Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Hydroponics!

Note from mom: I take no responsibility for the captions, or the exclamation mark overdose. The project we are working on here comes from this elementary school website from Hawaii.

This week for biology, we decided to start a hydroponic garden.We decided to grow some lettuce and basil. So we poked holes in some paper cups, put them in a metal tray full of water, added sphagnum moss and seeds, and waited a week. We also put plastic tops on the tray to keep the water from evaporating.
Yesterday we looked at the seeds with our digital microscope. We saw that the basil was growing mold, so we threw it out. We noted that the lettuce seeds are starting to grow.


Setting up the cups.

Sphagnum!!!

Sphagnum in a cup.

Sphagnum magnified 60 times.

The trays chillin' on their shelf.

Xenomorph egg, or basil seed? you decide.

1 comment:

Cakes said...

they need appropriate temperature to avoid mold. it gives competetive germination rate.

also, aeriation of water would have needed to occur for further growth or anerobic rot bacteria would have taken over root area.