Viewing post #504982 by admmad

You are viewing a single post made by admmad in the thread called Crown Planting Depth - Especially in Areas with Very Hot Summers.
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Oct 29, 2013 7:07 AM CST
Name: Maurice
Grey Highlands, Ontario (Zone 5a)
If one wishes to test the effect of the crown moving deeper then one would need to run an experiment in your growing conditions.
To run tests one always needs two groups of plants, one group which is left alone (the control group) and the second group which is 'tested' (the treatment group - in this case the group that will be lifted and replanted). Because each location in a garden or even in a planting bed can be different one needs to place a few plants from each group in several different locations in the garden.

One might look for three to five cultivars that have shown re-positioning in your garden and divide each cultivar into two groups (two clumps or two single or double fans, etc). The two clumps should be as similar as possible (same size fans, same number of fans, etc). Plant the two clumps of each cultivar (one is the control and the other is the treatment) near each other. Then after the treatment clump sinks, raise it in the soil back to level at which you originally planted it. Leave the control alone. Otherwise treat both clumps in exactly the same way (same amount of water, weeding fertilizing, etc, each clump should have the same number of neighbouring plants, of the same size in the same relative positions (North-South-East-West), etc). If the control clump of one cultivar is near a path then so should the treatment clump of that cultivar be, etc.

After sufficient time has passed the control and treatment plants would need to be compared. One cannot do this with just one control and one treatment since chance always affects experiments/tests. Chance can make the control different from the treatment even when the treatment did not have a 'real' effect. One cannot do it with plants in just one spot in the garden because each location in a garden is different in many unknown ways (as well as possibly obvious ways) that affect how plants grow and such differences may cause the control to be different from the treatment when there is no real effect of the treatment.

Of course one must decide what one is going to compare between the control and the treatment plants before one starts the test. One cannot wait and then look at the plants, see that something is different and decide to use that characteristic - that biases the results of the test. Perhaps, the most important characteristics are the number of buds, or amount of rebloom or the amount of fan increase, etc. In any case one decides before starting the test and one decides how long the test should run.

Such tests, done in garden settings can usually at best, only be considered as indicating what happens in that particular garden.
Maurice

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