GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post

27-04-2005, 12:53 AM

In article ,
says...
In article , Janet Baraclough
writes

I'm just glad seeds can't read, and don't get discouraged easily.

Don't bank on it! My mother would always put *some* name on any
unidentified cactus - she reckoned they grew better if they had a name
;-)

Actually, it could be simply that she was inclined to value more, and
therefore tend more carefully, something that was named rather than just
sitting in a pot without a label. So there may have been something in
it. Certainly I find that if I talk to a plant, I have to find something
to say, and therefore pay it more attention than otherwise, and so spot
pests at an earlier and more easily controllable stage.

There's a Merkin programme that gets shown on one of the Satellite
channels, "MythBusters". They try to test out urban myths and other
folklore in a mostly scientific way. They tested out the talking to
plants/playing music etc thing reasonably carefully. They set out some
greenhouses with peas growing in pots. One had no sound, one had
insulting speech, one had encouraging speech, one had classical music
and one had rock music.

The sound was looped automatic playback and the plants were all watered
with an automatic system.

The general idea was to let it run for X weeks and then do taste tests
and weigh the biomass of the plants.

As this experiment was fully automated and a background task to the more
intensive tests they were doing (floating a sunk ship by feeding ping
pong balls into the hull e.g.), it took a week to find that the
automatic watering system had failed when the plants were only just
beginning to crop.

They weighed the results anyway. The silent greenhouse had the lowest
mass. The spoken greenhouses were next up with little difference.
Classical music was next and hevy rock the highest.

There wasn't anyone around to notice pests.

I have no plans to start planting speakers in my borders pumping out 24
hour Metallica tracks.

Warwick