Sensational Snapdragons

            Have you ever tried watering a plant with something other than water?  We are going to try.  We are hoping to discover if plants are able to grow while being watered with Club Soda or Gatorade. This will be an interesting project since neither of us has ever tried watering a plant with a liquid that is not water.  This is what we want to find out through our science project.

            Our hypothesis is that the plants will grow differently.  We predict that when we conduct our experiment, the plant watered with water will grow the best, the plant watered with Gatorade will grow the second best, and the plant watered with Club Soda will not grow as well as the other two plants.  We hope our hypothesis will be proven true. Also, we hope that the plants have distinct differences so that we can record what we discovered. We hope to discover something new. 

     For our experiment, we are going to use bottled Club Soda, Gatorade, water, a measuring cup, and three potted Snapdragons.

      First, we went to Target and bought three pots of the same size, three Snapdragons, and one bag of Miracle Grow soil. To conduct our experiment, we have put each Snapdragon in their own pot.  We put five cups of Miracle Grow soil in each pot.  All three pots were placed in the same area outside where no rain could reach them and received the same amount of sunlight.   Everyday, we watered each plant with one-third cup of water, Club Soda, or Gatorade.  Each week, we took a picture of each of the plants and recorded how they were growing.  Our experiment was conducted over a span of four weeks.

Week 1

All of the plants seem to be growing well.

Week 2

The plant watered with water is growing very well.

The plant watered with Club Soda is not growing as well as the other plants.

The plant watered with Gatorade is growing relatively well.

Week 3

The plant watered with water is still showing good improvements.

The plant watered with Club Soda is still short with only a few flowers, but has large and healthy leaves.

The plant watered with Gatorade has many flowers and is growing tall, but has wilting leaves.

Week 4

The plant watered with water overall looks the best and the healthiest of all the plants.

The plant watered with Club Soda looks the second best.  It is still shorter than the rest of the plants, but it has healthy leaves and some flowers.

The plant watered with Gatorade looks the worst because of its dried-up leaves, but it is still the tallest.

          In conclusion, the plant watered with water grew the best, the plant watered with Club Soda grew the second best, and the plant watered with Gatorade grew the worst.   We were partly wrong with our hypothesis because we thought that the plant watered with Club Soda would grow the worst, but the plant watered with Gatorade actually did.  We were somewhat right because we thought the plant watered with water would grow the best, though.  If we were to do this experiment again, we think we would have used a different color Gatorade and used Sprite instead of Club Soda.  Our experiment was a success overall, though.  We really enjoyed it.

            Overall, our experiment worked out well.  We discovered that plants watered with Club Soda grow almost as well as plants watered with water, and plants do not grow very well when watered with Gatorade.  We proved that water is the best liquid to water plants with. In conclusion, our experiment was a big success.

Work Cited

"The Home Depot". Homer TLC Inc.. 7 February 2008 <http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/HomePageView?storeId=10051&catalogId=10053&langId=-1>.

F. Niehaus, Theodore. Wildflowers. Austin, Texas: HMCo Field Guides, 1999.

"Snapdragons". World Encyclopedia. Oxford University, 2005.