Remediation

      Our soil was not exactly as fertile as we would have hoped. Through the results of our tests, we found that our soil was low on nutrients, organic matter, and life, which isn't extremely spectacular for growing crops, but it is also at a good neutral pH and a silt-loam complexion, which are more beneficial traits. So our focus for creating the best possible soil for our lettuce centered around adding more nutrients to the soil to support the plant's growth.

The two variables (before adding fertilizer)

       But first, we needed to decide exactly what traits we wanted to enhance in our soil. Looking at the tests we'd done on our soil, we found that because of the data from our berlese funnel test (there were no living organisms in our soil) we definitely needed to do something to create the best possible conditions for our plant to grow. We looked at the results from the soil texture tests and the percolation rate tests and found that the soil most likely has mostly a silt or silt-loam texture because the data from the qualitative and quantitative tests pinpoint a silt-like complexion and the data from the percolation rate test shows us that our soil was more similar to clay than sand but was not extremely close to that of clay. Our soil having a more silt-like texture was favorable in our opinion because we did not want the soil to be too sand-like or clay-like to detract from the growth rate of the lettuce, so we decided not to alter the soil texture. We also looked at the results from the percent organic matter test and correlated it with the soil fertility analysis to find that the low organic matter may be a factor of how low the soil's nutrients are. Organic matter contributes to the foundation of the soil's nutrients because without organic matter, the soil cannot take in as many nutrients and becomes less fertile.
      Taking these results into consideration, we decided that it would be best to use inorganic fertilizer to give our lettuce the best chance of not being terrible. That doesn't sound super positive. I meant to say, to give our lettuce the best possible chance of being the best gosh-darn lettuce the world has ever seen! That's slightly better, maybe a little overdone, but let's keep this optimistic.

Stop! Hammer time

      Anyway, because our lettuce has such low nutrient levels, we decided to use the inorganic fertilizer because we felt that it would be better to use specific known amounts of nutrients that would be added into the soil instead of organic fertilizer in which we'd have no idea the exact amounts of what we were adding to our soil. We didn't need to add anything to alter the pH because we thought a pH of 7 would be sufficient, we didn't add anything to the soil texture because we thought soil with mostly silt would be good for growing this type of seed, and we didn't add any more organic matter because we thought that adding more nutrients would be more helpful than adding more organic matter.

The two variables (after adding fertilizer)

      In our remediated soil, we added Vigoro fertilizer to add the essential nutrients we needed. The control soil weighed 262.7 grams and the remediated soil weighed 260.4 grams to begin the lab, and we appropriately added 12.8 grams of Vigoro into the water we used to water the remediated soil. We used 20 mL of water each day (except on days we were off school) to water the two plants, and we left the plants in natural sunlight each day.
       We expect that the lettuce made in the remediated soil will be healthier and tastier than that of the controlled soil because of the nutrients added. Let's hope the remediated soil lettuce will be less terrible than the other. I'm sorry, I mean both of them will be fantastic, but maybe the lettuce with the enhanced soil will be even better!