How Tall Can Your Fast Plant Grow?

How Tall can Your Fast Plant Grow?

Procedure: During the fast plant life cycle many things were taken into account. The plants all started out as a seed. Data was collected every Tuesday and Thursday after class. The kind of quantitative data that was collected was the height of each plant on the days that we would go in and check them. The qualitative data that was collected was our drawings of the plants. We were able to add details to the pictures. The purpose of this experiment was to be able to view the complete life cycle of an organism. All of the plants that we used in the experiments were F2's .

Analysis: The germination took place within the first 3 days of planting the seeds. It was noticed that in the time frame of the 3rd and 5th day the cotyledons became visible. The first true leaves made their appearance right around the 10th day. The days surrounding the 13th day lead to flower buds actually forming and showing up. The plants were starting to get flimsy so on day 17 we added stakes to support the young plants. Our first flowers started to bloom around the 27th day. They were yellow and petite. Pollination took place a day later. We cut the wings and heads off of the bee and glued it to a toothpick. We then gently brushed the bee over the flowers to help the pollination procedure. After all of the pollination was done, seed pods started to develop 30 days after the initial planting. The plants stayed healthy for a couple more days after this. It was around day 36 that the plants started drying up and dying. It was time for the plants to be harvested for their seeds they had produced.

While working with our plant it was exciting to look around and see how other plants were coming along. I like to think that our plants were in the top percentile of successful plants. They grew up fast and tall while others seem to take a while to get the same height. Weekly growth seemed to be exceptional. It seemed like every Tuesday that I came in to check my plants they had grown so much over the weekend. Some occasions the plants would grow as much as 4 centimeters just over the weekend. Of the four plants that we had remaining at the end of the experiment, two were hairy. These two were easily distinguishable from the other plants. We had 6 plants going into the last 2 weeks, but we weeded them out to give the other plants maximum potential.

Critique: