Saccharin Radishes

August 23rd, 2010
experiment, sweetradish
I'm going to test the feeding plants artificial sweeteners thing. One friend suggested using saccharin as the sweetener because its chemical structure is pretty different from that of plants (unlike sucralose or aspartame maybe) which would make it harder for the plants to process and more likely for them to store away the sweetener somewhere. Another friend suggested using radishes because the flavor change would be quite clear and they grow quickly. Checking dates, radishes take 20 to 30 days to mature while the first boston frost probably isn't until october 5th, which means I still have leeway.

I planted raidishes yesterday in one long pot divided in half down the middle. I'll start adding saccharin (sweet-n-low from the grocery store) to the right side once they've germinated; no point in adding any before they're working on creating a big tasty root.

Comment via: facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

LLMs roleplay characters

I. I’m going to talk about the persona selection model, which in my opinion is one of the most important concepts to understand if you want to understand large language models’ psychology.

via Thing of Things May 1, 2026

You should try contra dancing

a story of middle school Ben • a not-very-illuminating description of the mechanics • flow, joy, and community • the antidote to the rest of life • how to try contra

via benkuhn.net April 24, 2026

On AI writing in 2026

I use AI to write a little bit: I ask it for high level feedback on blog post drafts, make mechanical edits, and sometimes use it to brainstorm options for wording at a paragraph level. It’s unusual that I accept its wording or changes without modificatio…

via Home April 16, 2026

more     (via openring)