Teleidoscope

Wed, Jun 13, 2007

Family Plants

Posted at 8:25 pm MDT to Technology

Found through Slashdot

Some researchers have found that when unrelated plants (I assume of the same species) are placed in the same pot, they grow extra roots to try to hog all the water and nutrients. When they are planted in pots with their own siblings, they don't grow extra roots.

I'm not sure what if anything gareners and farmers could do to take advantage of this. Aside from anything else, figuring out whether plants grown from seed are siblings would be tricky.

I assume plants grown from cuttings of the same plant count as self. Since apples are clones, I suppose you should plant single rootstock varieties if you want them to play nicely together, and mix varieties to encourage root growth?

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