Which medium do roots use most effectiviely?

Research Question: Which media type helps plants grow large and evenly distributed roots? Media eliminates the use of soil, it soaks up water very well, and it provides support for plants as they sprout. This will also allow them to grow larger roots and cause them to uptake more nutrients. This will produce healthy plants!

Procedure:

1. I will pour water in each media.
2. I will then plant a radish seed in each media cup.
3. Put the cups (that contain the seeds in the media), and I will poke holes in the bottom to allow drainage.
4. After that, I will place them in a greenhouse, and water them with water until germination.
5. After the plants have grown as much as they can with the nutrients in their seed, we will then see how well distributed the roots were in the media (if at all) by looking through the transparent “plant pot”.
6. After that, we will empty the media and wash the roots.
7. Mass the total amount of root produced at the end of the experiment.

Data: The ranking of roots figure shows that roots penetrated the medium most effectively in the perlite, followed by the vermiculite with coconut fiber ranking lowest. The root mass graph shows that perlite has the greatest root growth compared to the vermiculite and coconut fiber.

Conclusion: In this experiment I tested different media types to see which the roots use best. By looking at the data, the perlite radish has the highest average rating and largest mass of any of the other

media-grown radish.