Science Fair - Vitamin Enriched Plants
Introduction
This is Steve Santoro's science fair project for the year of 1997. It is called Steve's vitamin enriched plants because that is what it is. I experimented with three types of vitamins and fed them to some small weeping fig trees to see which would grow fastest and best. The idea behind the concept is that if we can figure out a way to produce more or grow it faster, we could be able to supply more food to our growing population. The project was designed to give me an idea of how well an experiment of this sort would work and if it would.
Investigation
Hypothesis
I thought that vitamin C would enrich the plants and have them grow the best. This was based on the fact that vitamin C is a major vitamin in humans and I thought that it was possible that plant's might require this substance to grow and function also. I hoped that the vitamin would help the plants to grow larger than the other plants so that I could hopefully find out the reason for it and experiment with other types of plants such as grain or fruit yielding plants. Unfortunately my hypothesis was totally bogus and the exact opposite occurred.
Materials
The Plants
I used a indoor tree, used mostly for decorative purposes, as the plant. It is called the Ficus Benjamina or "weeping fig". It is part of the Ficus genus and is a relative of the fig plant. It has two to four inch leaves which are often long, shiny, and leathery. On the border of each of these leaves is a noticeable white edge and each also has it's own slight twist. Its slender branches droop naturally in the enviorment and indoors. They may grow to be up to four to six feet tall and are quite beautiful if you ask me. The ideal growing conditions for these plants are bright, but not direct sunlight, moist, not wet, soil, and fertilizer once a month.(I did not fertilize any of the plants during my experimentation.) The ideal temperature for growing is sixty-five to seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit at night and seventy-five to eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit during the day.
The Vitamins
I used three separate vitamins for this experiment. They are vitamins A, C, and D. I ordered them through the pharmacy my mother works for.
Vitamin A
Vitamin A is a fat soluble vitamin. It came in the form of a gelcap. There were 10,000 IU per gelcap. The most active form of the vitamin is retinol which is found in concentrated amounts in fish liver oil. The substance in the gelcaps itself is less dense than water and looks like a petroleum substance.
Vitamin C
Vitamin C is a ascorbic acid and is water soluble. It is really a plant sugar in the form of hexuronic acid. It came in a tablet form and had 100 mg. per tablet. The ingredients in in the tablet were as follows: Ethyl cellulose, searic acid, microcrystaline cellulose, calcium phosphate and magnesium stearate.
Vitamin D
Vitamin D is also a fat soluble vitamin like vitamin A. It has two active forms which are erogocalciferol, or Vitamin D-2, and Cholecalaferol, or Vitamin D-3. There are 100 mg. per tablet. In humans the drug is produced in the body when people are exposed to ultra-violet rays and is an interesting twist to my experiment.
Other Materials
The rest of the materials are listed below:
16 plant cups 4 Soft Drink Bottles
2 plant holders 12 Vitamin A tablets
1 kool aid scooper 12 Vitamin C tablets
36 cups of water 12 Vitamin D tablets
Reynold's Wrap a little luck!
Procedure
The procedure I used was fairly simple and should be easy enough to follow and reproduce my experiment. The first thing I did was purchase sixteen "baby" Ficus Benjamina trees. They were all the same size, I made sure of it. Then I watered them for one week without any vitamins in the water. I placed each set of four plants in a tin foil dish,(So I made the drained water wouldn't mix with the other plants.), I made witch I put into a large plant pot holder. At the beginning of that week I dissolved, or tried to dissolve the vitamins in the soft drink bottles. For every one cup of water I would add two vitamin tablets. I used six cups of water in each bottle and 12 tablets a bottle. The Vitamins C and D were easy to dissolve to a point, for they were in tablet form. They became a powdery substance in the water, eventually settling to the bottom of the bottles after about thirty minutes, without shaking. Vitamin A, however, took a little more work, for it was in gelcap form. So I cut open each gelcap and emptied it into the bottle depositing the shell into it also after it was drained. It became an oil like substance that floated on the water and when shaken randomly, formed beads in the water. The shells became inflated and became very soft, so I ignored them and just let them be in there. I filled one bottle with just plain water. Now that I had the vitamins in the water I could begin the experiment. I would give each plant one kool aid scoop every other evening and do this for a ten day period. At the end of this period I would measure the plants then continue the watering process. During that time I would observe the changes in the plant's physical appearance, which happened to be minimal. The temperature in my house was always sixty-five degrees at night and seventy-three degrees during the day. This is the complete procedure I used to do my experiment, I hope I explained it in the thoroughness you requested.
Observations
I begin my observations with the first thing I observed, the beginning height of my plants. This was 14.6 CM.. Before the first ten days I noticed that the leaves of the plants had some white around the edges of them and that the stem itself was quite sturdy. During the first week I could not see any physical changes at all. They were minor (As shown in this Chart) changes in height but nothing dramatic.
During the second ten days I did not see or feel any difference in the leaves or in the stem of the plants. I
did however notice that about two thirds of the plants were growing taller but weren't that dense, but the smaller ones were quite dense with foliage. This didn't happen to any particular plants but to random ones in all the groups. Overall, up to this time, the control set of plants were doing the best.(As shown in graph 2)
During the third period of ten days I noticed one plant really taking off, it was the first one in the control group but there was also another small plant also. This led me to believe there would be natural highs and lows. Also, that studying individual plants would be foolish. The overall average was the important part of the experiment. There were small plants in all the groups, except the Vitamin D group, which kept an average medium. This is a chart of the third ten day period.
The fourth period of time, I saw some dramatic changes between the largest and smallest plants. This was the last period of time that I made observations and I still had no physical characteristics on the leave or stem growth. The Vitamin D plants had the best overall, but Vitamin A and the control sample were right behind. Vitamin C remained small.
The total averages were as follows:
Vitamin A - 20.7 cm.
Vitamin C - 19.4 cm.
Vitamin D - 21.8 cm.
Control - 20.8 cm.
The tallest plant went to the control group plant number 1 with a whopping 30.1 cm. height and the smallest goes to the Vitamin C group, plant number 1 with a miniature 14.6 cm..
Conclusion
As you can see my data proves absolutely nothing except for really conclusive results I would have to continue my experiment. My hypothesis has been proven wrong and vitamin C did less then regular water. Possibly it was a bad batch of plants but it was most likely that the plant couldn't tolerate the levels of vitamin C present. Vitamin D had the best results and I believe that the plant used this vitamin to do some internal function which help increase the growth process slightly. Is it possible that the experiment had not been carried out long enough or that the vitamins where given in excessive amounts? It is possible. I could always test a different amount of each vitamin next year!
The End
Well, you survived my report, long huh? I hope I went into enough detail to make this report a little better than my past ones. I hope that this and other experiments will yield some new technology to the growth of plant's to help us support the population into the future!