Organic Fertilizer Lab

The reason for this experiment is to see the impact changing the pH of the soil will have on plant growth of __ that uses an all organic fertilizer. Plants usually have a specific range of pH that they prefer to grow on so the experiment is essentially testing which pH this plant prefers (Zhao). Each plant also had the fertilizer in the soil. An experiment could have been done without the fertilizer just to determine the pH range, but also having a fertilizer present seemed more useful considering a lot of plants are grow with fertilizer in order to get all the nutrients needed so testing without fertilizer would only apply to the plants grown in that condition (Jeong). This experiment is interesting to the scientific community because it is

10 plants were grown in separate pots so that they could be treated with different pH solutions. The pots consisted of 3 control plants, 4 plants treated with a pH 5 solution, and 3 plants treated with a pH 8 solution. To growth the plants a seed was place 1 ml beneath the surface of soil inside a pot and then watered. One weed was given to allow for the plants to sprout before being treated with pH solutions and the fertilizer. After the initial week for growth, each plant was given the fertilizer by diluting 1 ml of concentrated fertilizer into a mason jar of water. 3 ml of the fertilizer solution were administered to each pot. Then 4 of the plants were treated with 2 ml of a pH 5 solution and 3 different plants were treated with a pH of 8 solution. The remaining 3 plants were used a the control group. Every week the plants growth was measured by placing a ruler on the surface of the soil and recording the tallest point of the free standing plant. Once the measurements were recorded the plants were then treated with the same amount of pH solution. No additional fertilizer was used after the initial treatment. The plants were watered by someone other than the students carrying out the experiment during the week since lab only occurs once a