I’m now going to play a little concerto for my cucumber

Garden melody: Michael Leapman tests out some tunes on his seedlings. Photo: Carla Molden.

Do veg thrive on Verdi, will flowers blossom if they hear Handel? As The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra release a CD to encourage growth in the garden, Michael Leapman finds out if plants really do love the sound of music.

By Michael Leapman
The Telegraph
05 Apr 2011

Excerpt:

In 2003 some more serious South Korean researchers undertook a large project concentrating on two staples of the oriental diet, cucumber and Chinese cabbage. They played to them what they described as “green” sounds, combining classical music with noises that the plants might be expected to encounter in real life, such as bird calls and rushing water. They discovered that the effect of sound waves was to make the cabbages absorb more oxygen than those that had been raised in silence, with a consequently beneficial effect on their protein levels; but they appeared to have no effect on the cucumbers.

As it happens cucumbers and cauliflowers – a close relation of the cabbage – are two of the seedlings I am currently raising by the window in our spare bedroom, along with aubergines and celeriac. I treated them all to the Royal Philharmonic’s Mozartfest. While the exposure was too brief to count as a proper scientific experiment, I can report that the cucumbers and the celeriac look a bit perkier, while the aubergines feign supreme indifference and, worryingly, a few of the cauliflowers are starting to go brown along the edges.

A couple of years ago I wrote a book about people who grow giant vegetables and was privileged to attend the most important shows where these monsters (the veg, not the growers) are paraded for our amazement. The old mining areas of north-east England are fertile ground for this kind of thing. At the World Leek and Onion Championships at Ashington, Northumberland, the prize for the largest onion was won by Paul Rochester of Seaham, Co Durham, with a football-sized specimen weighing in at 15 pounds, six-and-a-half ounces.

He confided that his secret was to play Glenn Miller tapes to the plants as they developed, to get them – ahem – In The Mood. I rather suspect, though, that his triumph was more to do with choosing the right seed, using industrial quantities of fertiliser and heating the greenhouse to a tropical level.

Read the complete article here.