ELECTRICITY AND PLANT GROWTH.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 959, 28 October 1910, Page 6

ELECTRICITY AND PLANT GROWTH.

The effect; of electrical discharges. on §lant growth was the subject of a lecture elivered recently under the chairmanship of Sir Albert EoHit at the Eoyal Horticultural Halk by Mr. J. ; H. Priestly, Lecturer in Botany at the University of Bristol. Turning to the more practical aspects of electrifying plant life, tho lecturer referred to a series of experiments made outside Bristol, and also at Eyesnam, where Mr. J. Newman had' electrified about twenty acres of wheat land with notable success. By means of a small engine, and dynamo, in the absence of a local electricity plant, the knv tension current was transmitted to the field by wires, and there in a suitable outhouse the current underwent a change to high tension through the medium of Sir Oliver Lodge'e induction coil. .The current was then circulated over a sort of barbed wire arrangement above the plants, etch of the barbed points acting as a distributing point for the electric fluid. The general improvement effected in plant growth, as shown by the experiments, xeprosented 29 per cent, increase in wheat, 18 per cent, in mangolds, and 25 per cent, in strawberries. Similarly satisfactory results were obtained in the treatment of cucumbers in greenhouses, while the indications generally were-that there was an appreciable hicrearo of nitrates in the soil so treated.