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
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.
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.
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”.
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
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.
Viticulturist here (grape grower). Allowing a vineyard to overcrop is one of the worst things you can do. It has a detrimental impact on fruit composition and fruit quality. On top of that, it interferes in plant physiology and the vine’s ability to store nutrients over the winter and “harden off” to protect against winter damage. What usually happens the following year is higher rates of winter kill and poor canopy growth in order for the plant to compensate for the previous year’s over-cropping. Even just one year of over-cropping can set a vineyard back and take several years of work to correct it.
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