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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

A hothouse in Halifax, Nova Scotia had an agave that bolted so fast they had to remove it from the building. I think it grew six inches per day, that just as interesting that a plant that big can grow that fast.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4318649/agave-americana-halifax-p...

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There's a corpse flower near Grand Rapids, Michigan that's going to have its first bloom since it was planted in 2000 sometime in the next few days, it's currently growing at 3 inches per day:

https://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2018/07/pu...

Thank you!! I'm totally going to check this out.

Plants can grow very fast as long as the part that's growing has not yet turned to wood. Look at grapes to see how fast it can go.

Cute anecdote:

I'm positively blown away by the grapes we planted last year. We had accidentally left a hole in our bird netting and a deer got in and stripped both vines bare, as well as breaking many of the core tendrils. Swore they were going to die; within a month they had doubled their previous size, put out an entirely new and more vigorous crop of leaves, and then proceeded to produce two entire bunches of Riesling. (on year ~1.5 after planting).

As someone who kills most everything I put in the ground, so much love for the robustness of grapes; they probably put out at least a few inches of vine a day even at this point.

You really should go check out a vineyard in November/December. It's absolutely shocking how much of the growth is removed - virtually 100% of it - each year. And every year in late winter/early spring the first bud breaks, and for the next several month you can't even fathom how much they grow.

Here in the South, Kudzu is a vine that will grow about a foot a day, and engulf trees (and abandoned houses).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu#/media/File:Kudzu_on_tre...

>Kudzu was introduced from Japan into the United States at the Japanese pavilion in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

...

>During World War II, kudzu was introduced to Vanuatu and Fiji by United States Armed Forces to serve as camouflage for equipment and has become a major weed

The irony.

Kudzu was also the name of one of the first hardware detection scripts for early Linux distros

Asparagus, which as we've learned from the article is related to agave, grows to edible length daily.

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