Nathan Xavier
February 26, 2024 10:11 PM
Beginners: Hydroponic Gardens by Nathan Xavier
Nathan welcomed the beginner students into to Greenhouse One for their first Herbology class since midterm. Herbology was only taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays for all grade levels, so he was the last class all of them were returning to, other than Flying Lessons, which the first years would have next. In some ways, that was nice, because it meant they'd already had a day and half to get back into the swing of school and they could all hit the ground running, but on the other hand, he felt like they were all ahead of him already as he said, "Welcome back to Herbology, and I hope you all had a good break."He waved his wand to distribute a sheet of paper to each of the students - ensuring the one in Braille made it to Summer - and he only startled a little as he dropped one in front of Dora. By the end of last semester, he'd mostly gotten used to having his daughter in his class, and had largely stopped needing to fight the impulse to tell her she shouldn't be here and she had to go back home right now, but that instinct nearly burst through again, after having fallen back into the old patterns of having her around in their private quarters during the holidays. Fortunately, he caught himself in time and only stuttered a little in his casting to distribute the worksheets.
"I'm passing out a quick review worksheet I want you all to complete for homework and turn in next class. You can use your textbooks, the library, or ask each other for help if you don't remember all of the answers. It's not a test, just a review so you remember all the concepts and vocabulary you learned so far and haven't thought about for two weeks, and I'm hoping to give out perfect grades to most of you to start the spring term on a high note."
"Which brings us into Term Two. We'll be starting with a unit on hydroponic growing techniques, both muggle and magical. Does anyone know what hydroponic gardens are?"
He called on a student and smiled, nodding approvingly, "Excellent, two points for your House. A hydroponic garden is a garden that grows without soil. They typically take less space than normal gardens, and can be used to grow plants year-round and indoors. Plants grown in hydroponic settings also tend to grow faster than plants in traditional gardens, use less water, and if cared for correctly, can even yield larger harvests. And they plants grown this way are more nutrient rich when growing food and more potent when growing potion ingredients. That sounds good, right? So why do we still grow plants in soil? Because hydroponics require a lot more work; the systems are much more complex and they can fail pretty easily if not constantly monitored. It can also be more expensive, and not everything can grow without soil. Root vegetables, for example? They don't work so well without a solid ground to support them. Hydroponics also work better for small plants, so anything that comes from a tree, for example, would probably work better growing in the ground."
"Today, we're going to start by building the simplest kind of hydroponic garden, which called a deep water culture. This will have a raft of plants floating on the surface of a water reservoir, with the roots submerged into aerated water that will give the plants their necessary oxygen and nutrients. You can work alone or in teams of two to three people. Each group will start with a bucket of water. You'll notice the water in your buckets is bubbling, because each one has an air stone, which the advanced class has made for you this morning as part of their 'constructing magical gardening equipment' unit, and that will keep your water aerated so your plant roots get enough oxygen and don't drown."
"Once you have your bucket, you will use a piece of cork to make your raft, poking it with holes and fastening in some netting to hold the seedlings. You should all know how to do sticking charms by now. There are some suggested designs on the papers on each table, or you can create your own." The main point there was to give enough space for the plants to grow, and not overload the cork so much that it sank. Everything beyond that was aesthetics.
"Seedlings are on the shelves along the wall. You have a variety of beginner level flowers, vegetables, and potion ingredients to choose from." Many of which had words like 'weed' in their common names that suggested they didn't need a whole lot of care and intervention to thrive. The point for this first attempt was not to grow a difficult plant but to not kill a hardy one. "You can go ahead and get started. I'll be walking around to answer any questions."
OOC: Reference article from Reader's Digest. Summer can assume she has a pressed page near her with relief diagrams for potential raft designs.
Subthreads: Cool by Alma Brockert
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Nathan Xavier
Beginners: Hydroponic Gardens
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Alma Brockert
April 18, 2024 1:04 PM
Cool by Alma Brockert
After a lovely midterm where she and Libby had been reunited with the boys-she chose to focus on that rather than on the part where she had to put up with less pleasant relatives-Alma was now back at Sonora. Of course, she missed Uriah and Miles but because of those less pleasant relatives, she wasn’t entirely unhappy about being back at school either. Though she knew it had been hard for Libby to separate from her younger brother again and even harder for Miles. The first year got to go back to school where she could distract herself and make new friends whereas, arguably, her younger brother was at home, which while it could be a source of safety and comfort-it was familiar and as allergy safe as possible and Uncle Eustace wasn’t allowed in Libby and Miles’ house-he was probably lonely, except when Uriah was there, and doing the same old things, only without his sister.For Alma, however, while she missed her cousins, it wasn’t the exact same as it was with Libby and Miles. Christopher was older than her and at school already. It wasn’t a thing where she felt a need to protect him. Well, okay, that wasn’t exactly true either, because in some ways, the second year really was pretty protective of her brother. Like, he was older and bigger than her and was protective of her when it came to things like boys, not that that was an issue at this point. And actually, Alma had no idea how that would work, since she was pretty sure what her brother wanted, in theory, to protect her from was ending up like Aunt Helena and married to a man like Uncle Eustace. Which was obviously common sense, but the way it would likely work was that Christopher would be afraid to confront this hypothetical jerkwad and that Alma would have already spotted all the red flags a mile away.
However, that was more or less the thing that she wanted to protect him from. Well, maybe protect wasn’t the right word exactly. It was more like her uncle had destroyed her brother’s self-esteem and turned him paranoid and anxious. Not that Alma had ever known Christopher any other way, but she knew that he was tremendously afraid of others treating him the way their uncle had and that he felt the need to hide not just literally, but to hide away who he was as a person, which was sweet and kind and talented and interesting and had a lot to offer.
And she hated her uncle for that. Not to mention, he’d done the same to her dad. Dad was Uncle Eustace’s fraternal twin, and obviously, her uncle had quite a bit of control over him. Like that he hadn’t been banned from their house was probably because of it since Dad really didn’t seem to be able to stand up to him.
Alma also saw Uncle Eustace doing pretty much the exact same thing to Miles as he’d done to her brother. That seemed the most similar comparison, minus the fact that her cousin had never been forced into doing Quidditch-like activities by their uncle like Chris and Jasper had been when they were little. However, like her brother, Miles was sensitive and creative. Artistic. Uncle Eustace thought very little of men who were artists rather than athletes. Meanwhile, he picked on Olaf for being nerdy and Uriah for being chubby so the things that he said to or about Miles were the same things he’d said to Christopher for the same reasons and made them the most the same. Jasper got similar things said to him but more due to him being nurturing-a Teppenpaw who was going to school so he could help disabled children-than being artistic.
So being at school, where Uncle Eustace couldn’t go, whether or not he said anything about Alma specifically, was nice. Plus, there was the Fair. She was debating doing a project but they’d only just gotten back from break and she hadn’t gotten a chance to truly think it over yet.
She didn’t have time to think about it now either as it was time for Herbology, a class Alma generally liked when not using any dung based fertilizer. She listened as Professor Xavier gave his lecture on hydroponic gardens which definitely fit that requirement. Once he let them go, Alma turned to her neighbor. “Would you like to work together?”
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Alma Brockert
Cool
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