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What Is the Best Way for Fruits and Vegetables to Decompose?
by  Room 107
* Hypothesis * Abstract * Materials * Procedure * Results * Conclusion * Bibliography & Links * 
 
Hypothesis 
 We thought that  the vegetables in all of the bottles would decompose.  Some people thought that the sand would help the mixture decompose the fastest.  Other people thought that the bottle with the leaves would decompose the fastest.    We thought that the temperature of the mixture decomposing the fastest would be the highest and the level of the mixture decomposing the fastest would be the lowest.   
 
 
Materials   
  • Soil 
  • Rotten vegetables (potato, cucumber, lettuce, mushrooms, orange peels, apple   peels, squash, turnip) 
  • Bucket 
  • Water 
  • Nine clean plastic soda bottles 
  • Thermometers 
  • Measuring tools 
  • Leaves 
  • Coffee grounds 
  • Pencil shavings 
  • Garbage from the playground 
  • Sand 
  • Paper 
  • Wood chips
Procedure   
     

    First we mixed rotten vegetables in a bucket with soil and water.  Next we put this mixture into nine separate plastic bottles. Then we added different things to the different bottles.  We had one control bottle and in that we only put the vegetables and soil.  We had one green bottle.  In the other bottles we put either wood chips, garbage, sand, pencil shavings, paper, leaves or  coffee grounds.  We made a mark on each bottle to show the height of the mixture.  We took the temperature of each mixture every week. 

     
     
     
     
     

Results   
 This is what happened.  The sand mixture grew a plant.  We donšt know how we got a seed in there but the mixture must have been rich from the compost which helped it grow.  The temperature in all of the bottles went up and the level in all the bottles went down.  The temperatures and levels were all pretty close but the level of the leaf mixture went down the lowest and the temperature of the mixture was a little higher than the others.  Our green bottle was dropped and we lost a lot of the mixture so we donšt know how much of the mixture decomposed or what the final temperature was.  The control bottle was not much different from the rest of them. 
 
 
 
Conclusion 
 We might have had bigger changes in temperature and some of them might have decomposed faster if we had put the bottles outside or dug holes outside.  We might have used bigger containers. 
We are going to try planting seeds in all of the containers to see if one mixture is richer than the others.  We think that a plant will grow the fastest in the richest soil. 
 
 
Bibliography & Links   
  • Glaser, Linda. Compost! Growing Gardens From Your Garbage.  The Millbrook Press. CT:1996.
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Room 107
Timber Ridge Magnet School