Category: Fruits and Vegetables

Peanut Butter Fence

We got the peanut butter fence up on the farm — Scott and Anya attached the metal strips, and I smeared the with peanut butter. Since they are connected to an electric fence line, the idea is that a deer will lick at the peanut butter (evidently something they really like) and get an unpleasant jolt. It’s a solar energizer, so not too unpleasant. But enough for them to think “I’m gonna go eat this other green leafy stuff!”.

Using Graph Database to Track Plant Hybridization

Graph databases are designed to both store data and record relationships between data elements. I wondered if this would be useful in tracking cross-breeding projects – essentially building “family trees” of the entity being cross-bred. The data model would have nodes with the hybrid with notes on it. Relationships for PARENT_M and PARENT_F (male and female parent of the hybrid) would be used to associate nodes.

Graph databases have a concept of pathing – what nodes do we need to traverse to get from A to B – but to create a lineage for the plants, you need to know the starting point. Which is great if you want to play six degrees of separation and find a path between two known people, but not great if I just want to know what the lineage is of Tomato #198. To make pathing possible, I needed to add a common root node to all of heirloom seedstocks – PLANT0

This allows me to take any plant and find the paths from PLANT0 to it

MATCH
p=(Tomato0:TOMATO {name: 'PLANT0'})-[*]->(Tomato8:TOMATO{name: 'Tomato0000008'})
RETURN p

And visualize the genetic heritage of the hybrid.