Here’s an update to the Electric Fertilizer portion of the Sunflower+ Project.

A few weeks ago we showed up early on the day of the Awards Ceremony to begin installing the system’s electrodes.

To get a feel for of the lay of the land, I went to visit the property a few weeks ago… Being my first visit to Old North, I was pleasantly surprised!

Old North St. Louis – Recipient of National Smart Growth Achievement Award by the EPA

Sunflower seeds (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To prepare myself for sowing sunflower seeds on-site, I started a mini-experiment to see if sunflower seeds respond favorably to electrical stimulation.  We happened to have 2 varieties of sunflower seeds on-hand since my pet parrot, Oskar, is a regular consumer of those seeds.   The two kinds were a small black variety and the other was large and striped.

So using some organic soil, I planted 4 seeds, two of each variety into some square spice jars.  While they really are a bit on the small size, not only because sunflowers grow very tall, but also because they have large root systems (which is helpful with regards to phytoremediation).  On the other hand, I chose these containers because at least in the beginning, I could keep them sealed to minimize moisture loss when I was gone from them over the weekend (since I kept this mini experiment running at my office). Here’s a photo of the initial setup.

If you haven’t read the previous post about the joint Washington University / City of St. Louis Sustainable Land Lab Competition, check out the previous post, here.  Here’s the update… We, the Sunflower+ Team, was one of the final winners in the competition along with 4 other teams!

Now that we have won the competition, we will officially receive a 2-year lease to the plot of land in Old North.  The plan is to follow the posterboards that were submitted as part of the competition.  The first submission gives a description of the project.  Next was the second submission:

I’m interested in collecting old images of electroculture experiments.  Here are some historical photos and illustrations that I’ve found so far:

The “Plantricity” system was developed by David MacZura and published to the world via his friend Mark Fancher’s website, BroadrOOt.com.  David has been developing 2 methods of growing, one called MultirOOting, and another called Plantricity.  Plantricity is David’s way of stimulating plants by planting a portion of the plant other than it’s normal root system into a separate container and electrifying both containers with a switched electric current.

As you can see, the results of his experiments stand for themselves: