In article ,
Bill who putters wrote:

At first casual glance I was taken aback. But then I thought of two
common gardening techniques.

1) Pruning
Pruning, in this group, would be to insure that all the fruit the plant
sets, will ripen
2) Thinning
Thinning gives a single plant the maximum of nutrition and sunlight. It
must be admitted, though, it salutatory effect on the plants that are
thinned, is much less.
3) Setting Plants on Fire
Setting fire to your manzanita plants, occassionally, is helpful to
their proliferation, but isn't generally considered beneficial to other
plants. This technique is especially effective in coastal canyons. ;O)
4) ????

I do not know of a third except for maybe small holes that starve or
force roots to spread out versus a large hole with nutrients all about.

In the world of humanity we have adversity builds strength sort of a
take on Frederick Nietzsche "That which does not kill me makes me
stronger." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

But I am a nurture kind of guy and I nurture my plants funny how
pruning and thinning come into play.

This inspired by

Peter Cundall

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Cundall

"David Hare-Scott" wrote in message
Suzanne D. wrote:
I bought a bunch of tomato and pepper plants yesterday, and some of
them have flowers and/or fruit on them already. I asked the people
at the stores if I should pinch them off when planting in order to
put more energy toward root-building, and three different people said
I didn't have to. I'd LOVE for this to be true, but I could swear I
heard somewhere that you are supposed to pinch off the flowers and
fruit when you plant. Can anyone enlighten me once and for all?
--S.

I have never bothered with this pinching out of fruits and flowers and my
transplants work just fine. This is not conclusive because it is possible
that if I did it they would do even better.

:-)) Well Peter Cundall always says to treat tomatoes badly so they
think
they are going to die and thus flower early. I assume his reasoning for
that is to get crops from them. Whatever Pete says is good enough for
me as
his advice has always been woth following so I'd never think of
deflowering
at planting.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/HZinn_page.html