What is up epic gardeners? I have a weird episode for you today. This is something that I stumbled across when I was looking up a plant called the tickle me plant, which is a plant that as you run your hands along its leaves they curl up and

almost look like the response that let's say a clam or a muscle has if you're messing around with those at a

tide pool.

Very interesting.

And so what I came upon in my research is something called figmomorphogenesis and I hope I'm saying that right

thigmomorphogenesis now the definition of this is the response by plants to mechanical sensation by altering their

growth patterns. So this is something that shouldn't be too surprising to us because in the wild wind, rain, animals, debris,

all sorts of things can interact with a plant and cause it to move around and shift its position.

But what does this have to do with us as gardeners?

Why should we care about Thigmomorphogenesis the weirdest word I've come across in the last month or so?

Well, botanists have known for a while now that growing plants in a greenhouse tends to make them

taller and more spindly. Part of the reason for that, in my opinion, what I've noticed is that a lot of those plants are

suffering from inadequate light and often will stretch out in order to reach

more light.

That's mostly a preventable problem.

You can either increase the amount of light

by positioning the plant in a better situation in the greenhouse or you can move your

artificial lights closer to the plant. But what if there was a different way to deal with this?

Well, there was a botanist, MJ Jaffy. In the 1970s, he discovered that if you rub or bend the stems of new plants, it inhibits their

elongation and stimulates their radial expansion, meaning the stems get stockier and thicker.

Radial, of course, being circular.

Now, this is fascinating because who would have thought that simply rubbing or bending the

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