Canyon had the opportunity to participate in a project called Tomatosphere when he was in 4th grade last year.
Here is an explanation of the project from the Tomatosphere website:
Tomatosphere is a research project involving more than 9,000 classrooms of Grades 2 to grade 10 students ("Tomatonauts") across Canada, the United States and several other nations. Students will have the opportunity to grow tomatoes from seeds that have been placed in an
environment to simulate the effects of aerocapture, as might occur when entering the atmosphere of Mars, and a control group. In the research project, students will be asked to germinate the seeds, but will not know the origin of the seeds until the results are reported to the web site. At that point, the teacher receives an automatic response indicating which seeds were from each group. This methodology, known as a "blind study" will allow the mystery of the project to be real for the students.
After Canyon's seeds were germinated, he was allowed to bring the tiny plants home. They started out no more than four inches tall. We carefully transplanted them, along with their peat pellets, from the plastic cup to a large pot.
Unfortunately I did not document the process, and it has been over one entire year. From the beginning, Canyon agreed that if his plants produced a tomato....he would eat it!
Canyon's little plant faced some challenges. Unusually long dry periods - Who's turn was it to water??? The usual garden pests which were treated with a mixture of dishsoap and water - which in turn almost killed the plant. And some seasonal cold weather - thank goodness for old Whinnie the Pooh sheets, they did a great job keeping the plants warm!Well, that day finally arrived and
Canyon was ready to try his first tomato. He sliced it and sprinkled it with a little salt (many of his family members eat their tomatoes like this) and gobbled it up! Like a true champ...
Will he eat another one? Only if it comes from his tomato plant, and fortunately there are several more ripening right now!
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