Final Greenhouse Update

Our final week of being Interns at AYVA Educational Solutions has come! With this ending comes also the finish of our greenhouse experiment. If you’ve read our previous blog post, you know that our first batch of saltwatered tomatoes died very efficiently. They were black and shriveled within a week of sprouting and being watered with salt water. Not a hopeful start to our experiment. However, we maintained hope and pushed forward, replanting our seeds in the red pot.

While death was going on in the red pot, we had life in the purple pot. Lush leaves, consistent growth, good CO2 uptake. The three beautiful sprouts were jiving and thriving under the care of filtered water and scheduled LED light. What more could a plant want? Oh how good they had it. 

Fast forward a couple weeks. The scene is: Three healthy tomato plants in the purple pot and two stunted, barely-growing tomato plants in the red pot. We decided there was no hope with our sad, wilty babies. This required a hard sacrifice. In order to truly test the effects, we needed healthy tomato plants to perform our reign of salt water terror upon. We looked over at our healthy, thriving tomato plants in the purple pots and then to our half dead plants in the red pots. In our hearts, we knew sacrifices must be made in the name of science. Armed with our deadly spray bottle loaded with salt water, we accosted our beautiful tomato sprouts knowing it would ultimately be their death.

Over the next few days, we watched our prized tomato sprouts droop, continuing to measure their growth (or lack thereof). We quickly concluded that salt water is not good for plants.