How does your atomic garden grow?

Source - Messy Nessy Chic

With as scared as people are of GMOs at this point (and that's a whole other kettle of paranoia), I can't imagine that atomic gardening would go over too well.

I'll give a quick summary and point you to a few articles to read more, but the long and short of it is that atomic power was hip and neat and cool in the post-WWII era. Without that trend, it looks like we wouldn't have a decent swath of produce that we enjoy today - like ruby red grapefruits, for example, which are about 3/4 of all grapefruit grown in the US.

The basics are the gardens were planted in concentric circles around a radioactive source (cobalt-60 in the diagram below). The circles were to control how much radiation each ring of the crops got. Apparently the crops in the rings nearest the source would often die, but at some distance, the crops would survive but mutate in interesting ways leading to sometimes radically different crop properties.

Source - 99 percent invisible

The crops that looked promising, then, would be taken away and bred to produce more, viable offspring with the desired properties.

Yup, the radiation was used to induce random mutations...because we wanted to mutations.

Suck on that, GMO-scaredy cats...

To read more, check out...

• 99percentinvisible - a podcast and article about atomic gardening
• Messy Nessy Chic - an article about atomic gardening
• Ripley's - an article about atomic gardening
• Wikipedia - of course