduce, isn’t it? To even selectively breed this trait for slow bolting varieties. We munch away, and buy seeds when we need them (another topic altogether).
But then again, the dogs i grew up with were “fixed.” And the cats, too. You go to the pound for a new one.
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