Gilbert Ag Ed Article
GHS Horticulture Class Grows Fast Plants
By Students: Anna Babcock, Greta Sents, Olivia Whitham
In the Gilbert Horticulture classroom, students are beginning a 36 day long process to learn about the lifecycle of plants. This experiment uses fast growing plants, brassica rapa, aka fast plants, to teach students how to monitor, pollinate, and harvest plants. These plants are showing promising growth after two days and will presumably continue to grow.
Students will take detailed notes over many different aspects of plant life. By the end of this process, they will have comprehensive knowledge about environmental monitoring, developmental events, measures of growth, measures/analysis of biomass, and students will be capable of comparing many of these data measures.
One highlight the students are looking forward to is creating a bee stick (a pollinator stick). The students will take dried bees from the school bee hives and create pollinator stick. This shows them the importance of pollinator species as well as the mechanics behind the process. They will be able to compare their seed harvest and see how successful the pollination was.
Students began the process of these plants on February 7th and will continue this project until the beginning of March. The students are having a competition to see who can harvest the most seeds from their “fast plants”. We will see which group did the best work at pollinating, and caring for their plants!
