Mufasa becomes...

A Tomatosphere Tomatonaut!

Tomatosphere

 

What is Tomatosphere?
"Tomatosphere is a participatory research project involving 3,000 classrooms of Grades three to six students ("Tomatonauts") across Canada. Students will have the opportunity to grow tomatoes from seeds that have traveled with Canadian Astronaut Marc Garneau in space for 11 days and compare them to tomato plants grown from seeds that stayed on Earth. On STS-97 the seeds travelled 7,230,687 km or 4,460,164 miles. During the voyage they circled the Earth 170 times."

Who are the Nestor Tomatonauts?
Our Tomatosphere project is a combined effort between Mr. Rekunyk's (aka Mr. Green Thumb) Grade 3 class and Mrs. Boekhout's (aka Mrs. Megabyte) Grade 2 class. What a team! Mufasa even has his own seeds!

come visit the Official Website
http://www.tomatosphere.org

 

Here I am in the classroom, showing off our photo of Marc Garneau, the Canadian astronaut!
We have colour coded our seed tags so we can tell them apart.

We started our planting on April 19, 2001
There are four Tomato seed categories:

Earth
untreated

Space
untreated

Earth
Infra-red
treated

Space
Infra-red
treated

The Nestor Tomatonauts will be comparing the growth of seeds in these four categories.


Here is what the peat pellet looked like before and after soaking in water.
Wow! It sure soaks up a lot of water, doesn't it!

Mr. Rekunyk has the "greenest thumb" at Nestor school, so Mrs. Boekhout was lucky to
get him to partner up with her. The Tomatosphere program is for Grades 3 to 6, so
Mrs. Boekhout promised that her Grade 2 class would help out by helping record the
information and she would help by getting that data up on the school website.

I was so excited when it was my turn to plant my two seeds!

The seeds then went into the school greenhouse, which is in one of the inner courtyards.
It's right outside of Mr. Rekunyk's classroom door! Isn't his class lucky!

Mr. Rekunkyk set up heating coils under the trays. He has a heater and a fan too.
It's a lot of work to keep the greenhouse running properly...
sometimes it's too hot and he has to open all the vents in the plastic,
other days it's too cold and he has to close them all up again!


Oh dear...
after several weeks, Mufasa's seeds still hadn't grown,
or at least the TOMATO seeds hadn't grown...
Mufasa's peat pellet only grew a little weed sprout and some grass!

Mufasa doesn't feel so bad though, because a lot of the other seeds didn't grow either.
On the other hand, here is a picture of some of the great seeds that DID grow!

Here's how the greenhouse tomato plants look now!

Mufasa and the children are still kept busy... every day four children get to be the Tomatonauts of the Day.
They get to measure all the plants so that eventually we can send our data to the Tomatosphere website.
We haven't got all our data ready yet, but you can see the School Tomatosphere Web Page at the URL below:

http://www.sd43.bc.ca/schools/47/projects/tomatosphere/tomatowelcome.htm

 

Don't feel too bad about Mufasa's seeds. Mr. Rekunyk and Mrs. Boekhout have decided to put some different seeds in those peat pellets so that everyone will have a plant of their own!

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