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Re: plant communication

RE: BELOW
I've wondered about some of these things too.  For example:  You have a
plant with 4 long main vines (say 20 feet each).  One would assume that
everything flows from the centre of the plant outward toward the tips of the
vines SO if you only watered and fertilized one of the vines, would the
others benefit?  To me that would mean things would have to go against the
flow and go backwards to the centre of the plant and out to the other vines.

Another example:  Say each of these four vines were identical as far as
length, number of leaves, etc.  One of the four has a pumpkin set on it that
is the best and the one you want to keep.  Wouldn't it be better to then cut
off the other 3 vines relatively close to their origin so that all the
plants efforts go to the one that is left?  AT WHAT POINT WOULD YOU CUT OFF
THE OTHER VINES?

There may be a trade-off between stressing the plant by such drastic
measures, and steering it's efforts to what is left growing.  That is the
point, I suppose you are trying to determine?

Anybody out there have any ideas about this?

Go for it Dan.  Do some testing and let us know what you discovered.

At 12:58 PM 5/23/97 -0700, you wrote:
>Does anybody know how much of the root and leaf system actually feeds a
>given pumpkin?  I would expect that there is some distance, say 10-15 ft,
>beyond which the pumpkin and the roots/leaves are simply not in
>communication. No fluid flow, no transmittal of nutrients, nothing.
>If you lopped off everything further away, your pumpkin would grow just as big.
>
>One piece of supporting evidence is that fact that 700 lb pumpkins can come
>off of 450 sq ft plants - you don't need more leaf mass under some growing
>conditions.   The rule of thumb "don't grow green" gets at the same
>intuition.
>
>Any plant biologists out there want to run a test?  Add a radioactive
>tracer (or a powerful dye) to your water, apply in a specific spot, wait a
>few hours (days?), walk 10 ft and measure.
>
>If we knew the answer to this question we could do a better job pruning our
>vines.
>
>	Dan Shapiro
>
>
>
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