Pavel314 wrote:
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

You are right that it isn't wise to attribute too much to plants but this
behaviour isn't so complex that it implies thought or conscious intent. As
I understand it the damage (and other actions that the plant is able to
detect) cause the production of hormones (gibberellins) which control
various aspects of growth and development.

So for some plants cutting the top off causes production of new shoots lower
down, disturbance of roots produces suckering, a certain period of cold
breaks dormancy and stressing tomatoes can switch them from vegetative
growth to flower and fruit production. Some of these substances can be
extracted or synthesised to produce the same effect when applied by the
grower without taking the action that generates it naturally.

The trick is if you are going to influence the behaviour of a plant in such
a way that you need to understand what the consequences are likely to be in
that particular case. For example, to encourage fruiting by pruning fruit
trees you need to know which wood on each type of fruit tree bears the
flowers, it isn't all the same, so your pruning shouldn't be the same for
all.

David