What Grows Plants Faster, Regular or Salt Water?

Question/Problem: What grows plants faster, regular or salt water?

Hypothesis: I predict that the regular water will grow the plants the fastest because sterilized water water is known to be the most effective technique when growing plants.

Procedure:

1.Obtain materials for experiment

-Cherry radish seeds

-Ziploc bags

-paper towels

-ruler

-salt

-water

2.Put a wet paper towel in a Ziploc bag

3.Obtain a stapler and staple the middle part of the Ziploc bag about ten times across

4.Carefully place the seeds one by one on top of each staple(This will act as a pocket throughout the growth)

5. Add salt to one of the bags

6. After that label the one of the bags “Salt Water” and the other “Regular Water”

7. Every five days record how much each of the plants has grown with ruler using centimeters

8. After twenty days record your final amount of data and determine which plants grew the most after twenty days

Abstract

In my experiment I wanted to see what grew plants faster in, clean sterilized water or salt water. I predicted that the sterilized water would have the best outcome because it is known to have most effective results when growing plants. I believe that the way salt affects plants is similar to how it affects humans, it dehydrates. After eating a salty meal people usually grab a drink to wash it down, but plants can’t do this and have to depend on either the environment or people to feed them sterilized water. This is why I wanted to see what grows plants faster salt or sterilized?

My technique for growing plants was to grow them in a ziploc bag considering that it’s winter. The way to grow them in a ziploc bag is to put a paper towel in the bag and staple about ten times across in the middle of the bag. After that, I add the seeds to the bag by carefully laying them on top of the staples one by one. This will act as pocket for the seeds. Then add the water to the bag, just enough so that water fills and absorbs the entire paper towel. After a few days, determine what water, salt or sterilized grew the plants faster, then mark the difference in growth over time.These were the steps I accomplished when doing my experiment.

After twenty-days of growing plants I have collected a conclusive amount of data. I measured both of the regular water and saltwater plants every five days over a twenty-day period.Since I grew multiple plants in one bag, I decided to measure all of the plants in one bag with a ruler using cm,and then finding the average The data for my sterilized plants on day five was an average height of 1.6 cm and on day twenty an average height of 5.9 cm. I found the change in growth by subtracting the data that I collected on day twenty( 5.9) by the data I collected on day five(1.6) and got the amount of 4.3cm. For my saltwater plants on day five my plants grew an average amount of 1.6 cm and on day twenty the average came out to be 4.9 cm. After that I subtracted 1.6cm from 4.9cm and got the amount of 3.3cm, which would be the change in plant growth for the salt water plants.

After completing my experiment I learned that regular water does in fact help plants grow faster than salt water. I also learned that even though salt water does grow plants it still affects them in many ways. My hypothesis was partially correct because I predicted that the regular water would have the most effective outcome when growing plants, which was correct, but I also predicted that the salt water would cause the plants not to grow at all, which was incorrect the salt water plants grew but eventually grew into a yellowish brown color. Even though I tried to make my experiment as accurate as possible, there could have been occasions when things were not as accurate as I thought. For example, when I was measuring the plants, most of them were curled up and the measurements could have not been as accurate.