I’m stretching a bit here into my home life, but this is something tangible that I can track. I’ve been told and recall from my childhood that I come from a line of farmers and sharecroppers. I just hadn’t thought to try here with my home and yard until last year.

I successfully got some sunflowers, basil herb plants, pumpkin plants, and corn stalks to sprout and grow for a while.

The sunflowers were concentrated in a single planter and spent much of the summer in a survival of the fittest zero-sum game after I failed to move some of the stronger sprouts to the open soil. I ended up getting a really pretty one decent sized but it did not produce edible seeds

The basil and corn stalks did not survive the dog days, and neither really progressed past the sprout stage as it was.

The pumpkin vines survived, ran a little, and even flowered in the fall but did not produce fruit before it turned cold. They were my last hope.

I’m planning to do some more research and get a lot more topsoil to offset the amount of clay below the grass in my backyard that I’m planning to till up so that there’s a fresh plot to plant once all this cold weather goes away in March/April. That’s also something I need to correct from last year; I waited until nearly the end of May to try and plant the stuff, so the plants’ peak growth period was in the heat of the July sun. Yeah, not so much.

I will photo-journal here so that anyone interested can enjoy watching plants grow with me. If no one does, I can always make that 100 M back. :)

• Update 2025-06-07 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has stated they are resolving this market YES. See the linked comment for their reasoning and the evidence provided.