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CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: This is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS, in VOA Special English. Today, we tell about an American farmer and an unusual device he developed. For twenty years, people around the world have been buying his invention.

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JIM TEDDER: Blake Whisenant and his family are farmers. They live in the American state of Florida. For nearly a hundred years, Mr. Whisenant's family has grown fruits and vegetables, and sold them to businesses around the world. The warm weather in central Florida is good for growing crops, especially tomatoes. That is what he grows the most of on his eight hundred hectares of land.

In nineteen ninety-two, Mister Whisenant had some bad luck.

Self-watering containers, like this EarthBox, are great for space deprived gardeners
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It began to rain. And...it rained. And it rained some more. Nearly fifty centimeters of rain destroyed the tomato crop that year.

JIM TEDDER: Blake Whisenant was not a happy farmer.

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BAKE WHISENANT: "I just thought there's got to be a better way!"

JIM TEDDER: So, he began looking to find a way to make sure this never happened again. He wanted to develop a system that would provide water to the plants from below. He thought some kind of cover would keep rain away and the soil warm. He wanted the plants to be grown in a box that would take up little space. He became obsessed with the idea and thought about it day and night.

BLAKE WHISTENANT: "And I told my wife, before I die I wanted to see if I could build me a box above the ground that I could grow tomatoes in."

JIM TEDDER: And...after years of work...

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...he knew what to do. He found a company in Pennsylvania that agreed to make the box. It would be made of thick plastic, and would be about one meter long and half a meter deep. Inside the box would be a plastic tube to pour the water in, and a plastic screen with many holes in it. Something like peat moss, but not soil, would be placed in the box on top of the screen, which would hold it above the water in the bottom of the box. A thin plastic cover would fit over the top of the box to keep out rain and harmful insects. Blake called it...the Earthbox.

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JIM TEDDER: Frank DiPaolo is the general manager of the Earthbox Company in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He says that growing vegetables this way...container gardening some call it...makes it easy for Blake Whisenant and other farmers to quickly solve common growing problems.

FRANK DIPAOLO: "When he saw any sort of disease or problems with the plants in the field, one human being could basically go and grab the box and just pull that problem right out of the field before it spread to the other plants."

JIM TEDDER: Frank DiPaolo says normal dirt or soil will not work in this kind of container gardening. Instead, potting mix is used.

This is mostly peat moss with a few things added to help air get to the roots of the plants.

FRANK DIPAOLO: "One of its responsibilities is to wick the water up to the plants. When you put a small seedling in, the roots are not deep enough to go into that water reservoir, so we need to bring本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。