2016 OES Bio 20 Ecology Posters

Students in our grade 11 OES program are presenting their research at the Fish Creek Environmental Learning Centre, in Fish Creek Provincial Park, Calgary, Alberta, from Jan 5, 2017 to February 24, 2017.

The students will be at the opening of the exhibit from 2:30 - 4:00pm on Jan 5, 2017.  We have invited all of the partner organizations and individuals that have supported our program since its inception in 2013/14.

We hope you are able to visit the exhibit.  Please leave a comment if you have any feedback.  Visit our program's website for more information.

 https://sites.google.com/site/centennialoes/about-oes-centennial

Feb 24: SeedlingsPlanted.
March 24: Seedlings transfered to Towers (100L of water/tower 120ml of A & B) Lights off 4hrs on 24 hour cycle.
April 4: 40L of water 40ml of A & B
April 12:  First harvest, 7 heads of lettuce, grazed arugula & kale (50 students)

Oct 24, 2014 Food Day

"Bring your own toppings"

After the culinary arts students washed and prepared a bed of lettuce varieties, garnished with Kale and Arugula that were grown in our classroom, the students brought their own toppings to celebrate and recognize the importance of eating healthy nutritional food.

The Year of The Salad Club

Oct 16, 2014

With Food Day approaching, Oct 24, 2014, we are almost ready for our first Salad club event.

Our lovely crop of heirloom organic lettuce, kale, arugula, and basil getting ready to nourish our cells.
The first batch of seeds were started on Aug 20, with the hopes of the first harvest in the last week of Sept.  They didn't germinate except one basil plug.  The only difference was that I used tap water vs distilled, and started them outside.  So I re-seeded on Sept 14, 2014 and here are the results 4 weeks later.  4 lamps 24/7, ~80L of water and organic liquid nutrients.  Pump is set 15min on/off.

So our first salad club involves the OES students bringing their own toppings BYOT.  Students in the culinary cooking program prepare the leaves for us, and enjoy the nutritional benefits of nutritionally rich produce.

Our First Harvest

After proving that the tower with 18hrs of artificial light produced significantly more biomass, we harvested the lettuce, kale and arugula for our first salad.

Students were asked to bring their own toppings that are nutritional rich, chemical free and as local as possible.  The first salad above had the following:

Once the produce was harvested, two grade 12 culinary arts students gladly volunteered to wash, clean and cut the salad for the class.

April 16, 2014

After several weeks after germination and feeding each of the seedlings the tower tonic until we saw roots in the bottom of the rock wool we transfered the rock wool plugs and seedlings into each of the towers according to the position selected by the students. 

Manipulated Variable #1
Problem:  Do specific plants do better in different positions on each of the individual towers?

Manipulated Variable #2
Problem:  Does varying amounts of natural and artifical light have significant results in plant growth?

April 9, 2014

The electric composter from Naturemill begins its first composting cycle, using only organix produce scraps.  The soil produced will be used to grow so Kale seedlings and native species.  The kale seedlings are going to be grown for the purpose of looking at the stems of kale for comparisson. If we wash the soil from the seedlings we can place them into the plugs without using seedlings from a greenhouse that may carrry harmful pests and deseases. The remainder of our compost will be used to make a nutrient tea to use for the towers.



Tower 1 OES 20 "Big Lou"

Order of plants from top to bottom: A, L, K, A, K, A, K
All natural light
Nutrients pumped every 30 minutes







Tower 2 OES 10 - Beta

Order of plants from top to bottom: L, K, L, A, K, L, K
All natural light, 6 x 54W blue light set for 12 hrs
during night.   Nutrients pumped every 30 minutes












Tower 3OES 10 - aLPHA

Order of plants from top to bottom:  K, L, K, K, A, A, A,
All natural light, 6 x 54W blue light set for 18 hrs during night
Nutrients pumped every 30 minutes

April 3, 2014

Tower 2 & 3 are set up by students. Tonic was added, and the timers for the 3 pumps to girggle in unisin, and the lights were set. Additional wool plugs were seeded for those plugs that were not successful. 12/84 plugs were not successfull. New plugs were ordered and in the future we will grow more plugs than what is required.

Some of the stems of the kale appear to be very weak (stringy), and perhaps this has something to do with lack of nutrients or that they are grown in an aqueous environment.

April 1, 2014

Tower 1 OES 20 "Big Lou" is set up by students.  The water tub took 4.25 x (18.5L) distilled water bottles.  Students measured the tower tonic, and set the pumps timer.

March 17, 2014

After all 12 rockwool plugs of Arugula died, we re-seeded and they are doing fine, then almost 90% of the lettuce shrivelled due to being too close to the heat registeres and having run out of water on the weekend even though they had been topped up with water on Friday.  The Kale is however 100% on fire.

Our nutrient mixture is 1L of distilled water with 2.6ml of A and B tonic added using a pipet.   The pH has been consitently around 2 and the basix solution has been added around 10-15 drops. to bring it back to a pH of 5.5 - 6.5.

New rockwool plugs have been added and our electric composter was shipped to use today from Nature Mills.