December 14

What happened to the Pumpkin Project?

I guess I should probably provide an update on the Pumpkin Project.  We harvested our pumpkins for the year.  It took some time, but we were able to collect the fruit that grew, make some simple measurements and deliver them to our school’s 1st grade classes.

Pumpkin Harvest

 

 

 

 

 

 

We harvested the pumpkins in October.  5th grade classes were responsible for harvesting their own pumpkins.  Then, we measured the circumference and weight of each.

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Many of the Kandy Korn pumpkins we harvested were pretty small.  The Snowball pumpkins were larger; but, many vines didn’t produce any fruit.  We shared the data between classes and came up with something like this.

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We continued to reflect on the different factors that might have impacted the results of our harvest.  The students determined that the small size of pumpkins and number of fruit could have been from …

-light

-soil

-amount of water

-temperature

-amount of insects/pollinators

-number of pumpkin plants

This spring we will look at making a change to the garden.  We’ll look at our list and decide how we might manipulate one variable/factor to run a controlled experiment and improve our 2017 harvest.  Wish us luck and check back for updates.