Null Disquisition

When you’re growing in a container that has plants of different growing rates, you’ll often find yourself in a situation where one plant out-competes the others for light. There are plenty of things you can do to remedy the situation, but I’m going to share my personal favorite.

Take the offending plant (in this case a Basil), and somewhere about halfway up the stem (or higher, not lower), give it a good pinch.

The pinch to the stem will cause the plant to redirect its resources to repairing the damaged tissue. Since plants are really well programmed for self-preservation (as well as self-repair), it will not grow any taller until the stem is hardened and healed. This prevents it from buckling over at the pinch from any additional weight at the top of the plant from further growth. Plants are neat!

A word of caution though – don’t pinch it too hard (you’ll break it), too often (you’ll kill it), or too low (again, you’ll break it). You don’t want to actually hurt the thing, just mangle it slightly.

-David

Just felt like sharing, b/c the pictures are so pretty. Here are some movies I made for an assignment in my biophysics class. It’s a bunch of particles in a box (as you might have guessed). It represents roughly the behavior of a Nobel gas in a confined space. My prof provided the template for the code, but we had to implement the hard parts.

Higher temperature

Lower temperature

Neat!