Talking to your plants, or playing them music, makes them grow better.
Talking to your plants won't grow them faster. You'd need to talk for hours a day for your breath to make a difference. Plants do respond to sound in the lab, but the music experiments are shaky and nothing shows a playlist helps a garden. Give them light, water and nutrients; chat to them if you enjoy it.
What is actually known
There is no definitive evidence that talking to plants helps them grow. The exhaled-carbon- dioxide idea fails on scale. You would have to talk to a plant for several hours a day to raise photosynthesis enough to matter. Sound itself is a live research question. Plants do respond to sound in lab studies, and one found seed germination affected at 92 decibels, far louder than speech. But the early music experiments lacked proper controls and results remain hard to reproduce, so nothing shows that music grows a garden plant better. What reliably helps is the basics of light, water and mineral nutrition.
The evidence
Evidence: checked against 2 sources in the research-based literature.
The 2 sources
But there is evidence that plants respond to sound.
Popular works such as The Secret Life of Plants and early experiments by Retallack suggested that plants might respond differently to various types of music, although these studies lacked rigorous experimental controls.
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Cite this page
Milpa Gardens. “Talking to your plants, or playing them music, makes them grow better.” Evidence grade: Contested. https://milpa.garden/beliefs/talking-plants-music-plants/
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