Reflective Learning Diary: MY JOURNEY ON GROWING A PLANT (PAK CHOY)

MY JOURNEY ON GROWING A PLANT (PAK CHOY) 

Hello everyone! 

My name is Aishah Humaira.
I hope everyone who is reading my blog right now is doing good. 

So here I would like to do reflective learning diary about my journey with my partner on growing plant together. It begun in October 2020, we; the plant developmental students were asked to sign the growing plant project by our beloved lecturer, Dr. Parameswari. This project took 10 week of planting and observing the plant developmental. The plant that me and my partner have chosen for this project was Pak Choy.

                                                                                 The Pak Choy plant on week 10

       

To be honest, never have I ever imagine that planting plants could be so much effort yet had so much fun while doing so. It felt like I was taking care a baby; need a lot of attention and love. I learnt a lot throughout planting and growing Pak Choy. I learnt deeper about seed germination, the correct methods of growing and caring for a plant, their growth conditions, type of fertilizers that suitable to use for Pak Choy, and even much more understand and can relate the development of a plant with the correlate genes that particularly involved in each developmental stages.

I must say that it is quite hard for me to imagine how these genes contribute and functioning to the developmental process of a plant during classes because no video or animation video are shown. But somehow when this project was asked to be done by us, I not going to lie that my views have changed and my understanding about the plant developmental have become more clearer since I can see with my own eyes how a plant can grow and silently can relate with everything I have learnt theoretically in the class. “Amazing!” This was the only word that kept coming out from my mouth. I can see the seeds germinate and I just knew that it was really took almost two weeks for the seeds to germinate and the genes involved; ABI3 really play their roles well in maturing the seeds ready for germination and GA gene to promote germination of seeds.

 

                                                                                         Pak Choy seeds

                                                                                                     Pak Choy plant on week 0

Before this the one who always started planting plant is my mother and I am the one who will water them sometimes without giving 100% focus to their development. But somehow, when I did this project starting from the scratch, I gave 100% focus to their each stages of growing and recorded it. I did water them daily, every morning and late evening, and feed them some organic and chemical fertilizers once in every two weeks. Also, once a week weeding the plant in the pot to avoid nutrition and water competition with other unwanted plants. I can see they were growing healthily and went through vegetative growth and also primary and secondary growth phases. Every week, their height was increasing steadily by 0.2 cm to 2 cm along with the increasing in leaves number. 

Furthermore, the developmental of vegetative plant is regulated by the environmental factors and right now at my hometown the season is rainy season. So, the Pak Choy plant did not get enough sunlight during day and unfortunately the plant could not able to reach the reproductive growth phase before week 10 of planting. I have learnt best from this project, and I really enjoy relating the lesson learnt during class with the real plant phase of development. During the differentiation phase, I can see how the shoot apical meristem played roll inside the plant where the small-young part on top of plant developed into plant organs; leave and stem.

The knowledge gained from this molecular biology of plant development has opened my eyes to see and understand better about how does plant develops. To date, there are more other genes that get involved in every phase of plant development and the genes that are shown in the lecture notes are only some of it. If Dr. Parameswari is about to do this project again in the future, I would like to recommend you to keep with this flow of the project. I really like when you ask us to make and record a video presentation instead of presentation online during our class, because I have problem with my bad connection and always got stuck during other class presentation. In future, I really hope lecturer can include the video (perhaps in 2 or 3 minutes duration) that related to the topics especially the one that have flow phase or mechanisms on how this thing or that thing happens. This learning method really helps students like me where we find it is quite hard for us to imagine straight away in our head the process occurs right after being explained by the lecturer, and need to see and watch the flow on how something happens through animation video on YouTube. Overall, I really enjoy the whole plant class sessions this semester as I keep on learning new things about plant development from you and Dr. Nur Fatihah. Thank you so much Dr.

Thank you too to everyone for spending their time reading my blog.
Stay safe and stay hydrated.