ELi5: Can plants be “overweight” if they produce too much food in the similar fashion to how animals gain weight if they eat too much food?

Question

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

Answer 1

I feel like a lot of people are misunderstanding your question and focusing on the plant being physically too heavy (with fruit/flowers etc). Unless ***I’m*** misunderstanding I think you mean is it possible to harm a plant by giving it more nutrients than it requires for survival. The answer is yes! Over feeding a plant makes it look superficially healthy, bigger, bushier etc but the plant will be weaker and harder to keep alive. The pots of herbs you buy in supermarkets are blasted with fertiliser to make them look bigger (and often it’s not one plant but 4-5 crammed together in too small a space). As you might have experienced yourself, those supermarket herbs die pretty quickly, even in the hands of people who know about plants. Sorry to go off on a supermarket herb tangent but you can keep them alive by unpotting them, carefully separating out the plants from each other and putting them in their own pots with good quality soil. And laying off the plant food. Hope I’ve answered your question!