Damage plants to increase yield

 

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

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


:-))  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.

--
Bill  S. Jersey USA zone 5 shade garden
     What use one more wake up call?  
http://ocg6.marine.usf.edu/~liu/Drifters/latest_roms.htm

 



Pruning, in this group, would be to insure that all the fruit the plant
sets, will ripen

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)

- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/HZinn_page.html

 

In article


Hmmm... Looking for a single word ?

3) Burning ?
4) Pinching (Deflowering) ?

--
Enjoy Life... Dan

Garden in Zone 5 South East Michigan.

 

Bill who putters wrote:

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 wouldn't want to generalise this concept too much.


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

 


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