How Does Your Garden Grow?

Over the weeks story of the seed group 4-2 has been growing collards. From a seed they blossomed almost into full grown and beautiful collards. Once a week we would water the plants (not to mention that the rain helped water them as as well. Every time we visit our collards we could observe the amount of growth.  Every day it would have enough sun in order to have photosynthesis.  The collards are taking in sunlight that goes through many stages. The first stage is light dependent reactions, which takes place in the thylakoid membranes of the chloroplasts, that is when the energy captured from the sunlight is converted into ATP, NADPH and oxygen. Those are then use in the second stage called the calvin cycle, which takes place in the stoma of the chloroplasts. This is when they use ATP and NADPH to make high energy sugars. Not only that, but going through cellular respiration to which is when the collards which is when the energy is released from the plant by breaking down food molecules.  Finally Mitosis also known as cell division helped our collards grow. In Mitosis there are 5 stages, Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase, Telophase, and Cytokinesis, to split cells.  Prophase, the first stage, chromosomes become visible, the centrioles separate and go to both sides of the nucleus. Then the spindle helps take apart the chromosome, and this leads up to Metaphase. Metaphase is when the chromosomes line up across the center of the cell, and the microtubules attach to them. Then in Anaphase, the centromeres detach from the sister chromatids and then become individual chromosomes. After Anaphase, Telophase starts when the chromosomes disappear and a nuclear envelope starts to cover the chromosomes. Finally Cytokinesis finishes it up with 2 nuclei and duplicate chromosomes and puts the rest of the cell together. All in all, these three things have helped our collards become healthy and beautiful.

Below is a picture of them currently.