When you want to learn about the physical features of plants, the subject of knowledge that you study is called plant morphology. In general, plants have very specific limbs or physical sections that are designed for particular functions. When you know this, and some about the subject, you can garden much better than before.
Write down a list of the various plants that you grow anytime during the year. Then look up what kinds of sexual structures that they might produce. If you want them to have these so that they can reproduce, you can identify these parts and leave them be.
Knowing what each part of your plants does means that you can prune them with more precision. If a plant develops a certain characteristic to harness more water, you can possibly trim it out knowing that you water your plant enough. When your plant does not have to waste energy and metabolism on providing energy to the removed part, it might actually be able to yield more fruit and blooms for your harvest.
One big reason you want to have some idea of the morphology of your plants is simply so that you know what in your garden is something that you planted and what is a weed. This is especially true for anything you are growing for the first time. Pictures in books and online might not look the same as what you physically view with your own eyes, so having some knowledge about it will prevent you from pulling out of the ground a seed you deliberately planted.
Once you learn the morphology of specific plants, you can start knowing more about the morphology of plants in general. This means you will not only discern between weeds and wanted plants, as well as unneeded part plants, but you can actually start seeing problems in plants in advance. When you are so well versed in the subject matter that you can start preventing demise in more of your plants, your overall yields and harvests will start to rise.
Plant morphology and the study of it are great ways to pursue your passion of gardening even when it is not growing season. The long dark nights of winter are not typically times that you spend outdoors planting, watering and harvesting. Instead, spend them learning about the specific varieties you intend to plant and grow the following spring. Do your homework now so that your free hours can be spend focusing on your more physically laborious tasks.
Good gardeners learn all they can about the specific plants on their land. Regardless of whether you are looking at surface features or making guesses as to what is going on inside of a plant, the more you know about one of your plants, the better treatment you can give it. For as much time as a devoted gardener might spend on their knees in the soil working with their plants, they are likely to spend even more reading about the body of knowledge surrounding their plants.
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