Commentary 1

I’m about to post week 5, and I know what you are thinking. Is it really necessary to make so many measurements just to grow a bed of corn? Well (real) corn is the most grown crop on earth (112 kg of grain for each person in the world). The decisions I’m making in my garden are much the same as you need to make in a hundred or thousand hectare field.

For other reasons behind this blog you may have to revisit the very first post “What is this all about?” And there is another important reason too. When we let a story unfold in real time like this one does, we have to learn on the job. Some of this week’s data does not make sense to me. I thought salt would be building up in the soil, but it’s not. I can’t discard the data because it does not fit my existing knowledge, so we’ll just have to live with it for now.