If I had lots of big greenhouses, big enough to grow trees in, could I grow fruit (or nuts) so that at least one of the trees was bearing every week of the year? Or would they all cycle to the same schedule, and I’d just have lots of cherries or peaches or walnuts all at the same time of the year?
I’m assuming this would work the same for any kind of crop: strawberries or tomatoes or rosemary or pumpkins or anything.
Plants don’t know the date, they just respond to the quantitiy of water/light and the temperature. If you create the proper conditions, you can grow anything, any time of year. The problem is, its expensive to artificially create those conditions. People growing marijuana do it all the time, but thats because the cash value of a few plants is much greater than the wholesale price of a tree worth of apples and are less work to harvest.
Most plants set flowers, fruit, etc. on a schedule that is partially if not mostly (depending on the plant) influenced by day length. So you would have to artificially block the sun and/or artificially light the greenhouses to make peach trees set fruit in autumn, for example. You would have to do that year-round, mind you, and if you want different individual trees fruiting at different times, then you’d have to do all that on different schedules to different trees, which would require separate greenhouses for each one. Or, at minimum, completely light-proof partitions.
Equatorial plants don’t rely on Photoperiodism. They don’t need to, because there is no rush to bear seeds before cold weather comes. Also, they can’t be influenced by day length, as the day length stays near 12 hours all year.
So fill the greenhouse with equatorial plants, and keep it warm and you could have a perpetual harvest.
One way to address this is to use plants that have been bred to have different harvest times. Oranges are one such crop. Apparently, there are several varieties of oranges that ripen at different times of the year. This allows for a steadier supply than if they all had to be harvested at once.
Hot House Tomatos are grown year round. I think the variety was developed for that purpose.
So you’re saying, even if I could provide 15 hours of full “sunlight” every day of the year, I’d have to turn the lights on or off to correspond with whichever season it is meant to be. Some of the greenhouses would have only nine hours of dim “winter” light and little water, while some would have 12 hours of sunlight and others would have the full 15.
So I could have my greenhouses underground or underwater or in space for all it matters, really.
And temperature. Some plants (e.g., Northern tree fruits) expect seasonal temperature variations.
But basically yes. If you properly mimic conditions, with adequate moisture and nutrients, you can do it. Of course, by this time, you’re adapting to the plant, not adapting the plant to you.