Electroculture Gardening
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Potting soil is moist, has a non-neutral Ph, and has trace metals hanging out. So if you stick a zinc-coated or copper wire in that, it'll probably start to react in some way. So the effect may still be "electric", in a sense, but not by harvesting "free energy" from the environment. Also, ions directly from this galvanic affect might be working like a kind of fertilizer by being more bio-available somehow (I am not a botanist).
> why not just use a fixed source/oscillator and find the optimal parameters
Exactly. Don't leave it to chance and figure out what's viable. Also: use something unlikely to chemically react with the soil.
So, it doesn't seem to be directly related to plants at all.
Cell movement seems to be impacted by electricity in humans. Perhaps the same is true for plants, and can be part of the explanation behind this?
(Easier to digest version of the link, but in Swedish: https://www.chalmers.se/aktuellt/nyheter/mc2-sa-kan-elektric...)
Your paper references a highly controlled field on a chip.
Those metal rods are plugged into earth. They don't do anything particular in regards of electronic fields.
I have noticed something quite interesting: in my nursery, actual rain stimulates germination, leaf formation, flowering, and budding in a way that collected rainwater applied over identical timeframes in identical quantities using sprinklers that approximate rain drop physics fails to do. Well-water performs roughly the same as collected rainwater.
I’m speculating that there is some other signal present with actual rain that is lacking in the surrogate process. It could easily be electrical charge.
> including types of spiders that use it to fly to distant locations.
Really?
I need to leave this planet.
Now, if you have a fear of all spiders, I feel for you. If you have a fear of big fuckoff spiders, I can assure you that these are tiny, smaller than a pin head.
This allows them to attack much larger prey like spider monkeys and chickens, which they liquify on the inside with their venom, a kind of external digestive process.
After the liquefaction is well under way with the venom paralyzed prey, they suck out the nutrient rich liquid, often sharing the hapless victim with sister tarantulas from the same nest.
Thankfully, blue giant tarantulas are entirely a figment of my imagination.
(That was meant to come off as creepy, not sexually creepy though)
Flowers generate electrostatic fields as a kind of 'gas gauge' for available nectar, see:
Detection and Learning of Floral Electric Fields by Bumblebees by Dominic Clarke et al. Science 340, 66 (2013); DOI: 10.1126/science.1230883 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/340/6128/66
https://www.npr.org/2013/02/22/172611866/honey-its-electric-...
What seems to be happening is a whole lot of anec-data that has various problems which do not allow someone to draw useful conclusions.
The problem a lot of folks have is "We've been planting things in the ground using centuries of study on the subject, something so novel couldn't possibly work!"
Putting together some experiments with a little rigor to try to identify (a) if plants are growing better in this environment and (b) what, specifically, is causing that growth and (c) altering the experiment to focus on that "what" ruling out other possible side-effects[0] would be helpful.
It seems like something that could be done by an amateur as the equipment involved for a lot of this is inexpensive while the upside is huge if it turns out there's something to it.
[0] Specifically the mention of lighting strikes affecting Shitake mushroom growth -- which could be any number of crazy things that happen when lightning strikes something -- would be necessary.
The first question would therefore be 'were is the proof'
The control plants should have a non-electrical-conducting wire planted in a similar manner. And in fact, another control should use a copper wire that is cut in various places to interrupt the circuit (and reconnected to be rigid with a non-conducting material)
Without those controls, the effect could be simply a chemical interaction with metal as others here are suggesting. Or even just an effect from how the plant is potted with a wire placed in the pot. Maybe the wire just adds air or makes it easier for the roots to grow or something who knows. Interesting.
Dumb question: could it just be that copper rods in the soil are just providing “copper” to the plants in the same field?
I don't think it's an electrical thing in this context, but that doesn't rule out some other effect.
Most above ground plants are easy it's the root vegetables that are hard to grow. You pile on nitrogen and the tops of plants grow, even root vegetables' top leaves grow but little of the root. Corn can be a pain it needs a lot of water and even more nitrogen.
Even if you have the perfect amount of nutrients and the pH is good for nutrient distribution a carrot can be stopped by a single pebble in the way or if the soil too compact.
Meta comment. I'm a software dev but consider myself a scientist, at least in part, and I don't like dismissals like this. It's true we need to understand the underlying mechanisms of things, that's what science is about. It is not (in my view) about this, where we say we have no plausible underlying mechanism so we shouldn't be interested. There are times when we need to take that tack such as with likely crankery[1], but the first thing you do is check it out.
It's not a scientific attitude to say "I can't see how it works so screw it"
> “Does it help it better photosynthesize? Does it help it better uptake nutrients? Does it speed up the cellular metabolism of the plant? No one seems to have that answer,”
As someone else has pointed out, it's been suspected for decades that electric fields affect healing (I remember hearing about this in the 1980s where it was provisionally found to help bone growth in broken bones). There seems to be no plausible mechanism and it may turn out to be false – but it may not. You dismiss after you've taken a look, not before.
Edit: As mentioned, this is a meta comment. It's not about plant growth, it's about the 'right' attitude.
[1] if all perpetual motion machines so far have failed then it's likely the next one isn't going to work either. There is a cost to looking into peculiar things, but a potential benefit as well.
Perhaps this electric field is used by plants as some kind of feedback mechanism telling them how tall they are, and by disrupting that field with an antenna we are somehow tricking the plant into thinking it is taller or shorter than it really is and it responds to that by growing more vigorously.
Using copper allows you to absorb low frequency radiation like FM radio. Note that you aren't blocking it to any significant degree, since it's just one wire and not a cage. It also isn't causing any voltage on the plant since it's just being absorbed by the wire.
In the case of my hypothesis, the mechanism I'm describing would likely be somehow tied to the plant's perception of that current.