Nice to get a good chat going - thank you all!
When we got our first PC back in the early nineties, we bought the latest we could afford - Widows 3.1 - remember that?
Things moved on, and bells and whistles beckoned, and so here we are with Ipads, Iphones and more. But we still have the same sort of problems with the new gadgets, viruses, failures, cheats etc. Nobody is actually taking these issues on board, they're becoming a grey area of disinterest...
Too much 'new stuff' takes over before the less recent arrivals of investment/innovation have had a chance to grow and replicate! As soon as Apple bring out a new phone, there is an instant market, but with true gardening, there is always couch grass, blight, and disappointment. We need Marshalls and the rest to concentrate something towards letting us grow carrots easily, enjoy beans a bit earlier, help tomato growers develop new strains - Crimson Crush is a great example; and altogether make our hobby/pastime/passion a better achievement than just knocking out a few things because it saves going to the supermarket.
I love reading about the ways 'old gardeners' did their stuff. I always learned from their advice, and modified it to suit our needs, but if I'd told dear old Bert (85 years old) about orange beetroot back in the '80s, he'd have laughed his head off, and told me to get back to work, while he bent down and weeded his onions with a peculiarly shaped hand-hoe...