After nearly a month of hard work, we finally have our zucchinis growing! We are so excited, and we are looking forward to our first harvest! The zucchini plant had grown a considerable amount since our last visit to the garden, so we pruned all of the leaves that were growing underneath the flowers to limit their growth to one square foot. We left the leaves that are growing upwards towards the sky and not taking the shade of the other plants around them.
While attempting to grow a sweet potato, we noticed that stems and leaves are starting to grow out of the side of the potato rather than the top. I am unsure as to when we are supposed to plant the sweet potato, or if we should cut off some of the side shoots to start new plants. We might try several methods to see what works and what doesn't. Apparently there are several methods to growing new sweet potatoes from slips. Ours started growing shoots of the side much like the video below. I wonder what we did wrong.
Since we are currently learning about root caps, we pulled out our microscope to observe the various plant cells. My son learned how to slice plant samples and place them carefully under the microscope. Our microscope has a camera to connect to the computer, so we were able to take photographs and video to help document what he is observing. We observed the leaf cell structure of a gymnosperm. We looked up a cutaway view of the pine needle and compared our observations to the diagram. I like to introduce new bits of knowledge in patterns of three because this allows us to cover topics in greater detail rather than trying to cover everything at once. Once he has fully understood the concept, we will move onto the next set of items. This might be a slower method; however, for my son he is able to retain much more information using this technique.
My plan for now is to continue to have him observe the various cells as we are learning about each part of the plant. For example, today we learned about root caps so we looked at some of the root caps that came with our microscope kit and looked at the roots that we had pulled from our garden to compare the two. Tomorrow we will continue learning about the root and how the roots function. Insha'allah. This week we were blessed with more square footage, so today my son started planning his garden. He weeded, put sunken pots for deep watering and transplanted the plants that he had germinated. He planted raspberries, peas, beans, and lettuce. He dug each hole carefully and asked my help to remove the plants from their trays so that he could put them into the holes. Indeed, he was a very thoughtful in how he planned his garden. It is difficult to give up complete control over the new square footage as I tend to have a general idea of how I want things, but giving the control over to my son is truly such a wonderful experience for both of us. I love seeing him have so much fun planning things and figuring how and where he wants to put his plants, sunken pots, and pathways. I love that he put the sunken pots in first because he wanted to ensure that the plants would be deep watered and survive the summer heat. We worked together on putting sunken pots around our other plants in our family garden. If all goes well our plants will become more prolific and be like a miniature Garden of Eden. We put some sunken pots for the zucchini. After we carefully placed the sunken pots, we transplanted the germinated peas since the seeds we had attempted to plant earlier had not grown out yet. When I was transplanting the seeds, we took some photographs of the peas so we could study them later. There are parts of the plant that are still unfamiliar to us. They have grown up so much since they were just little seedlings! We even took photographs of the lettuce that have grown so closely together. My son wants to see what happens when they compete for nutrients so we are not thinning them out like we had done to their brothers and sisters. Overall, it was a very nice day to be out in the garden. I am happier with the sunken pots as I feel they are more likely to sink their roots deeper into the ground for deep watering. I am just happy that I am not killing off all our plants accidentally, but admittedly I am afraid we will end up with a plot full of weeds rather then vegetables if I pull out the wrong plants while thinning.
When we arrived back home, my son son sat down at the kitchen table to pick out the seeds he wanted to germinate. Once he was finished, I taught him how to use Excel to plan out his square foot garden. This enabled him to plan out where he wants to put his plants and where his pathways will go to enable us to easily take care of his garden. I love that he has built up enough knowledge to confidently plan his garden on his own. While perusing the web, I came across a video that describes slightly damaging the outer coating of the seeds to encourage seed germination. In the video "How To Speed Up Seed Germination," it seems that the lightly and heavily scarified sanded seeds did much better than the other methods he used. Although in the end after germination, the seeds seemed to have the same growth rate. In botany, "The seeds of many plant species are often impervious to water and gases, thus preventing or delaying germination. Any process of breaking, scratching, or altering the testa, seed coat, through chemical or thermal methods to make it permeable to water and gases is known as scarification." (wikipedia) Check out the following video and let me know what you think. Here is another video that talks about different ways to encourage germination. Let's see what experiments we can come up with to compare methods on our own. I wonder if some of the seeds would still germinating if we didn't completely wrap them in a paper towel? Will they grow if we had them only touching one side of a moist paper towel? Let's see!
Today was such a warm, beautiful day. However, it had not rained for the past few days, so we decided to visit the garden and water the plants to ensure they wouldn't die in the heat. My son spotted a tree growing outside the perimeter, so he took photographs to use as reference for drawing later. I love that he took several photographs to show the various detail. He even took a photograph showing the entire tree with the forest in the background. He knows how much I love to draw, so it was very considerate of him to do this for me and ensure I had enough detail for my artwork. Once he was done taking photographs, we then started germinating more seeds. We started some for a friend, and more for ourselves. We used more zip lock bags to use as control groups. One set for germinating outside, and the other for germinating inside near our window. Which ones would germinate first? Would the ones left outside die in the heat? When we were finished, we checked the plots nearby. We found tomatoes and even some sunflowers growing! After visiting the other plots, we checked our garden. Uh oh! The soil for the potted plants are dry! Time to water them. I am hoping these do not keel over, but at least we are trying this method to see what works and what doesn't. In the picture below, the front tray shows the seeds we germinated and planted into small pots. The tray in the back shows the three seeds we are using as a control group to see if they will germinate faster directly in the sunlight. We are both happy that our plants are growing, but three of our zucchini seeds we had originally planted into the ground didn't grow, so we transplanted our fastest growing summer squash into those spots instead. I showed my son how to transplant the young plants, and he watched carefully so he would be able to transplant the next set of plants. Setting up our experiment Yesterday we reviewed some basics about the male and female parts of the flowers. This chart will help us to use mathematics to figure out the statistics of what type plants will be grown from parents later based on what visual traits or phenotypes are chosen. For our experiment, we are going to be focusing on the "strongest" or "fastest" growing plants to be used as parents for the next generation of seeds. The macaroni represents DNA strands. You need one from the female and one from the male to create a new generation of plants. Today was such a beautiful day to visit the garden. The sun, making its way slowly across the sky behind the trees, cast long shadows on the grass. Dragonflies fluttered about and landed on our tall wooden sticks, and the bees were busy searching the garden for pollen. We sat down next to the garden, placing our gardening equipment next to our baby zucchini plants and begun our work. One by one we planted our germinated seeds in the plastic trays. Using the Popsicle sticks we marked the strongest plants: one for female, and the other male. This was to help us remember which ones we would later use as the plants we would pollinate later on when they grew older. We want the next generation of seeds to have a strong DNA from their parents so identifying the best plants early on is important. We were able to identify the weeds by comparing them to the weed infested plots nearby. After pulling out as much weeds as we could through visual identification, we then used some hay as mulch protect from more weeds invading our little garden. Our garden is coming along. The plants are growing, weeds are being removed, mulch is being added and seeds are being transplanted. What fun fun fun! It may not look like much now, but I am so happy that some of our plants are peeking their little leaves up above the lithosphere. I do wish that we had more space to plant our seeds, but this will do for now. This is our first year. Next year, Insha'allah, we will use what we learned this year and make our garden better with the next generation of seeds. Good bye for now! Time to lock up!
I spy something small and something green! What do you see? Green leaves! The mesclun, shown in the upper right corner, is growing tiny leaves! They are growing so well that they have thrust their naughty roots outside of their paper towel. Alas, we will not be able to tear them free, so we will try to carefully plant them with the paper towel to see how they do. Maybe we should have planted them yesterday perhaps?
The basil, shown in the bottom row, are also growing little leaves. They have sprung out of their seed and are growing up, up, up! How fun! How exciting! The corn, shown in the top left, is still growing, but some of the seeds are still a bit sleepy. they have now begun to grow up and secondary roots are also growing in. The Tomato, beans and summer squash are also doing well. Their roots are growing, growing, growing! Off to the garden tomorrow to plant our little germinated plants. |