Say hello to a new experiment: The Adventures of Bubbles & Squeak — our two farm cats (you may know them from our Too Many Tomatoes garden app) hosting a Schoolhouse-Rock-style educational series about the science hiding in the garden.
Episode 1 asks a question every gardener half-knows the answer to: what do plants actually eat? The answer is a song: N-P-K.
The science in the song
- N — Nitrogen: drives green, leafy growth. Fun fact: 78% of the air is nitrogen, but plants can’t use it straight from the sky — soil microbes have to “fix” it first.
- P — Phosphorus: powers roots, flowers and fruits. It’s literally the P in ATP — the energy molecule inside every living cell.
- K — Potassium: the all-rounder — strong stems, disease resistance, and it operates the tiny pores (stomata) that control a plant’s water.
- Those three letters are the numbers on every fertiliser bag (like 10-10-10) — and compost, manure and worms are nature’s own N-P-K factory.
How we made it
This one was a full AI-assisted production experiment: the cats are our own illustrated characters; the bouncy Saturday-morning jingle was generated with fal.ai’s stable-audio; the song vocal is an AI clone of a real human voice reading the rhyming lyric; and the animation — bobbing cat hosts, kinetic N-P-K letters, fun-fact captions — was assembled by Claude Code driving ffmpeg and Pillow, cut over real footage of our own sunflowers, beans and corn. Total out-of-pocket cost: pennies.
It’s a pilot. If Bubbles & Squeak earn their keep, future episodes are already on the ideas board: photosynthesis, the soil food web, why worms matter, and how compost works. Got a topic the cats should sing about? Tell us.
Part of the Rover Planet grow-along → more at roverplanet.co.uk. Fuel your curiosity.