Fertilizers Radish Growth Science Fair Projects

Botany Science Fair Projects

Fertilizer experiments can be very interesting for those students interested in botany. These experiments will look at how fertilizers impact the growth pattern of specific plants. When conducting fertilizer experiments you will want to look at the chemical makeup of the fertilizer to figure out what compound the plant is actually responding to.

PURPOSE

The purpose of this experiment was to determine the effect of different fertilizers on radish-growth.

I became interested in this idea when I noticed that my mom buys only one kind of fertilizer and I wondered if it worked better than other fertilizers.

The information gained from this experiment will benefit home gardeners and crop growers raise bigger and better plants.

HYPOTHESIS

My hypothesis was that plants would grow more massive with a fertilizer with higher percentage number of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus in it.

I based my hypothesis on an article that I read from Encarta Encyclopedia that stated, "The three elements that most commonly must be supplied in fertilizers are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium."

EXPERIMENT DESIGN

The constants in this study were:

• The type of plant used (radishes)
• The amount of water given to each plant every day (10 ml)
• The type of water given to the plants (tap water)
• The temperature plants were grown at (20-º C)
• The amount of potting soil given to each plant
• The amount of time to grow (7 weeks)
• The way the plants mass was measured (triple-beam balance)

The manipulated variable was the type of fertilizer used to grow the radishes.

The responding variable was the amount of plant-growth after a period of 7 weeks.

To measure the responding variable I used a triple-beam balance to measure the mass of the plants.

MATERIALS

PROCEDURES

Set-Up
1. Label each growing tray with the name of the fertilizer that is going to be used in it and label the last one "control group."
2. Put 118.3 milliliters of potting soil in each pot.
3. Add 1 Tbls of fertilizer to the group labeled its name. Mix the fertilizer together with the potting soil inside the pots.
4. Repeat step 3 and 4 with the 3 other fertilizers (make sure to put in the right tray for the right fertilizer).
5. In the control group just put 118.3 milliliters of potting soil in the pots.
6. Make a small hole in the dirt of each pot, about 0.635 centimeters deep. Do this to all the pots.
7. Put 1 radish seed in each pot in every group.
8. Cover the holes up by pushing the dirt over the top of the holes (don’t push or pack the dirt down).
Growing
9. Water every plant with 10 ml. of water every day.
10. Let the radishes grow over a period of 7 weeks, making sure to water them every day and making sure to have all the plants have the same amount of light, and all of them have the same room temperature (23º Celsius).
Measuring the Plants
11. Take one group of plants and pull them out of their pots and shake all the dirt off.
12. All together take the plants in that group and measure their mass on the triple-beam-balance. Record what you found on a data table. Make sure not to mix the groups together.
13. Repeat steps 12 and 13 with the other 4 groups recording all your findings in the data table.
14. After you have measured every plant and recorded their mass. Find the average mass of each group. Record this down for every group.

RESULTS

The original purpose of this experiment was to determine the effect of different fertilizers on radishes.

The results of the experiment were that the control group grew the most biomass but the fertilizer that grew the most biomass was Morcrop. The highest average, Morcrop, had an average of .24 grams in mass. The lowest average was Vigiro with an average of .1 grams. The control group averaged .26 grams

CONCLUSION

My hypothesis was that plants would grow more massive with a fertilizer with higher percentage number of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus in it.

The results indicate that this hypothesis should be rejected. This is because my information showed that the average biomass using the fertilizer with the highest numbers in nutrients (Miracle Grow) was slightly less than Morcrop.

Because of the results of this experiment, I wonder whether or not other fertilizers would have grown the radishes better or worse than the fertilizers I chose. Another thing I wonder is that whether or not a natural fertilizer would do better than a synthetic fertilizer.

If I were to conduct this project again I would have used a bigger sample group for each fertilizer. I would have also used more types of fertilizers. Another thing would be to grow the radishes over a longer period of time.