A story to share together
Jun, Amara and the Shady Half of the Garden
When the beans beside the gym wall stay small and pale, Amara feeds them compost and Jun starts timing the shadows. A dark-box test, a pondweed bubble count and a soil that weighs the same after four weeks show the friends that plants build themselves from air, water and light.
Page 1
Jun and Amara won the class vote to start a school garden in the empty raised bed that ran out from the brick gym wall. They pressed twelve bean seeds into the soil, six in the half nearest the wall and six in the far half. Every morning before class, they checked for green shoots. Within a week, all twelve seedlings had pushed up through the soil, and both friends started dreaming of a harvest.
Page 2
Two weeks later, the six beans in the far half stood twelve centimeters tall with broad green leaves. The six beans nearest the wall were only four centimeters tall, thin and pale. “They're hungry,” Amara decided. She carried over a bucket of compost and spread a thick layer around the weak seedlings. “Soil is plant food,” she said, patting it down with both hands.
Page 3
A week later, the shaded beans were still thin and pale, while the others had grown even taller. Jun checked the bed at every break and after the last bell, noting where the wall's shadow fell each time. Putting his checks together, he worked out that the far half got about eight hours of direct sunlight a day. The half nearest the wall got only about four, half as much.
Page 4
Amara frowned at the useless compost. “Maybe plants don't eat soil at all,” Jun said. They set up two tests on the classroom windowsill. First, they dried a pot of soil, weighed it at exactly two thousand grams, and planted one bean seed in it. Second, they planted two more pots of beans, waited until the seedlings matched, and covered one pot with a cardboard box.
Page 5
After one week, Amara lifted the box. The hidden seedling had stretched tall and floppy, and its leaves were pale yellow instead of green. The seedling in sunlight was short, sturdy and bright green. “In the dark, it used up the food stored in its seed trying to reach light,” Amara said slowly. “So leaves need light to make new food.”
Page 6
To watch the food-making happen, Jun put a sprig of pondweed from the class aquarium into a jar of water. In bright sunlight, Jun turned over a one-minute sand timer and counted the tiny bubbles streaming from the cut stem, about twenty in a minute. When Amara slid the jar into shade, the bubbles slowed to about five a minute. The bubbles were mostly oxygen, which leaves give off while they turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar.
Page 7
After four weeks, they gently pulled the windowsill bean from its pot and shook every crumb of soil back in. They dried the soil for three days and weighed it again. It still balanced exactly two thousand grams of weights. The bean plant weighed thirty grams. After it dried until crisp, it weighed only three grams, so twenty-seven grams, nine tenths of the plant, had been water.
Page 8
Where had those three grams of dry plant come from, if the soil weighed the same? Jun and Amara worked it out together. The dry part of the plant was built mostly from carbon dioxide taken from the air and water pulled up by the roots, joined into sugar using light energy. The soil had added only a tiny pinch of minerals, too little for their balance to measure.
Page 9
Now they knew what the weak beans needed. They carefully dug up the six pale seedlings with soil around their roots and replanted them in the sunny far half, making twelve beans there. In the shaded half they planted eight lettuce seedlings, because lettuce can grow well with about four hours of sun. Amara pushed bamboo poles in beside the beans so they could climb.
Page 10
Three weeks later, the bean vines had climbed halfway up the bamboo poles, and the lettuce near the wall had spread into wide green rosettes. Amara set the pondweed jar on the edge of the bed in a patch of sunshine. Jun knelt beside it and turned over the one-minute sand timer. Together they counted the silver bubbles rising one by one into the light.
