285 Electroculture Gardening vs the Scientific Method

Show Transcript

GB 285 TRANSCRIPT Electroculture, Avocados

Farmer Fred

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by Smart Pots, the original lightweight, long lasting fabric plant container. It's made in the USA. Visit SmartPots.com slash Fred for more information and a special discount, that's SmartPots.com/Fred.

Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, you've come to the right spot.

Farmer Fred

Go do an internet search of Electroculture Gardening. Go ahead. I’ll wait. You may have noticed that there are pages and pages of websites talking about electroculture gardening. Basically, it involves putting a stick in your garden bed. Wrapping a copper wire around it. And then stand back and watch your garden explode in produce and flowers because of the electricity that has been harnessed and transferred to your soil near your plants.

My opinion? It would be Farmer Fred’s Garden Rule #8:

IF IT WORKS FOR YOU, FINE; BUT KEEP AN OPEN MIND. If you're using safe gardening techniques that others frown upon - and those techniques are working…well, who are we to tell you to stop? Still, new research, techniques or equipment may make your chores a heck of a lot easier and satisfying. Today’s solution could become tomorrow’s problem. Be open to change.

One thing you might notice about all those webpages about electroculture, it’s gardeners conducting home made experiments, and recording their observations. Today, America’s Favorite Retired College Horticulture Professor, Debbie Flower, has arrived, armed with her 12 inch ruler, looking to slap someone’s knuckles. Why? Because most of these homegrown experiments with attracting electricity to the garden, are not following the scientific method. What is the scientific method? If you’re a gardener and you like to conduct experiments, you’ll want to listen to what Debbie has to say. Get out your data books. Prepare to take copious notes.

It’s all right here, in episode number 285, Electroculture Gardening vs the Scientific Method. And speaking of experiments, we also talk about Growing Avocados in Marginal Climates. If you don’t have avocado trees growing throughout your neighborhood, you probably in a marginal climate. But who are we to stop you from trying? We have tips to help you possibly, possibly, luck out.

We’re podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon Jungle in Suburban Purgatory. It’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Smart Pots, and Dave Wilson Nursery. Let’s go!

ELECTROCULTURE GARDENING vs THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

Farmer Fred

We like to answer your garden questions here on the Garden Basics podcast. Debbie Flower is here, America's favorite retired college horticultural professor. Debbie, have you ever heard of electroculture?

Debbie Flower

Heard of it? Yeah, a lot of people have heard of it.

Farmer Fred

If you're on the internet, you've probably heard of it as well, if you're a gardener. We get a letter, a question, from Charlie in Brooklyn. As you know, he's part of a community garden there in Brooklyn. Yeah, very active. And he forwards an email that the group got about an electroculture class being held there at the community garden in Brooklyn. And Charlie wants to know, “Hi, Fred, can you please tell me if this works? Charlie.” Do you have any easier questions, Charlie? It's about electroculture. It's an electroculture class that's coming up. He says, Well, what is electroculture? To put it simply, it's  because the cells of plants, like your own plants, have electrical signals, and you can increase the plants growing energy by capturing atmospheric electricity and directing it into the soil. And you've talked about that in the past, Debbie. About all these chemical interactions going on in the soil. And it boils down to electricity.

Debbie Flower

Yes, or some similar energy fields, like electricity.

Farmer Fred

It's very interesting. Well, the term electroculture has surged on social media in recent months as growers with gardens large and small give electroculture a shot. A public Facebook group called energetic agriculture has more than 150,000 members. The search terms electroculture, electroculture gardening, and electroculture copper wire have been spiking on Google since early spring, as well as on tik tok, which has 97 million views of the subject. There's a lot of tutorials around with users demonstrating how to create antennas by wrapping copper wire around long wooden dowels or bamboo stakes. This, according to The Washington Post. And there are plenty of before and after testimonials from gardeners who say that adding electroculture antennas make their plants flourish. This as we were discussing before we started, is an old idea. It goes back to Ben Franklin, his kite, a key and lightning.

Debbie Flower

Yeah, it's hundreds of years old, that people have been experimenting with electricity. I remember an experiment I read about where they were trying to figure out if a tree needed water based on electrical signals from the tree. That's sort of the opposite way of using electricity.

Farmer Fred

Experiments were conducted over the centuries, they sometimes were popular, sometimes they're not. And there's more experimentation and research going on now. Research in Europe and Asia has shown encouraging results. And electroculture advocates, as well as some scientists, are saying that harnessing electricity could revolutionize food production. There is research in Japan, that has found by generating artificial lightning strikes near Shitaki logs, almost doubling the size of the number of mushrooms that they produced. And then in China, scientists in 2018 conducted an experiment that involved applying pulses of positive voltage to crops, creating a 20 to 30% jump in yields. Well, if you go online, and you start doing a little research on this Chinese study, newscientist.com says that while the engineering is novel, the way the experiment was conducted means the researchers have limited biological data on the plants. They say it cannot lead them toward providing an explanation for increasing yield or cutting pesticides. There may be other explanations for why the peas, when exposed to an electrical field grew faster, the trial wasn't double blinded. And you can explain that a little later, Debbie. So the technicians growing the plants knew which were in an electroculture, and that might add some bias to the results. Another concern with the new study is how overly confident they were that electroculture works. New Scientist says that the author represented as fact that static electric fields promoted seed germination and plant growth. Although that's highly debatable. The authors don't expand on the current state of knowledge on this topic properly. And the basis for their hypothesis is rather poorly supported. So really, nothing about electroculture is settled. In fact, to sort of answer your question, Charlie: the 2018 systematic review of 19 studies on the subject found they all suffered from methodological flaws, which lowered credibility in the results.

And there's a movie coming out. A filmmaker is going to release a documentary called “Electroculture Life”, featuring advocates of electroculture. And he's doing this as a crowdfunding campaign for the project already. He's raised $40,000. And I understand that part of the movie is people showing their experiments to prove that it works. Well, you know, we can't really say yea, or nay about whether electricity is going to work or not , as far as increasing the size of plants or getting seeds to germinate. But you, in your past, have helped students conduct experiments,

Debbie Flower

And I've conducted experiments on my own. And that is a very specific thing.

Farmer Fred

That's why I would like to just sort of dovetail off from electroculture and talk about how to do a home garden experiment, if you want to do it using what's called the scientific method.

Debbie Flower

Right. The scientific method has some very specific steps to it. First, is you observe something interesting, such as that this plant grew bigger than the others, or this one didn't get pests, but that one did. Something that has piqued your interest, something that's different. And then you ask a question, why did this blank bigger than the other? Why does this one have pests, and not in that one? That would be your question. You create a  hypothesis. That's your guess, an educated guess, about what's going on. Why this plant grew bigger than that plant because… and then you come up with your reason why. Perhaps I fertilized it differently, or the seed source was different or whatever. Your reason why you think that that plant grew bigger than the other plant. And then you do the experiment. To prove or disprove your hypothesis. The experiment has to have some very specific steps. You have to have a good sample size. I saw an example where there were only  four treatments, and there were only three test subjects in the treatment. To me, that wasn't big enough not to prove something. You have to have enough test subjects in your experiment that other things like genetic differences and plants, for instance, would not be the reason for the variation. So in my example, I chose four treatments and 10 plants for treatment.

Farmer Fred

what were you trying to do?

Debbie Flower

Check whether growth was influenced by the concentration of fertilizer applied.

Farmer Fred

Alright, so pretty simple. And you're growing from seed or from plants?

Debbie Flower

Well, that is something to decide. You can do either. But you have to have all the plants be the same, you have to have some controls in your experiment, they're called controlled variables, that some things that are the same throughout. So let's say I started coleus, from seed, the coleus cultivars all have to be the same. I don't want a pink Coleus and a green coleus, or one with a wrinkled leaf and one with lobed margins, they all they all have to be the same kind of Coleus.

Farmer Fred

coleus, of course, is a houseplant.

Debbie Flower

Coleus is a houseplant, it's very easy to start from seed, I want to use the same media, and  in my case, 40 containers, I want all the containers to be exactly the same.

Farmer Fred

I would think you'd want all the soil to be the same, right?

Debbie Flower

That would be my media, right? I want the source of water for all my watering to be from the same place. It's not like some get deionized water and some get distilled water and some get tap water and some get tap water from the house and some good tap water from the hose, it's all going to be from the same place. I'm going to use the same fertilizer, all I'm going to change is the concentration of that fertilizer. I'm going to water at the same frequency with fertilizer, I'm going to water, if I do want additional watering without fertilizer, it's going to be at the same frequency and even amount, applying the same amount, the same growing conditions for all of my Coleuses from seed. They are going to get the same sun, the temperature, the wind, the light, the darkness, all the same. And I am going to have, as I said, four different treatments. So let's say one is you always have to have a control, which is one that does not get the any treatment at all. However it gets water when the other plants are given a treatment. The control gets something similar. So in this case, it would just get water, plain water. So that's water without fertilizer, the fertilizer is the treatment I'm testing but the soils are the same soils, the same containers, the same seed sources, the same growing conditions are the same. And ideally, I have set it up in a random order. I have all my containers, but they're randomly dispersed, I don't have all my controls in one place. For example, let's say my treatments are full concentration per the label on the fertilizer bag, half concentration per from the label, and quarter concentration. So I have 10 plants that are controls which are never gonna get fertilizer, 10 plants that are gonna be 100% of what the label recommends when it's applied. I’m gonna get 10 plants that are gonna get half as much as the label says to apply. And 10 plants to get a quarter as much. But these plants are not in blocks. I don't have them all together per treatment. I have them mixed up. So  maybe I put colored tags in them or something. I have them mixed up. So I'm applying the treatment, one containers is over there and one is over here. And there’s containers  behind me and ones are down there.

Farmer Fred

Is this a definition of double blind?

Debbie Flower

Yes, except in double blind, you don't know the results. In this case, because we're applying it we have to know what we're applying. So we would know. But  it's randomization of the treatment, maybe the location in the block of plants. So I have all 40 plants in one place. But maybe the ones on the edges are going to show different results than  the ones in the middle. I don't want all my edges to be one treatment. So I have to mix up within the things. I think I'm controlling sun, wind, temperature, light darkness, there may be variations in the location of where my pots are. So I have to mix up my treatments in that area.

Farmer Fred

such as humidity.

Debbie Flower

That could be one, yes. In plants for sure. And the seed source.

Farmer Fred

I would imagine seed source would have to be the same, too.

Debbie Flower

Yes, the seed source would have to be the same.  So I'm going to set up my experiment, I'm going to execute it, meaning I'm going to grow them, water them. And let's say I have to have something I'm going to measure. That's gonna be the data I collect.

Farmer Fred

All right, and then that in this particular case, would be I guess,  the germination time, days to germination, and then the height of the plant?

Debbie Flower

Yeah, that sounds  like the things to measure. I could, if I wanted to get really get technical, count the number of leaves, measure the size of the leaves, those sorts of things. Depends on what your goal is for the plant. But yes, I think time to germination and height over time would be good things to measure in this case. Or just one of them. You don't have to do both, then at some point, you're going to stop. You're going to decide to run it either for a period of time. Coleus are not cold hardy. So maybe you're just going to start in spring and run it until you get your first frost in the fall. And that will be the end of your experiment. Maybe you don't want to go that long. Maybe you're gonna do it for 12 weeks. So you take measurements periodically, say weekly, your choice, and then keep track of that by treatment. And then you have to decide if the treatments actually had an effect. And that's done with statistics.

Farmer Fred

That's why you have a data book.

Debbie Flower

Yes, yes, you keep the information written down, you might want to take the measurements at the same time of the day, sometimes plants wilt in the afternoon, and that would make them shorter. So you might want to do it always at noon, or always at whatever the time works for you. 7pm, whatever, as long as it's the same. You're measuring all the plants at the same time, every time you measure the plants.

Farmer Fred

And speaking of the containers, they would all have to be the same, you just can't go around the yard and pick various size pots to do this. And,  as you've often stressed, when it comes to planting seeds, make sure they're in clean containers.

Debbie Flower

Yes, in my mind, I would have gone to the supply store and purchased probably number ones (one gallon containers), black number ones, so they're clean, they've never been used before. They're all from the same plastic stock. Supposedly, I'm trying to keep everything the same. These are your controlled variables. “Variable”, meaning it could change. If you had different size containers, that ruins your experiment. So it's a controlled variable, I'm going to control that the pots are all the same, the media is all the same, the growing conditions are all the same. When I water, it is all the same. You can't just say that guy's wilting over there, I have to water it. If you're gonna water that one, you got to water everybody.

Farmer Fred

Nor can you extrapolate away from the coleus. You can't say, “The coleus popped up in eight days, you're gonna have great luck growing all houseplants this way”, right? You can't say that?

Debbie Flower

No, you can’t. Or, that Coleus grew best with half strength fertilizer applied weekly. That's great.  I haven't done this experiment, but if that was your result, you can only say that about coleus. You can't say tomatoes are going to be that way, or zinnias are going to be that way. You can only say about coleus.

Farmer Fred

In the real world of research, one of the big steps is the communication of your results.

Debbie Flower

Yes, in the scientific method, you're not just doing it for your own information. You're doing it to inform others as well.

Farmer Fred

Which might be one of the reasons for this guy producing a movie. But a movie is not a peer reviewed entity.

Debbie Flower

Right. In order for it to be considered a scientific experiment, you have to submit it to what's called a peer reviewed journal. Peers are people of your own ilk. And with peer reviewed journals, they assume you're a scientist. And so the people who will review your work are scientists also. And so they'll maybe have a Coleus expert, a fertilizer expert, a statistics expert. Some generalists out there who aren't experts, but who you know are horticulture professors or something, and they'll all read your experiment, as you've written it. And they will have ways  they want it written. You have to contact them and find that out. And they'll look at your how you did it and what your results were. And if all that was kosher, meaning if all that was done is to their standards, to general scientific standards, and their own specific standards, because they're reading it, then your article will be published and people can take it as good science. When you said some of those experiments had questionable results. That wasn't the word that you used. But the electroculture experiments were evaluated and shown not to be up to scientific standard, right. And so they would not be printed in a peer reviewed journal. So we don't know that electroculture really works, until we see results in peer reviewed journals. And the little bit I found that was in peer reviewed journals was incredibly specific, you know, a certain kind of seed for a certain kind of treatment period.

Farmer Fred

And also in a peer reviewed journal, or any sort of report that you submit to a peer reviewed journal, you have to state your financial interests. Yes. And if you have a financial interest in selling some sort of gizmo that creates higher electrical fields in the soil, you have to say that.

Debbie Flower

Yes, and it doesn't mean you'll be refused, unfortunately. Well, that's my point of view, maybe not yours. A lot of university research is now funded by the companies that want their product to be accepted. It's unfortunate because they obviously have an interest in the results of the experiment. But it's fortunate that somebody is funding the research. So it's a two-sided coin, but there is not enough independent money out there to do research on new products or new techniques that may be advantageous to agriculture or horticulture. So the companies who have scientists who have come up with potentially ways to take care of things, they want someone to collaborate their research. And we'll send money to universities that will be used to do that those experiments.

Farmer Fred

Let's throw a bit more mud in this whole picture. There are some, shall we say, peer reviewed journals out there that are basically pay-for-play. You pay the journal to have your report in that journal.

Debbie Flower

I don't like that. No. If money is talking, it's not science.

Farmer Fred

Follow the money. And Woodward and Bernstein used to say.

Debbie Flower

You find the bad stuff. You don't find the the honest stuff.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, it's amazing the amount of research that is passed off on the nightly news as scientific research today. It might turn out to have very questionable starts, especially if you trace it back. And I remember one that was talking about the superiority of frozen foods versus canned foods, a study that was done at a university. But the head instructor who was conducting this experiment, was also the Vice President of Public Relations for, I think, it was the frozen food industry.

Debbie Flower

Oh, my. So you know, yes.

Farmer Fred

They can push things one way or the other? Yes.  You really have to have an unbiased view of any sort of experiment that you're doing.

Debbie Flower

Yes, you do. And I when I did an experiment to get my master's degree, I was good at statistics, but don't ask me to do them now. But I knew what I was looking at. I understood what it said. I knew how to do it. And I had a professor who was telling me the outliers didn't matter. Outliers being let's say, in one control group, you had three seeds that never germinated. Well, they're outliers. They never germinated, don't consider them. Or you had three plants that got really huge. Even just one, wherever all the data for the rest of them was kind of close together. I disagree with that. Every plant in this group participated in this experiment and their results count. So even within the scientific community, there are people who, as in everything, are a little tighter about the rules and some who are a little looser about the rules.

Farmer Fred

Now you're making me feel bad. Because on my bike rides, I like to calculate the number of calories I burned on a bike ride. And I have four different sources for that information. I I never said I traveled light. But they all give me a different calorie output number. To make it easy on the math in my head, I just toss out the high one, I toss out the low one, and figure the average of the two in the middle.

Debbie Flower

Whereas in science,  in my estimation, you would take the average of all four.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, that's a lot of math. Okay. So I think what we're trying to say here, if you're going to conduct an experiment,  have fun like that in the garden, you know, why not? Yeah, if you've got that urge, you know, get yourself a really expensive soil test kit. Set up big chemistry set.

Debbie Flower

Yeah, where things go and change color, and yeah, yeah, bubble up and stuff.

Farmer Fred

Have fun. Just be sure to use the scientific method, right. And remember, do not extrapolate. Just because something will help peas grow faster, does not mean it will help tomatoes grow faster, right?

Debbie Flower

And if you don't use the scientific method, that's okay. You can still have fun and do stuff. But  present your results with that caveat, that you didn't do it scientifically.  it's called anecdotal. It's anecdotal information. In my garden, this happened. And that's an anecdote, right? It's not science, it's not proven.

Farmer Fred

Well, that brings up another point too, about conducting your own experiment. Should you repeat the experiment more than once?

Debbie Flower

That is a kind of a standard of science. It's not proven until you can do it. You've published your results. you've said what you can do. And someone else could take what you've done, do it again themselves, and have the same results.

Farmer Fred

But as far as the original experiment, should you repeat it?

Debbie Flower

You can, but you are a variable, too. So you can, and if you  get different results, that's very telling. If you get the same results, you still gonna want someone else to repeat it. To prove it scientifically.

Farmer Fred

Science is hard, but can be fun. Alright, so as you're experimenting with electroculture, remember the scientific method. And as the cynical Farmer Fred would say, follow the money. Yeah. See if somebody's trying to sell you something or not. Well, there's your mind-boggling science for the day. Thank you, Debbie.

Debbie Flower

You're welcome, Fred.

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Q&A AVOCADOS IN AUBURN? (Originally Aired in Ep. 140)

Farmer Fred

We like to answer your garden questions here on the Garden Basics podcast. We bring in Debbie Flower to help us out. Debbie Flower, retired college horticultural professor. And this one we will call, “All Gardening is Local” and “The Right Plant in the Right Place”, Debbie. And this is from Doug who lives in Auburn, California. Auburn is in our foothills, the altitude there is about 1500-2000 feet, depending on which part of Auburn you live in. And Doug, where you live, it's kind of a transition zone, I guess really, depending on which side of Auburn you live on there. You're either on the warm side or the cold side.

Debbie Flower

A low spot or high spot, too.

Farmer Fred

Yeah. So I think we're fairly safe to say Zone nine, USDA zone nine for that. but it could be zone eight.

Debbie Flower

or seven. Yeah.

Farmer Fred

And Doug writes in and says, "I enjoy your podcast. I'm growing in water troughs and I'm growing avocados. I'm wondering if I can combine growing avocado trees with growing in water troughs? I think I have a good location in my yard for a couple of avocado trees. But it's really close to a couple of water lines from my well to my house. If I plant in the ground on a raised mound, will the avocado tree roots seek the buried water lines? If so, can I plant in a water trough with drain holes in the bottom of the trough? If not that, can I plant in a water trough with no additional drain holes in the bottom of the trough? My wife and I eat avocados all year long. They're really expensive, especially organic avocados. What do you suggest?" Move to San Diego. Doug, if you want year-round avocados, Doug, I got a question for you. I know you can't hear me or you can hear me but you can't respond, Doug. How many avocado trees are growing in your neighborhood? That would be the first thing I would do if I moved to an area and I get this hankering for growing something that I don't normally grow. I woul