Could this idea for growing vegetables build you a million dollar business? Caging plants in copper wire can help you to raise plants 'two or three times larger than normal'. Or so claims writer Louise Riotte in Sleeping With a Sunflower (Storey Books).
She stretches a length of copper wire around her plot, raised on poles. Then she connects another wire and pushes it into the ground to 'earth' the circuit. The keeping qualities of the vegetables and fruit also seem to be definitely improved,' she writes.
She cites an 1877 rose grower who used a similar principle to increase the growth of tea roses. He cut a strip of copper 1/2 inch wide and 15 inches long, and a similar one of zinc, and riveted them together to form a strip 29 inches long.
An electric horseshoe
He bent this over the plant like a horseshoe, thrusting the ends in the soil to complete the 'circuit'. 'In three weeks, the plant had more than half doubled its original size,' he wrote.
'I am now experimenting on other plants with good results. After the plants get a good start, I take the strips away.'
If this is true, can we forget about foliar feeding, fertilising, cloching and all the other fussy things we do to spur a plant? Would the circuit work even better if we plugged in a car battery? Do farmers with electric fences observe higher crop yields in fields thus protected?
Or is Ms Riotte two diodes short of a semiconductor?
A down to earth gardening tip
There is nothing outrageous in the idea that a weak electric current might stimulate plants. All living things have an electrical field, which is doubtless affected by copper and other conductors. Many folk attest to the value of copper bracelets for muscular ills, for example, though scientists laugh.
Kirlian photographs of plant 'auras' can be taken easily enough even by amateurs and they clearly show the energy field that emanates from plants and, indeed, all living things.
Will electrical horticulture one day become a recognised science, just as the 'myth' of mesmerism lead to painless tooth (and truth) extraction by medical hypnotism? Will our flowerpots be topped with photovoltaic cells? And will 'earthing' up potatoes acquire an entirely new meaning?
If the concept is valid, we should be able to see superior plant growth beneath every electric pylon that crosses fertile land. To be sure, there's a lot of weed growth there. But maybe that's because nobody thinks to weed under electric pylons.
Meanwhile, let's not scoff. The concept is easy to test. Take two identical plots, containing identical plants. Ring one with earthed copper wire. Compare the plant growth, yield, eating and storage qualities in each plot. Alternatively, apply a copper/zinc horseshoe to several plants but leave a similar number alone as 'controls'.
Better still, test if growth is enhanced by a copper wire encircling the plants but laid flat on the soil. (Not least, a copper frame has been proven to keep out slugs and snails.) Even better, you could lay copper foil around the plants like a flat mulch. Then there wouldn't be any weeds in your patch either.
It sounds like a gardener's panacea. If you can prove and perfect it, and manufacture copper foil for gardening use, and provide an explanatory video, your fame and fortune will bloom like a weed in spring.
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