Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Overnight we received a decent amount of rain – about 24mm – which was a relief to all of us at the farm. We’ve been waiting for rain for a couple of our crops in particular and it had been weighing on us, with stress issues coming up that were difficult to keep on top of.

Now that this miraculous stuff fell from the sky overnight, it had me thinking about water. What do we really know about water?

What do we think we know about water?

A couple weeks ago I was listening to a podcast while in the field whose guest was challenging the idea that there are only three states of water. There’s the ones we know…solid, liquid, and gas. But is there a fourth?

While it might sound absurd at face value, it sounds absurd because it goes against something we believe to be true. There are people thinking really hard about water. And there are properties of water that these 3 states don’t fully explain.

Challenges like this are important and a good reminder that we are intellectual babies staring into the vast voids of knowledgeless-ness we have about the universe and about our own planet, about nature, and the interactions that define the world we live in. It is easy to fall into a mode of thinking in which everything around us is certain.

A quick look at science history (one of my favourite things) tells us we should always be ready for a scientific bombshell that completely changes how we think, and that it may involve something we take for granted.

The predominant understanding of how plants work goes something like they need some sort of chemical fertilizer…you know, Nitrogen and stuff…which is an idea from the 1800’s. Despite many advances since, how plants function has still a long way to go in terms of widespread understanding, and humanity remains stuck in the 1800’s. There were no high-powered microscopes, which came a hundred years later, and nobody knew what DNA looked like until Photo 51 was taken in 1952.

We now know that fungus and bacteria are integral parts of plants, the way micro-organisms live inside our human guts, and that the symbiosis between these things is crucial to understanding how they work. We can show more and more that nature is far more interconnected than we could have ever imagined, and the idea that plants require chemical fertilizers to grow will be relegated to a bygone era (hopefully sooner than later).

We didn’t understand the earth revolved around the sun until Copernicus in the 1500’s, and we didn’t know there were even other galaxies in the universe until just 99 years ago when Edwin Hubble figured it out in 1924, and today, we’re a flying solar-powered helicopter on Mars, which just made its 51st flight.

So…what do we think we know about water?

Maybe there’s more to learn.

Stay curious!

Graham

if you’d like to listen to the theoretical discussion of water, a key ingredient of Blueberry Juice, a link to that podcast is here…and if you enjoy reading this blog, it’d be really great if you might share some with someone you know would enjoy