Cabbage, Well what can I say? We did an experiment on them, Oh joy. As much as I thought it’d be totally boring, it was actually more interesting than I thought. Don’t get me wrong- it’s not something I’d do in my spare time.
Well, to the experiment- We deprived three Cabbage plants of three (apparently essential) nutrients. Those nutrients were Potassium, Phosphorus and Nitrogen. We also had a control plant to compare them to.
We had 6 weeks to do the experiment. We started out taking measurements in class. But afterwards, our teacher said to measure in our own time. All I measured was the height and how many leaves were attached. Out of the six weeks I only got four measurements. Now we were meant to measure our plants three times a week. So what’s that a total of? 18 measurements? Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about measuring cabbages in my spare time!
Well let’s get to the results then, shall we? My plants shrunk, simple as that. Even my control plant shrunk. I don’t think it was the plants fault- I haven’t exactly looked after cabbages before… Or any other plant for that matter. So I’m not too sure it was to do with the deprivation of nutrients. Other plants in our class didn’t shrink, so yes, it was my lousy farming.
Although the plants shrunk, they all grew more leaves, although the cabbage deprived of Nitrogen managed to lose one. But I must have done something semi-okay because other plants lost leaves too. I’m not a complete failure.
By the fourteenth of August the plants deprived of Nitrogen and Phosphorus had some symptoms of an early death. The Nitrogen deficient plant went purple and the Phosphorus deficient plant developed spots. Apparently this happened to a few plants so my experiment was (to my surprise) a success.
