I understand that creo herbam only makes nourishing food if it's a ritual, but what if the spell merely ages an already existing plant or seed?
If I do this, does the plant return to it's baby plant state after the spell wears off?
Is the food from the plant nourishing since it is only an altered mundane plant and not magically generated?
Can I age a plant by using perdo to make it older?
You can age a plant so that it rots with perdo, but you could not make it "better" only worse.
Most of the other benefits would wear off when the spell ended.
Yes, perdo on plants tends to make them wither and die.. you'd need Creo to make them grow from a seed to a full grown, prime example of plantliness. Though the guidelines don't specify.. they tend to read to me that any changes in the maturity of the planets is lasting.. .. though I might be wrong on that... it's a little unclear.
But if so, yes.. you could use CrHe to make seeds grow into food which is perfectly natural
So If I have an apple seed I can use CrHe to make an apple tree which would grow perfectly normal apples. After the spell wears off, would the tree shrink back to a seed?
That's the not too sure bit.. .. it seems like it would be lasting, afterall, growing to maturity is a naturally occuring thing that doesn't break any of the limits afaik.. so probably
Yes, that's my impression too. It's analogous to CrCo spells that allow the body to heal faster/better rather than simply fixing the wound straight off.
To get an apple tree to actually produce fruit would likely require a ReHe spell too, though (this is actually a canonical example from the ArM5 book, serfs parma). Better to go with something directly edible like lettuce or carrots.
Yes, you can make things grow faster with Creo. The end product is, as far as I understand, permanent.
Fantastic! Thanks!
I have to disagree that you cant use perdo. If you compare to corpus effects....Creo corpus base 30: bring a person to full maturity.
Creo Herbam base 15+: bring a plant to maturity
Looking at perdo...Perdo corpus base 15: age someone 5 years, and there are 15+base effects in the guidlines
Perdo Herbam...guidelines as written only give 4 examples of what you can do. It's silly to think that by moving from human to plant the basic guidlines get shortened so much.
Yes, but for humans it's aging in a BAD way.. .. the fact is, humans don't keep growing and such the same way that plants do, so Creo and Perdo work differently on them. Perdo would destroy or wither plants, I certainly wouldn't let people use PeHe to make giant redwoods or something.. cause that's not what Perdo is all about
I agree.
CrCo to age = removing penalties from youth.
PeCo to age = make aging rolls.
Remember that for the Creo based aging, it only lasts as long as the spell lasts - so it's not going to be very nurishing...
Using Perdo to age a plant, will not include any growth, just aging... which I'm not even certain means anything to a plant...
Use Rego to make the plant grow fast. it is a natural characteristic of the plant to grow.
Most stuff that you can do with creo (or perdo, for that matter) you can do with Rego in 5th edition.
Cheers,
Xavi
Nope, it explicitely falls under the Creo guidelines: CrHe 40 - Bring a plant to maturity in a moment.
"Balance the content of water, soil and sun in a plant so it grows fast and fertile in.... 10 seconds". Now it is rego. Pretty much like those spells to balance the hunours in order to speed up the recovery of a body. As usual, several ways to reach the same target 
Cheers,
Xavi
Where is this guideline, or where are spells, that you speak of? =)
"Balancing" the sun or water would probably require some amount of it not immediately present, which would require Creo.
These "balancing" spells are houserule spells he uses to avoid using vis on healing - and if you want to start going that way, I'd rather give the soil the supernatural ability to have plants grow to full size overnight in it (MuTe, Cr req).
Nope, that's definitely Muto: you can't do that with "natural" soil.
Aging plants could be in a bad way too as they also have a natural life span. The more I thnk on this I still so no reason for perdo not to work to age the plant, but I don't see how you could get it to produce fruit. The corpus version has limits if the target is to young. I see the same for plants. So you cant take a seed and age it into a tree, but you could take a 2 inch sapling and age it another few inches. You would still have to wait for it to "get pregnant" and produce fruit. Keeping the target age limit prevents you from aging an apple from small and green to red and juicy.
Isn't it more appropriate to have the limit be that the Perdo variant cannot cause growth? After all, you're bringing destruction, not creation to the plant... (hmm - then again, maybe you could make termites with a PeHe spell?)