I’m not thinking of totally different kinds of plants (like a tree vs. a vine, say), but more like how two different kinds of succulents can grow at vastly different rates. What factors lead to some plants growing roots and leaves very quickly and others taking weeks or even months longer?
In: Biology
Plants have something called “active transport” in their roots (mostly), which spends energy to manage their phosphates, nitrates, water, waste, and all other nutrients they must regulate.
Any imperfections in their growing conditions (which includes concentrations of all actively transported materials, air moisture, temperature, particle size in soil, optimal mix of light wavelengths, timing of daylight, etc) causes delays in growth.
Typically these imperfections have to do with limiting “actively transported” chemicals. For example, spinach needs to take in lots of iron from soil – if the soil is low in iron, spinach must actively “pump” iron into its system, which takes energy and time, slowing growth. As you can imagine, limiting light (it’s energy source) has a similar effect.
There’s cool research on “controlled environment agriculture” for future urban farms, which optimizes growing conditions for rapid plant growth (without messing with DNA or hormones!). Current industrial-scale “controlled environment agriculture” pilot farms are selling lettuce and other veggies in NYC. They safely boost output of farms by about 10x because they have about 1/10 the time from seed to harvest. The huge issue is production cost, but the benefits are lower transportation costs, faster time from harvest to store, no pesticides, and predictable output near predictable consumption centers
Two major factors; enough nutrients like water, potassium, magnesium and nitrates and within the plant itself a chemical called auxin which is broken down by sunlight, no auxin and the plant growth slows dramatically.
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