Plant Experiments cont.

The blue container has their carnivorous plants. Thin red shoots have started to sprout!

The container next to it has their flowers. I moved the pots into an old grapes punnet so it'd be easier to transfer them to the window sill each day. 🌞 They've sprouted nicely and the girls are excited to check on them each morning! 🌺🌼🌸

The small container on the right has an abundance of cress seeds. 🌿🌿🌿 There were a few seeds left in the packet but not enough worth saving, so we decided to sow them all into one small container (old hummus pot!) and see if being overcrowded made a difference to their growth. 😁

The container at the front has 4 pots (old yoghurt pots in an old mushroom punnet!) from their cress experiment (the 5th pot being in the cupboard so it gets no sunlight!). In clockwise order from the top left: no water, no air, no soil, control. The girls predicted that only the control pot would grow, so they were surprised to see the seeds in the no soil pot were sprouting! So maybe the ones in the other pots, under the soil where they can't see them, are sprouting too? But how well will they grow? More waiting to see, inshaAllah! We only planted them on Friday so this photo is only day 2 of their growth. 🌱

The overcrowded pot had some seeds pressed against the side of the container, so they could easily see those ones sprouting. InshaAllah they'll be able to see the roots growing and spreading out as the days progress, too. 😄😄

On a particularly sunny day, the girls noticed that the plants on the windowsill were bending over. Which direction were they bending and why? M said they were trying to get closer to the light (she remembered seeing it a previous year in the kitchen when we were growing green beans!) so I thought I'd teach them the word phototropism. They didn't want their plants wonky, so what could we do to make them straight? Turn them around! When we checked back on them a few hours later, they were growing straight up again. 😄

When they told Papa later that they'd seen phototropism on the windowsill, they were happy to see him both surprised and confused. 😂 Then I got them to explain to him what it meant - which he remembered learning about in secondary school. 😂😂

[EDIT:]

Day 4: All the plants in our cress experiment have sprouted! But why? 😙

clockwise from bottom left: 1, 2, 3, 4

5

1) Control - everything is as expected!
2) No water - because the soil was damp when we started, even though we've not added any more.
3) No air - because there was some air in the soil/under the lid to begin with, maybe? And every time we water them, we take off the lid and let air in... We changed to lid to clingfilm so it wasn't pushing down on the plants.
4) No soil - because the water woke up the seeds, but they've not grown properly because they've got nothing to hold them up or give them nutrients!
5) No light - because the seed doesn't need light to sprout, the plant only needs light once it's grown leaves to absorb it... And every time we open the cupboard door, they get a little bit of light... M noticed they were yellow though!

The above is what the girls came up with, with some discussion. So what do they expect to see happen next? That only the control cress will grow and the others will begin to die as more time goes on. 😏

As for the overcrowded pot, they're all growing well at the moment. It's really interesting to look through the container and see the roots spreading out and the shoots breaking through the soil!

The flowers are still growing well and the carnivorous plants are growing too but more slowly in comparison. 😁

[EDIT:]

Day 8:

The no soil pot was beginning to smell so we threw it away! Why was it so smelly? Because the plants which weren't growing were starting to rot. 😷

[EDIT:]

Day ??:

I stopped keeping track of this lol.

The overcrowded one was too overcrowded! The plants pushed the soil out and made a mess (why? brief lesson on displacement!) and we compared the size of the cress to the control... Some of them weren't growing as much because they didn't have enough water/nutrients from having to share and others had grown bigger because they had taken most of the nutrients/water. Then we threw the pot away after seeing what would happen if we stopped watering them too. 😂

The cress with no light had withered and turned yellow, so we threw that away too. The girls came to the conclusion plants turn yellow/lose their green colour when they don't have enough light.

The no water cress had started out growing better than the control! But eventually they wilted and we could see the effects of not watering them - this was a few days after we threw the pot away which had no light. M was confident this was because the soil was already damp when we sowed the seeds, because otherwise they shouldn't have been able to grow at all! We also noticed how the flowers they'd planted needed to be watered every 1-2 days or they started to wilt, whereas the cress seemed like it could go a long time without needing any extra water - so even though all plants need the same things to survive, they don't all need the same amounts of them. This led to a discussion about cacti because deserts don't have much water at all but cacti can still grow there. 🌵🌸

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The no air cress was still growing well in comparison. Why? The girls suggested it was because they kept getting air whenever we watered them, so really it was getting everything just like the control was! The clingfilm lid was stopping the cress from growing taller though, which is why they were bent over. When we looked more closely, we could see that some of the plants were turning brown. Maybe this was an effect of not having enough air?

[image]

The control pot was still growing and all the cress was still alive. The only confusing thing was that there were less shoots in there to begin with, in comparison to all the other pots. Why was that? Maybe because those seeds just happened to be less hardy in the first place. There really isn't any way for us to find out except to repeat the whole experiment again and see if we get the same results. We talked about why repeating experiments, therefore, led to better results. Because if we get the same thing again and again we can treat those results as being more reliable and not inexplicable one-off results!