Friday, December 18, 2009

If you fed a normal house plant with extra virgin olive oil, what effect would it have on growth?

I am performing an experiment and am trying to form a hypothesisIf you fed a normal house plant with extra virgin olive oil, what effect would it have on growth?
I did this experiment once. The plants treated with oil do not do well. My hypothesis is that the oil makes it difficult for the soil to dry and the roots to get access to air. It probably promotes mold growth and other undesirable conditions.If you fed a normal house plant with extra virgin olive oil, what effect would it have on growth?
Well, you could hypothesize that it will either die because the lipids would clog up the xylem (but that makes no sense, really); or you could just say that nothing would happen because only water with its dissolved nutrients gets absorbed, and since water and oil don't mix, the olive oil wouldn't get absorbed at all by the roots. It would probably just coat the surface of the soil, making it hard for water to seep through to the roots, in which case the plant would wither and die.

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