On Jun 16, 7:54*pm, "David Hare-Scott" wrote:
Bill who putters wrote:
At first casual glance I was taken aback. *But then I thought of two
common gardening techniques.

1) Pruning
2) Thinning
3) ????
4) ????

As long as the treatment is getting the plant to do what you want without
weakening it too much. *For example pruning at the wrong time may ruin
flowering instead of encouraging it. *Cutting asparagus too long in spring
will weaken the plant and not allow it to store energy over summer so the
harvest next spring will be reduced.

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

I wouldn't want to generalise this concept too much.





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.

Cundall is pretty good. *In this case you are treating the plant harshly in
the short term to turn a metabolic switch. *Once that is done you need to
treat it well so it has lots of energy to put into fruit. *Continued harsh
treatment will just give you a stunted plant.

The converse might be a pumpkin plant. *A healthy plant in full sun will
produce fertilised flower numbers in excess of what the vine can support to
ripeness. *Treating it harshly will get you nowhere. *In this case you to
maximise yield you should be nice to it, give it lots of water and
fertilser. *Don't generalise too much.

David- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I've noticed that digging around the roots of fruit trees seems to
increase the yield the next year, much like pruning, although I've
never done a scientific measurement with controls and such. My theory
is that when plants are injured, they try to reproduce their species
as much as possible in case they don't survive. But that's probably
attributing too much conscious intent to the plants.

Paul