Terracycle Challenge – Off To The Races…Well, Almost!
As I discussed in our summer newsletter, our “Terracycle Challenge” is underway. If you have absolutely no clue what I’m talking about, be sure to check out my original post: Terracycle Challenge.
As you can see in the picture above, we are making some progress – but as you can also see, we’ve run into a bit of a situation with one of our pots! I had hoped that by putting two seeds in each pot I’d greatly increase our chances of having at least one test plant for each treatment (of course, if I had started with a lot more seeds I definitely would have planted more than two in each pot).
Unfortunately some local bird hooligans had other ideas and decided to munch on both seedlings as they emerged from one of my pots. I had one other casualty, but luckily there is still another plant left in that pot.
In hindsight of course I wish I had purchased a lot more sunflower seeds (unfortunately I still was not sure what type of plants I was going to use for the challenge), but oh well! I could track down another package of the same type of seeds, but I’m not sure I’ll have time this week and the other plants are already well on there way.
SO…
I’ll either transplant one of my other seedlings (most likely) or get rid of one of my treatments (don’t want to do this).
I should also mention that I am going to setting up a similar experiment using different plants in the near future. While it can’t be considered at second repetition (since different plants are being used), it will still be interesting to see if we have similar results.
Back to our current challenge…
Once the second set of leaves (first set of ‘real’ leaves) emerges I will start ‘Phase 2′ of the experiment. Each pot will become a distinct treatment, and various fertilizers and amendments will be added accordingly. It just occurred to me that I’ll need to make sure we only have one plant per pot at that point so there isn’t any uneven allocation of resources (2 plants sharing resources obviously won’t grow as well as a single plant).
Anyway, you can expect to see another update before too long!
Technorati Tags: terracycle, compost, worm compost, vermicompost, fertilizer, miraclegro, micracle gro, sunflowers, worm tea, compost tea
Written by Bentley on July 3rd, 2007 with
2 comments.
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Bentley
#1. July 9th, 2007, at 4:32 PM.
Wow, this is interesting. I can’t wait to see how this progress’
By the way, I met a guy from Terracycle at Torontos Green Street Festival. They are doing a good job, the only thing that really bugs me is that they are selling their products at Walmart, and I don’t agree with their business structures at Walmart.
Anyhow, I’m really excited for this experiment and can’t wait to see more of it.
Best Regard,
Hans (rethinkable.com)