For the end of year project in my Advanced Placement Biology course, everyone had to design an experiment and present it to the class. He gave us no guidelines except that we had to record data, keep a journal, have a purpose, have it pertain to biology, and to preset it to the class. Very vague. My partner and I decided to see the effects of different terrain on plant growth. We had to write up a long formal lab report, but I will summarize our experiment for you in this blog.
First, we got eight pots for our soil. We filled the first pot with all soil. The second pot was filled with a mixture of three-fourths soil and one-fourth sand. We filled the third with a half soil/ half sand mixture. The fourth was filled with a mixture of one-fourth pot soil and three-fourths sand. The fifth was filled with all sand. The last three pots were filled fully with soil, but big rocks were randomly spread out throughout the soil in the first, small rocks in the second, and a mixture of the two sizes in the last pot. We made two sets of the soil mixtures and planted zinnias in one and radishes in the other. We then watered them every few days and let them grow for about a month and a half.
Our hypothesis was if the amount of sand increased in the pot, the plant would grow less. We also thought that the rocks would stunt the growth of the plants. We thought this because the more sand meant that the plant would have less soil to get nutrients from and so the plant would not be able to grow as tall. We didn’t think the plant in the pot with all sand would grow at all. We thought that the rocks would be too big of obstacles for the plant to avoid and so the plant would not be able to grow very tall or have very thick stems.
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