Competition is not scripted. The bed's soil is a grid of cells; water diffuses between them, evaporates from the sunlit surface, and is drawn out by whichever roots reach each cell. Root zones expand with growth, so neighbors gradually invade each other's water. Canopies cast shade on shorter plants between them and the moving sun — an eastern neighbor steals your morning specifically. Wilting, starvation, and who-wins are downstream of that, nothing else.
What's real: the species' strategies. Rosemary's drought-induced carnosic/rosmarinic acid response is from its published genome papers (Lai 2024, Han 2023). Basil's eugenol/linalool synthases and pinch-to-bush thigmomorphogenesis are real. Kalanchoë is a genuine CAM model organism (genome 2017): stomata open at night, CO₂ banked as malate, with the clock-controlled kinase PPCK1 gating the cycle.
Soil is now 2-D: four depth layers per column. Water percolates down under gravity, drains out the base when saturated, and carries nitrogen with it — so overwatering both rots roots and leaches the bed. Roots have species-true depth profiles: rosemary taproots into deep moisture (its real Mediterranean strategy), basil mats the topsoil and feeds heavily, kalanchoë barely roots at all. Nitrogen gates growth and its absence yellows leaves (chlorosis); compost feeds the topsoil locally.
Vegetables: tomato is a tall, heavy-feeding shade bully whose flowers set fruit only when fed and watered, ripened by SlPSY1's lycopene. Lettuce is a cool-season crop with the real bolting pathway — sustained heat accumulates through LsFT until LsLFY flips it into a bitter flower stalk, irreversibly. Carrot pours surplus sugar into a storage taproot you can watch fatten in the soil cross-section, then harvest. Mulch cuts surface evaporation and slowly composts itself; the probe reads any soil cell directly.
What's modeled: all kinetics are invented; each gene panel is ~15 nodes standing in for tens of thousands. The bed persists between visits and keeps running up to 5 bed-days while you're away.