Brassica Rapa

The effects of fertilizer application on the number of leaves and height of Wisconsin fast plants (Brassica rapa)
Introduction
Nearly 350 years ago the word Scientific Method was coined. Even though the Scientific Method might not have had its name, it has been around for a long time as steps to creating an experiment. The experiment of Wisconsin fast plants (Brassica rapa) was created to get familiar with the Scientific Method and to learn how to use it. Some of the goals of this experiment were to show the various effects of fertilizer on the Wisconsin fast plant (Brassica rapa). The experiment exposed the Wisconsin fast plants (Brassica rapa) to different numbers of fertilizer pellets to see if increasing the number of fertilizer pellets

The experiment was started off by putting a water strip on the bottom of each quad box and labeling the boxes A1-A4 and B1-B4. Then soil was added into the quad boxes along with two seeds into each of the quad boxes about a pencil tip length into the soil. Putting two seeds into each quad box was done to help the rate of germination. Once the seed was in the soil more soil was added to the top of the quad box to cover up the rest of the seed. The fertilizer pellets were added after this was done, zero pellets in both box A1 and B1. The fertilizer pellets were increased in increments of one from boxes two to four. The boxes were on top of a water box that would water each plant the same using strips on the bottom of the quad boxes. After the plants started to grow, measurements were taken with a ruler that measured in millimeters. The plants were measured at the maximum height from the top of the quad boxes to the top of the outstretched plant. After the first week there were more than one plant in each quad box, so the smallest plants were taken out. These measurements were recorded for a length of four weeks in lab manuals.
Results
During the experiment the height of the plants correlated with the number of fertilizer pellets. The number fertilizer pellets effected the number of leaves that grew, but it did

Hypothesis 1 Increasing the number of fertilizer pellets added the more leaves would sprout. The first hypothesis was disproved because plant number 2 had the most leaves on it until the last week, then plant 4 ended with the most leaves. Plant 3 either had a lower number of leaves or the same number of leaves when compared to plant number 2. For hypothesis 1 three fertilizer pellets would be used to get a plant with the highest number of leaves on it. Hypothesis 2 Increasing the number of fertilizer pellets will increase the height of the plants. The second hypothesis was closer to being accurate but was still disproved. Week 1 started out with plant 1 growing the tallest and plant 4 the shortest which makes sense, because of what was found in a Soil and Fertilizer paper “Too much fertilizer can do more harm than good (Oshiro, 2000).” After week 2, plant 2 was the tallest with plant 4 still being the shortest. In week 3 there was a result that correlated with hypothesis 2 all the plants went from shortest to tallest. After the final week of the experiment plant 4 slowed down and became the second tallest which then disproved the hypothesis