Monitoring the Growth of barley seeds
Introduction
The reason barley is so important is because it is in our food. Farmers have the job of knowing what is in their crops and they need to know what they are putting on the crops. We are doing an investigation on the growth of the barley. We are going to monitor how much the barley grows over a period of time. We are comparing the growth of the barley seed with the nutrients it needs.
Planning
Factors affecting barley growth
There are control variables, which can be used to change the growth of a plant. Such as the soil type, temperature, light intensity, concentrations of all the other minerals accept the one under test. They are called controlling variables because they can change the growth of the plant. When we did this experiment we needed something to hold the plant up. You can use soil or as we did cotton wool to hold to plant up. The temperature, which was surrounding the plant, can also be controlled. It doesn’t matter whether the barley was kept in perfect sunlight or in a dark cupboard it would have still grown. With all these control variables I decide whether I keep the temperature the same or whether I use soil it’s all up to me how I want the plant to grow. If we wanted we could control the concentrations of nutrients, which are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium but it depends on the nutrients under investigation. We have set the experiment by putting the plant in water instead of soil this is so We have put tinfoil around the test tube so that no light can get in and green algae doesn’t form.
