Why is there a lack of agriculture? Or way too much food waste? Well, contaminated soil is one of the main issues. I chose to work on these problems because my island is going through a lot of deforestation. What better way to help than to answer our greatest questions: What causes contaminated soil? How can we help fertilize our soil?
My project is working with compost. Why not kill two birds with one stone? My initial plan was to grow two plants: one with compost, the other without, looking to see if the one with compost would grow more than the one without.
If I put compost in one of my plants then it will grow more and “healthier” because of the nutrients in the compost. The compost would be made of food waste, from tea/coffee bags to excess food (aka leftovers no one will eat).
The nutrients in all of these foods help the plant grow giving it more nutrients that more than likely will not be found in a plastic cup. This also helps the lack of agriculture because it opens up a new way of growing plants.
Unfortunately, my project didn’t go as well as planned. I had grown six bean plants, three with compost, three without. I had used papaya peels with a little papaya flesh on it. I had cut it into small pieces as shown in one the pictures above. I watered and measured the growth daily for a full week. I averaged the amount of growth between both categories.
The compost plants getting an average of 1.38 inches and the “no compost” plants with a 1.92-inch average. My hypothesis was therefore incorrect. I had made a few mistakes in this project though. I don’t think I had the correct compost to soil ratio, and the compost had dried up because of the dry soil. So in the process of “remoisturizing”, I had dumped the water too quickly in one of the plants (“no compost” one) and therefore uprooted the forming seedling and overwatering the soil, because the water from the day before hadn’t fully absorbed.