Atomic Gardening Was Created To Save The World
In the 1920s, scientists started X-raying barley because in those days the only time people weren’t shotgunning double whiskeys was when they were doing cocaine. This led to an interesting discovery that a sufficiently high enough dose of X-ray radiation could create inheritable mutations in the crop, thus laying the foundation for serious atomic gardening, which developed during the 1950s.
After scientists developed the atom bomb, they started looking for ways to come to terms with the fact that they were responsible for creating a weapon that could quite literally destroy the world. And because therapy hadn’t been invented yet, they settled on finding non-destructive uses of radiation. This eventually resulted in an idea, pioneered by the Brookhaven National Laboratories in Rhode Island, of exposing plants to cobalt-60 and seeing what happened. The radioactive material would be placed in the middle of an atomic garden patch, with strawberries, sugar maples, corn etc. being planted around it like slices of a pie. Hang on, let’s see if we can find a helpful visual …
via Wiki Commons
Once the flora took a long enough shower in Godzilla’s morning breath, scientists wearing full radiation suits would come in an inspect the results. The plants nearest the cobalt-60 would usually just be dead. The ones in the middle merely begged for death (which we may or may not mean literally) because of their massive tumors and other gruesome mutations. But the ones near the back — those were the ones that got their genome scrambled just enough to basically get superpowers. We’re talking about larger sizes, better taste, and resistance to illness etc., all of which were inheritable, like with Todd Mitchum Peppermint or the Rio Star Grapefruit.
Just so we’re clear: although the plants and their seeds were irradiated does not mean that they were radioactive. They were mutated via radiation, but they didn’t emit radiation themselves. The cultivars were and still are perfectly safe. Hell, the Rio Star Grapefruit has been around for over 50 or so years now and actually accounts for 75% of Texas’ grapefruit production. Trust us, if atomic gardening could result in you growing extra limbs, Amazon would’ve used it to create a race of bladder-less Machamps that could pack boxes twice as fast and spray sticky diarrhea whenever they heard the word “union.”
It Was Popularized Thanks To A Lady Getting A Giant Nut … And L. Ron Hubbard
The initial success of the Brookhaven experiments gave scientists hope that radiation might be the key to stopping world hunger, and soon atomic gardens were created all over the world, from the US to Costa Rica, Sweden, and Japan. But the practice didn’t really enter popular culture until a guy showed his massive nuts to his lady friend.
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