Measuring Blooming

Measuring blooming is part of the additional data that we decided to collect this semester to make my project more quantifiable. I started measuring this on 02/01 and finished today. This took a lot of effort since there isnt a list of plants grown for the garden plots. The ones with names were easy to identify, and the ones without I take pictures of an upload to an app that I pay for that tells me what plant and species it is, and everything about it. If you want to check out this app its called "Picture this" and its specific to plant species. 

After collecting the data I found that in the Edible Garden, 14/24 plants are blooming, bringing the blooming percentile to 58.3%. In the Native Garden, I saw drastically different numbers, with only 3/29 blooming. This brings the native blooming total to only 10% of plants are blooming. This is going to be measured through the semester, but its exactly the kind of data that I am interesting in testing for to help me get a better understanding of why the Native Garden captures so much less insect populations/diversity. 

I also want to collect temperatures through the semester from the first date of capture to last to find an average for the summer, but that can of course be done later since its recorded information. I also am still very interested in measuring the water thats used to water the garden, and this will test for phosphorus! Which is basically plant crack (super food) and if the edible garden has a higher amount of phosphorus in the water, and that's connected somehow to the blooming percentile, then that's direct relationship between the nutrient levels in the water and insect populations. 

I wont be able to collect traps until it stops raining though. Today we walked the perimeter of the plots and checked the traps and took out the old cups and tossed them. I think I want to paint the inside of the cups to match the dirt so that bugs can easily fall in to the traps. But that might be changing a variable that I wasn't able to do last time, so it just depends I need to find out if thats a good or bad idea. 

Hope everyone is doing well! Have a great week. :)

*My photo for this week is a my favorite flowering plant from the Edible Garden which is cabbage :)