Day 23–Maintenance Mode

Last Tuesday I finished pollination.  Since then I’ve simply been maintaining the plants–making sure they have water/fertilizer and trimming back excess flowers to concentrate the energy captured into fewer seed pods.

This last procedure is analogous to the apple orchardist who sprays his/her trees with a blossom drop spray to limit the number of fruits on the tree.  If you don’t you get small apples.  I try to keep about ten to twenty seed pods to a plant but I have no evidence on how many can be produced—hmmmm sounds like an experiment.  What could be the “optimal” number of seeds/seedpods produced per plant?

At this point, I am having to add fertilizer every two days–I can just make it through the weekend because the plants have so much leaf area.  I’ll maintain the plants for the next week to 10 days and then remove them from a water source so that the plants and seeds dry out.