I Wet My Plants... with Hydrogen Peroxide: The Effects of H2O2 on Seed Germination and Stem Cuttings

Overview

Objectives/Goals Improved methods of producing healthy crops in environmentally-friendly manners are desirable. The purpose of my experiment was to determine the effects of hydrogen peroxide on seed germination and stem cuttings. Methods/Materials I used four different growing solutions of H2O2 in water and a control of water to wet basil seeds and basil stem cuttings growing in a greenhouse environment. I checked daily for seed germination for three weeks. I measured stem cutting growth by root development in the roots to shoot ratio after three weeks of growing. I used 10 basil seeds and 3 stem cuttings for each solution per trial, and I ran three trials. Results My results showed that a 6% H2O2 solution yielded beneficial results for both seed germination and stem cuttings, however only by a small percentage, and more testing would be needed to completely confirm these results. Conclusions/Discussion These positive results occurred because H2O2 dismutated, or broke into a water compound and an oxygen atom, supplying beneficial amounts of oxygen and water directly to the plants. The single reactive atom of oxygen from the H2O2 dismutation also oxidized harmful bacteria on the plants. A larger concentration of H2O2 was too acidic and provided more pure oxygen to the plants than was healthy, and a smaller concentration provided insufficient H2O2 to help.

Competition history

• CSEF 2017 Plant Biology · Entry J1902

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Plant Sciences projects
• CSEF Plant Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2017 project