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Old February 29, 2012   #9
Petronius_II
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Albuquerque, NM - Zone 7a
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(Please let me apologize in advance if in the following writing it seems like I'm "talking down" to you. I don't know how old you are, or how much of this is old hat from your POV, but I do know that there may be others besides you and me who read this, so I'm keeping a rather broad audience in mind.)

Quote:
**I would have chosen to make a compost except I dont have room in the small individual potters to add a lot of mixture. My inquiry now is if anyone would advise against subbing coconut water for the banana peels every two weeks? Or if it would be worth a try?
In science, no experiment is a failure if it teaches you something. Contrariwise, every experiment is a failure that either (a) doesn't teach you anything, i.e. yields ambiguous data that fails to confirm or refute anything, or (b) teaches you the wrong thing, i.e. the design and implementation of the experiment produced misleading results.

BTW, in real-life working science, the idea(s) that are confirmed or refuted may not be related to the original working hypothesis. Roentgen wasn't looking to discover X-rays, it just sort of ... happened. Which is why I wrote "fails to confirm or refute anything" instead of "fails to c. or r. your hypothesis."

So... whatever is worth a try to you, is worth a try to you. If still in doubt, discussing with your teacher and fellow students can help you make up your mind.

The parameters are pretty simple: 15 specimens is a pretty small sample, so you're well advised to try to test one and only one input. For example: coconut water; banana peels pureed in a blender with X amount of water as I described; molasses as Dice described; any combination of these.

As long as you're not trying to test two different inputs at the same time with an experimental group that small, you'll be fine, i.e. no putting molasses on 8 plants and coconut water on 7, etc., the resulting data would be too ambiguous, could be misleading because irreproducible, etc.

...Or, if you do want to monkey around with a second input, the second input should go on the control group as well. For example, if I were in your shoes, I might be interested in adding some mycorrhizae bacteria to the experimental design, but if my main purpose is to test [coconut water, or whatever] as an input, I should add the mycorrhizae to the experimental group, but also add it to the control group. Each experimental group should employ one and only one variable.

When you have experimental results, I hope you'll come back here and post them on this thread.
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