Poor Dirt Quality

Since we've last updated this blog, we've begun to realize that our plants are not growing as fast as we would like. It has been over a week and a half and all three plants have yet to break the surface of the soil. Because of this, we reevaluated the quality of the soil that the plants were grown in. We quickly realized that we should have used potting soil instead of soil from the natural earth, which contains an unusually high quantity of rocks and sticks. We believe that this is the reason that our plants are not growing as well as we expected. We plan to remove all the soil and newspaper shreddings and start from stage one. We will replace the layer of newspaper and replace the dirt with potting soil, which contains more nutrients. Afterwards, we plan to replant the three types of seeds. We hope that this will help the plants grow faster. Although we are disappointed with the outcome, we still have high hopes that adjusting our plan slightly will help the plants develop at the pace we originally predicted.

We started the planting process!!

It has been two weeks since our last blog post and we started the planting process of the seeds. We first had to find two boxes to grow our plants. One of these boxes would serve as our control and the other our experimental variable. Our control box contains dirt almost 3/4th of the way and we laid seeds on the top bed of the dirt. The variable box has shredded newspaper about 1/2 way through and dirt about 1/4th of the rest of the box. We planted seeds on the upper layer of the dirt. The main difference in the boxes is that the variable box is going to act as a compost bin. We are waiting will the plant grow a little bit before we put in the worms. We are doing this because we don't want the worms to eat the seeds even before they grow.
We have yet to create lids for our boxes which came without a lid. We were going to do that with duct-tape and then makes holes in it so the worms can breathe. We don't need it right away because we haven't put the worms in the variable compost bin.
Although it rained the past couple of weeks our plants have yet to grow but because it will rain the following week we really hope the plants grow to about 5 inches so that we can put in the worms. We water the boxes every day once.
The seeds we used include tomato seeds, pea seeds and spinach seeds.