When animals eat too much food, they gain weight. What happens to a plant that produces too much food via photosynthesis? Can plants be overweight?
In: Biology
I bought my house four years ago, and we watered a half cut down little tree in my backyard, not knowing it was a peach tree. Winter, and spring passed, that first summer, it produced maybe 30/40ish peaches. A buddy of mine gave me advice and said “Put a piece of ribbon tape on every little branch shoot that doesn’t produce peaches. When winter hits and the nutrients go back in the ground, slice those branches off.”
Sounded easy peasey, so I did it. Next year, I had over 100 peaches. Rinse and repeat for several more years.
Last summer, I produced so many peaches half of my tree snapped in half. I plan on adding supports to my wild branches this year so it doesn’t happen again… I love peaches!
It depends, some plants can store excess energy as humans store fat (tubers, bulbs, rhyzomes). If a plant can do that, they will (potato plants will make more and bigger potatoes, plants, like onions and liliums, who have bulbs will make their bulbs bigger). Plants which don’t have those organs will do different things. Take for example, trees: most trees will choose to make and grow more stem and leaves instead of flowers (which causes problems), some plants, for example, can store excess nutrients on themselves (which is a grave problem in things that we eat) without any noticeable changes in size. This is called “luxury consumption” and it’s a problem. This is overly simplified because it’s eli5 but you can ask if you want clarifications on any item.
Source: I’m an agronomer and my life is plants and plants accesories.
Not the same I guess but there’s a herbicide that kills the plants by causing it to grow so quickly it will kill itself because it can not possibly get enough water to keep up with the demand that the growing puts on it so they will dehydrate.
It probably depends on the plant.
Some can store starch that can be used later, a bit like adipose tissue in mammals. Things like potatoes will store it in their tubers.
Not exactly overweight, but plants can grow so much they hurt themselves. The example I’m familiar with is Bradford pear tree. They tend to have too many branches angled too close together. As they grow it literally starts to push the tree apart making it very susceptible to storm damage
My cactuses are overweight. I watered them too much so the top is so fat that they can’t stand up. The pot and everything is lying sideways. They are still alive though.
Echoing what others have said about trees being over-encumbered with fruit: When I picked oranges and mandarins on a citrus farm if there was a bumper crop that year it wasn’t uncommon to find branches with so much fruit that they were dragging down to the floor (and ping up once picked!) Or worst case the branch has snapped but you hope the fruit is still fresh to pick
Cannabis plants certainly can. With genetics especially. for example, Blue dream grows wimpy stalks and branches but its Kolas get way too big and they commonly break themselves. The thing with plants is, (atleast cannabis) is they’ll only eat what they want.
So one practice that I do with my pepper and tomato plants is called “pinching” and this basically stops the plant from producing fruit too soon. It allows the plant to grow bigger and have the potential for more production. I typically pinch the flowers off for the first 2-4 weeks that I see them, or until they reach a size that is to my liking.
For example, last year I had 2 identical fresno pepper plants, grown from the seeds of the EXACT SAME pepper pod. they started flowering at 6 weeks, and I pinched off the flowers on them both for the first 2 weeks, but the 3rd week I let one of them grow its flowers. The other I continued to pinch(because it was in a significantly larger planter). after the 2 weeks following, I let the SIGNIFICANTLY larger plant start producing flowers and quickly thereafter pods.
Smaller plant produced 119 pods that season. Larger plant produced 443 pods that season. Larger plant ended up dying off during the winter. Smaller plant ended up producing pods all throughout the winter and is starting to get back into its major production cycle again.
So there are benefits to both methods.
Tomato plants in particular are susceptible to producing excessive foliage, which will actually limit the number of fruit they can produce and increase the susceptibility to disease. So, yes. Plants can be “overweight”.
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