Month: March 2013

After coming back from break we were surprised to see that our strawberries have began to grow! All three of our pots have began to sprout, but were still very tiny. The pH of the water when we checked it 7.0 after the plants were unattended for over a week. We added a teaspoon of pH down, but that lowered the pH all the way to 3.3. We then had to add a teaspoon of pH to the to bring it up to 5.5.

We saw no visible budding of the plants. The pH of the water rose from 6.1 to 7.0 from Monday at 12 pm to Wednesday at 9:50 am. We added 1 teaspoon of the pH down power again and brought it down to 6.1. Two Hours later we checked the pH again before we left for spring break and the pH was at 3.2. We are keeping it that low because of being away for the next week, and having rock wool as a support of the plants it absorbs the pH of the water and raises quickly.

We planted our seeds on March 11 around noon. Before we planted the seeds, we mixed the nutrients and prepped the rock wool for plated. We soaked the rock wool in the nutrients for a few minutes so it could absorb all the nutrients and the seeds had a better chance at growing. Using three cups that we turned into net pots, we put a half of cup of clay pellets into each and then put the rock wool into the cups. We then finally planted the seeds and tested the Ph of the plants. The Ph for the strawberries was suggested to be around 5.8-6.2, ours was at 7.1 A teaspoon of “Ph Down” later, we had lowered the ph to 6.1. Lastly, we had set our lights to shine on our plants for 6.5 hours everyday.