Mrs. Irwin's integrating science in garden restoration |
Daily Journals
As my undergrad years come to an end I am increasingly thinking towards the future. This project was such a useful and fulfilling experience that I hope more ISE students can utilize in the future. I have learned a lot over the past semester about how those key big idea details matter so much and I hope I can lead future budding scientists down the right path and avoid the misconceptions that they pick up along the way. I have learned how much effort goes into collaborating a meaningful and informative piece of work, such as this website. I fully plan to reference and guide back to this website regularly throughout my career. As much stress and hard work that has gone into this project, the experience and testimony that has been produced has been a whole-heartedly magnificent experience.
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We did it! The plants are in the garden and ready to develop a flourishing ecosystem in Kedzie courtyard!
This was the first time in a long time that I've done any gardening. First, we raking and tilled the soil to remove any dead plant life or weeds we didn't want growing in the garden. By tilling up the soil, we also added air and created a more porous environment for the roots to take growth in. Then, we placed the plants, still in their buckets around our plotted area to allow for a visual on where we would like to plant them. In our plot of the garden, we have a butterfly bush, a long grassy plant and some tulips that we kept. We planned to use the tall grasses and butterfly bush to help with partial shade for our plants. We also had a large chunk of mushroom near our grassy plant that will offer great material for nutrient decomposing. Hopefully all of our plants will be able to benefit from this. We then began planting all of our plants, digging holes, placing the plant and filing in the hole with the excess soil moved. We found a lot of creatures in the soil that will begin to engage with our plant life in building the ecosystem. We finished up with supplying plenty of water to each plant. I am really excited to see what our plot looks like in the summer, luckily I'll be around for about half the summer to watch it progress! Yay! Today was a good day nurturing a green thumb! Today we are getting ready to plant the plants that we got from the greenhouse. On the blackberry and raspberry bushes, there are dead stems and twigs. These are remnants of last years bushes. The cilantro and stevia are already leafy, usable leaves. Some of our flowering plants have flowers already and some bloom later in the summer.
Notes for working on the pages: The soil got more moist the further down until you reached an area of compacted clay. Air in the soil: space for oxygen to move into the roots. All winter long the roots are burning sugar. The leafy plants need more water in between today and our last meeting based on the fact that the flow of water when there is leaves (in the root and out through the leaves). Whereas, in the plants that were just roots and stems, the water is being stored. (No reaction with photosynthesis). Today was the first and only field trip that I had the pleasure of experiencing as an MSU student. We traveled to Everlastings in the Wildwood, a greenhouse in Owosso, MI. It is an off the beaten path family owned plant nursery with a gorgeous landscape.
Happy April fools day! We redid some of our tests, producing better results. As a scientists it is important to run multiple tests and compare the data of each in order to get a more precise result. We also spent some time outside getting a living inventory of the garden plot area. I am still not seeing any sunlight during the timeframe of our class. But I have heard speculation that there is some sun at noon. I will need to drop in and observe it directly at this time. Our plan for next week is to finish testing the soil. Hopefully, we will get our 1/6 of the garden assigned so we can start weeding out all of the dead material in the garden. I suspect the only living plant life now are the small trees and the new weeds growing. I am interested in growing possibly a raspberry bush and some flowers I enjoy such as Calla lilies provided they don’t require an immense amount of sunlight.
We spent most of the class period working on soil tests. Some of our values seemed to vary largely from similar test that were orchestrated on the same soil location this past fall (2014). This either reflects changes in soil throughout the year or variations in lab conduction's.
We also planned out our plots and made arguments for which area of the garden we would like to be in charge of restoring. Our group is vying for an area in the middle of the plot. The landscape slopes downward there to an area of 2 ft. We would like area in the 1 ft. region where ground water flow will interact with our plants yet avoid pooling as possible in the 2 ft. region and avoid drowning the plants. This was the start of our soil sampling, we collected soil samples from the plot we measured (we actually measured all the plots thinking we were doing each of them).
The Kedzie building is 4 floors high. This seems to cause an issue with sunlight touching the middle garden plot. Spring has just begun so the angle of the sun will continue to rise until mid-summer, but as of right now the garden does not get sunlight during the day. This observation was made around 1PM therefore just after peak angle for the day. This may effect our choices of plants we would like to put in the garden. I fear plantings needing a large amount of direct sunlight will struggle here. |
AuthorA budding scientist... Archives
May 2015
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