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Re: milk feeding

> Cutting a vine open and trying to put milk in, is like slashing your
>wrist and putting it in a bowl of milk >and thinking the milk will enter
>your body.

No, it's like not taking enough nutrients in through your gastrointestinal
system- and being put on an intravenous drip. With the bonus that plants
don't have such fussy immune systems, so the job can be done in your back
garden.

It's a matter of hydrostatic and osmotic pressures. If I cut into my
vascular system, blood comes out because it is at a pressure higher than
atmospheric. In a plant, movement in the xylem (water and ionics) is due to
*negative* pressures generated by the 'pull' of water by the leaves (the
transpiration stream). Phloem (sugar) movement is due to an osmotic
pressure difference. So if you introduce a concentrated solution (you have
not yet referred to my suggestion of a sucrose solution instead of milk) to
a wounded xylem or phloem vessel (providing the right initial precautions
are made) the pull from the leaves on the xylal water will suck water and
ions in the wound. And the sucrose, if the concentration is right, can
enter the plant by diffusion.

Plants, especially annuals, are opportunistic, and so any extra goodies
they can use they will. It's a simple law of biology. I'm NOT saying that
milk/sucrose feeding is any replacement for good seeds, good luck, and hard
work- it just supplements the plant.

Regard it, if you like, as an artificial grafting practice. Every gardener
knows that selection of good root stock is going to help a grafted tree-
because good root stock means a faster rate of delivery of water and other
essentials to the leaves etc. The sucrose-feeding method is like giving the
pumpkin some more roots- and some very useful ones at that.

As I said, I began sucrose feeding last year with good results until I was
struck by rabbits. I'll try a rabbit proof version again this year- and
report the results. Meanwhile, why not keep an open mind about such things?
Just because Howard Dill doesn't use it doesn't mean it wouldn't work.

Remember- the electric light bulb was supposed to be a fad which wouldn't
last ten years.

Vanessa.
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