Dirt to Dinner: Food Preservation and plant drawing

October 24, 2009.

Daddy and I went to the class at 10:05 am. We first checked the results of the soil experiment that we did in the last class. The results are:

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                With Compost            l        No Compost
Sprouts               6                      l                12
Leaves              6 - 9                  l            2 - 11
Height           0.75 - 3 in             l          0.25 - 3 in
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In the picture above, I am writing the results of the experiment. Our hypothesis was that compost in the soil will give us bigger leaves and more sprouts. But, I found results to be the opposite of the original hypothesis.


One possible reason could be when we removed the original tomato plant, it shed off some seeds and they sprouted in the side with no compost instead of the peas we planted. I will observe the small sprouts after two weeks and see if they are tomatoes or peas. One possible reason that the compost side had less sprouts was that there was one big lump in that side. Maybe there were sprouts there but the lump prevented them from coming out.

I flattened the lump out expecting peas to sprout before the next class.

Then I went to draw a plant and I selected an interesting leaf for drawing shown in the photo above. I first drew the stem and looked at the hairs of the stem and also drew the first leaves in exact detail. Daddy showed me his quick sketch of the plant. He did not draw the hairs at the tip of the stem and the small bump and the hair there. In his drawing, the stem was nearly rectangular. I colored my stem using pastels. I also colored the leaves I drew. Then, I went to the food preservation exercise.
 
In the food preservation exercise, 12 foods were laid on a table and we needed to say how those foods were preserved. The foods were yogurt (fermentation), tuna, meat, dried fruit (drying), vanilla (?), avakai (pickling), cucumber pickle (?), cheese (fermentation), dried beans (drying), dried strawberry and bananas (drying), cinnamon jam (canning) and others. Devin started an experiment storing garlic in oil, honey, water and air to see which one works and how garlic is spoiled by the others. I think the garlic in air and water will not be preserved because fungi will attack it. I expect oil and honey to preserve the garlic. You can see me doing the food preservation exercise in the photo below.