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w   _____          ____   1  000 666            "Capsicum annuum"            w
D  //             |    \ 11  0 0 6                  by Priest                D
* ||  ____        | || |  1  0 0 666                                         *
G ||    || \    / | || |  1  0 0 6 6 issue #106 of "GwD:  The American Dream G
w  \\___//  \/\/  |____/ 111 000 666 with a Twist -- of Lime" * rel 09/20/01 w
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    Walk into any average garden in west Texas, and you will most likely find
a variety of plants.  Some types of plants, however, you will not find.
Tropical plants, for instance do not grow well in our desert climate.  To grow
such plants, we would need a greenhouse.  A greenhouse is a building and a
tool-a structure built entirely to grow plants.  It offers a controlled
environment that can be tailored to suit any type of plant from any given
growing environment.  Walk into a greenhouse here in west Texas, and you will
encounter first the conservatorium.  The lobby or anteroom to a greenhouse is
a room which displays plants exotic to the native region, showing what kind of
plants will most likely be grown within.  Once inside, if you look up, you
most likely see what is called a ridge and furrow design in the roof.  The
glass panes that allow light in for the plants are typically installed
slantwise, much like the ridges and furrows of a garden.  One of the greatest
advantages of a greenhouse is the ability to control the temperature and
moisture in the immediate area.  Thermostats are kept in every room,
monitoring and regulating the temperature for maximum growth of plants.  A
normal greenhouse is kept between eighty-two and eighty-five degrees
Fahrenheit.  Plants can also be watered on a regular schedule, once again
increasing chances for optimal growth.  It is quite easy to see how a
greenhouse is essential for anyone trying to grow any type of plant not native
to the area.  Experiments can be conducted in the headhouse and subsequently
moved to smaller rooms and thenceforth be monitored at the growers'
convenience.
    As the title suggests, the author decided to grow a plant in a greenhouse;
specifically, a cayenne pepper plant, or Capsicum annuum longum.  Cayenne
pepper (also known as chili or red hot pepper) is the fruit of Capsicum
annuum, a shrubby, tropical plant that can grow to a height of up to 3 feet.
The fruit is technically a berry.  (The Cayenne Pepper, Nature-Herbs, Online)
At maturity, the plant will have multiple branches, growing laterally up to
two feet wide.  The peppers will grow dark green and curl, before turning red
upon ripening.  The flowers of the plant grow upside down, to ready themselves
to produce the peppers.  The flowers are star-shaped and starkly white,
growing to only to, at most, a centimeter in width.  The petals are short and
pointed and are not separated at the base of the flower.  The leaves resemble
the tip of a spear and can reach even three inches in length.  They are simple
leaves with only one leaf growing per petiole.  On January 24th, 2001, the
pepper seeds were planted.  Clay pots with holes in the middle bottom were
used.  The hole prevented the soil and roots of the plant from becoming
waterlogged.  A perfect mixture of sand, clay, and loam was used as a soil.
Too much clay would have caused the roots to drown, and too much sand would
have resulted in the loss of too much water, thus starving the plant.  The
soil was placed in the pot up to one inch from the lip, firmly, but not
tightly.  The seeds for the pepper were scattered evenly across the top of the
soil, and then completely covered with topsoil.  Misted water was then applied
until the topsoil took on a dark brown color.  The potted seeds were left in
the greenhouse to be tended to by staff, including fertilizing, watering, etc.
The purpose of planting the plant was not to practice tending a plant, but
rather to determine methods and materials for planting, growing, and in some
cases, maybe harvesting the plant.  This would be done by observing and
monitoring the plants progress and growth.
    To the author's knowledge, no scarification or stratification was used to
aid in germination of the seed.  (When a seed is scratched to remove a tough
outer covering, it is called scarification, stratification being when a seed
is boiled for a time to simulate a warm and moist environment.)  However, even
without the use of these methods, the seed still germinated on the fifth of
February, almost two weeks later.  Since multiple seeds were planted, then
multiple seedlings germinated.  Greenhouse workers pulled all but one of the
seedlings, leaving only the center-most seedling.  This was done to allow the
root system all the room in the pot to grow.  On that afternoon, the plant was
slightly over one centimeter tall, with two leaves shooting straight out,
opposite each other, from the stem.  The plant doubled its height in one week
and produced two new leaves as well.  These leaves also grew opposite each
other, as did all following leaves.  From that point onward, the plant
averaged a new node and two new leaves (sometimes four) and a full centimeter
in height every week until early March at which point growth increased in
speed and development.  Between March seventh and March twenty-sixth, the
plant nearly tripled in height, producing almost twelve nodal regions, doubled
in width, growing leaves too numerous to count and flowering the weekend
before the twenty-sixth!  On March nineteenth, the top of the plant split and
began to grow multiple branches laterally upward.  These new branches quickly
accelerated in growth, and were growing faster than the original shoot.  Now
that is a busy little plant!  By April eleventh, the plant had grown to a
final height of fifty-four centimeters, a width of thirty-four centimeters,
producing over forty nodal regions, and growing new flowers almost every week.
Considering the probable life span of this type of plant, that would be like a
human being born and growing to five and a half feet tall in less than a year!
On April fourth, something small and green began to grow out of one of the
fully developed flowers.  This continued to grow, and now, exactly three weeks
later is fully seven and a half centimeters long.  The plant has produced
eight peppers thus far and all are growing just as rapidly as the first,
though none yet have ripened to the point that they can be harvested.  In
almost all aspects, the plant's growth started slowly and increased in speed
towards maturity.
    Now, after taking over three months of lectures and labs concerning
botany, what can I tell you about my cayenne pepper plant based mainly on
observations?  First, the plant is a vascular plant.  This is easy to tell
since the plant grew more than two centimeters tall!  That leaves several
types of vascular plants still to choose from.  Since the plant flowered, then
it is easily classified as an angiosperm, or a flowering plant.  Now, the
major question left is monocot or dicot.  It would be possible to learn this
information by cutting the plant open and examining a cross-section of either
the roots, stem, or leaves.  However, that would make growing the plant a moot
point, since it would kill the plant.  So, there are other ways to identify
the plant.  The first available clue was the leaves.  Monocot leaves always
have parallel veins running from the base of the leaf to the tip.  The veins
of a dicot leaf have more complex patterns called pinnate and palmate.  This
kind of venation looks like continuous branching and spider webbing.  Since
the leaves of this plant had branching veins, then the plant is a dicot.  If
that were not enough to be sure, then when the plant began to flower, all
doubt would evaporate.  The flowers were fairly small, white, and had five
obviously visible petals.  Monocots have flower parts in multiples of three,
while dicots have flower parts in multiples of four or five.  If we were to
pull the plant up and slice and dice it, we would find other characteristics
of a dicot plant.  In the stem, the vascular bundle, (that which contains the
xylem and phloem vessels) would be arranged in a ring as opposed to randomly
scattered.  In the root, the stele (containing certain vascular bundles) would
be star-shaped.  Examine the root system of our dicot plant, and you would
discover a large main root called a taproot, where a monocot has a fibrous
root system.  There are even a few subtle differences in the leaves that
require a microscope to identify.
    What else could be learned from observation of our pet plant?  The cayenne
plant is native to tropical areas, so the plant would wither easily if not
watered frequently.  Of the plants in our section, the plants towards the back
of the table had a tendency to grow higher to reach the sun, a product of
positive phototropism.  Hormones produced in one part of the plant would
gather on the shaded side of the stem.  If the entire stem was shaded, then
the stem would grow straight up.  However, when the stem reached light of some
kind, then auxin would gather only on side of the stem, the shaded side.  The
auxin promoted growth on that side by loosening the cell wall of cells on the
shaded side of the stem.  In layman's terms, the stem would bend towards the
light.  Our plants did not exhibit any other major tropisms that we could see.
However, we should assume that the roots system would exhibit positive
gravitropism, or growth towards gravity, as most roots do.
    Photoperiodism refers to the plants tendency to flower only when the day
is short or only when the day is long.  This was somewhat more difficult to
observe, since the lighting environment was not so closely controlled, and
I had no way of checking on whether or not the plants night was broken up by
any flashes of light.  Since photoperiodism is affected by the length of the
night and not the length of the day, any flash of light at night would cause
the plant to think it was a short night and a long day.  In spite of this, a
guess can be made.  Since the plant did not begin to flower until late March,
then one would be inclined to guess that the plant was a long day plant.  This
would only be a guess however, since too many other variables are involved.
    Other facts about the plant were learned in reading, but the purpose of
the experiment was to improve observation skills and to see what could be
learned through observational skills alone.  Therefore, almost all facts
contained in this report reflect what was learned through simply watching the
plant grow and recording and monitoring the plants progress.  We were able to
correctly identify exactly what kind of plant the pepper belonged to simply
from studying parts of the plants anatomy.  We were able to learn about the
plants growth from the plants reaction to light and the other plants around
it.  We learned what conditions the plant preferred when withering occurred
after insufficient watering.  We learned what materials were successful in
aiding in the growth of the plant, and we learned the value of a greenhouse in
controlling the environment of the plant and therefore eliminating as many
unknown variables as possible.  In this case then, the objective was
successful.

[Fine, this is a report from a botany class.  Kiss my ass.]

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Issue#106 of "GwD:  The American Dream with a Twist -- of Lime" ISSN 1523-1585
copyright (c) MMI Priest/GwD Publications                    /---------------\
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