Photo By Path slopu – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93473375

Dear Readers, the author and botanist James Wong always has something interesting to say in about plants and gardening, and this time his article in New Scientist is about how to stop your seedlings getting long and leggy.

There are pluses and minuses about starting your plants off indoors. They’re protected from the wind and the rain, the cold and any pesky pests that might be lurking over winter. Alas, this lack of ‘challenge’ can also lead to them growing tall and fragile. Who amongst us has not planted out our seedlings only to see them all keel over at the first available opportunity! What they are lacking is a bit of buffeting.

Wong points out that plants respond to wind and other ‘mechanical perturbation’ by growing thicker stems and a stockier ‘body’ overall. This phenomenon is known as (takes deep breath) thigmomorphogenesis. Furthermore, plants subjected to touch seem to have more resilience to pests and drought as well.

Experiments with plants as varied as petunias and tomatoes, involving  fans, feathers or even a sheet of paper brushed across the leaves have all shown a reduction in stem elongation of 20 to 40 percent.

Wong suggests that just 10 seconds per day of ‘plant stroking’ is enough to trigger the effect. So, while many of us talk to our plants (and in my case often plead with them to do better) maybe we need to get hands on?