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Garden with Insight v1.0 Help: fruit


When we call some garden plants vegetables, we are incorrect because we eat their fruits, not their vegetable parts. Tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, peas, beans, and corn are fruits just as much as apples and oranges are fruits.

The fruits of most garden vegetables (there we go again) are simple fruits, meaning they develop from just one ovary. An ovary can contain one or more seeds, and in the case of the tomato fruit it can contain thousands. The edible part of the fruit is usually the ovary wall.

In this simulation fruits attempt to develop according to an S-shaped growth curve. They demand energy (as photosynthate) from the plant to grow along this optimal curve, and the plant partitions its resources among the growing fruits. When a fruit reaches its full size (or a maximum number of days has passed), the fruit begins to ripen and may change color. In reality fruit ripening is much more complicated but we assume it to be typical here.

How it works:
plant biomass partitioning
fruiting model
fruit growth

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Updated: May 4, 1998. Questions/comments on site to webmaster@kurtz-fernhout.com.
Copyright © 1998 Paul D. Fernhout & Cynthia F. Kurtz.