Service Report
We are team Planter Justice, and our members include Maria Morris, Jiaying Wang, Ziqing Song, and Yan Tung Ip. We worked with Brian Twyman and George Davis at the City Park Greenhouse. Our group learned new ways to grow plants and make the recycle plant containers. This experience makes us become better members of this community and contribute to the awareness and solution to the gardening and plants growing.
At the first time, we met Brian and George. We discussed the ways grow plants, like the hydroponic growing way we used at last. Besides, we also discussed the problem of food wastes, food safety, and food shortage which probably will happen. We had a nice conversation, and we planned works we were going to do with them this semester.
On March 22, the second time met with them, we learned about urban planting, which uses the least cost to grow plants at home. George taught us making the container or the hydroponic pot for plants. We used two kinds of plastic to make the pot. And George told us the roots of the plants would be growing with just sunlight, water circulation, and bacteria in those hydroponic pots. We painted the pots in black so that when the Sun shines on them, water circulation is active.
We took a long time to made the hydroponic pots, and at the same time, we make the nana pot which can grow some bigger plants, like corn. At the third time we met with them, we decorated the hydroponic pots with pink spray to make them more presentable and made the nana pot. We colored nana pots by the black spray, and we make holes on those pots so that water can flow out if there’s too much water in the pots.
On April 5, we started planting on the pots we made, and we planted the lemon which can grow lemons after five years. At first, we washed away the dirt on our plants. Then, we planted it into the plastic pot. The pots have no dirt, but we used rice hulls and perlite to replace dirt to help the plants grow. Finally, we added water into the pot. At the last time we met, we did the same planting process as last time, but we grow the lettuce and oranges.
In conclusion, we learned a lot about planting this semester. Through the techniques we learned in this ECAP project, we can grow food and plant at low cost and recyclable at home by ourselves. This is an amazing journey to do the planting and learn knowledge. We are so appreciated to have a chance to do this ECAP project in this class.
