There are so many new knowledge that I able to learn in this course. What I can describe this whole journey is reality is way too different from theories. Why I’m saying this, due to in the class we learn theoretically how the plant develop and I thought it easy and simple to grow it but when plant it ourselves it quite challenging. The first challenges that we face is the time constraint, which we need to spent twice a day for watering the plant and additional hour once a week in order to take the measurement of our plant. Moreover, cowpeas plant has very long in height and it tends to swirl around to another plant, thus it makes more difficult for us to measure it properly and if we want to un-swirl it, we need to handle it with care because if not it will tend to damage the plant and maybe the worst case it will break the stem.
Next, maybe we apply unsuitable fertilizer to our plant because our plant tends to growth in height, but didn’t produce any fruit, so in order to overcome it maybe after several weeks we should change the fertilizer may be specific fertilizer that will induce fruit production. Our plant also didn’t have constant reading and have huge differences in measurement between sample, this due to competition between sample is too high because in one vase, we placed more than four seeds and when all seed's growth it become too big and compete for nutrient and water between them. Thus, this produces huge different in size between them; for example, sample A have higher measurement compare to sample B. In addition, maybe the place that we locate our plant are didnt have optimum exposure to the sunlight, thus lead to difference in measurement, which mean the sample in vase 1 may expose to sunlight more than vase 2 due to vase 2 located near to the wall and reduce the sunlight exposure.
The biggest challenge that we face is our plant have been attacked by leaf miner which lead to damage in our sample leaves. Leaf miners can refer as larva of an insect that lives in the leaf and consume the leaf tissue of plants. Example of leaf miners is moths (Lepidoptera), sawflies (Symphyta, a type of wasp) and flies (Diptera), though some beetles also exhibit this behavior. Leaf miners attack many different vegetable and flower hosts, including, tomatoes, peas, beans and etc. Adult female leaf miners puncture the leaves to feed on exuding sap. These punctures eventually turn white, giving the foliage a stippled or speckled appearance. Mining usually has little impact on plant growth and rarely kills plants. Unusually heavy damage can slow plant growth and may cause infested leaves to drop. The damage will not be serious on most plants older than seedlings. These leaf miners can be overcome by closely monitor the plant leaves and if at the first sign this leaf miners, squeeze the leaf with two fingers to crush any larvae. Therefore, this killing larva can allow plants to survive minor outbreaks. We also can combat this leaf miner by removing infected leaf so that it did not spread to other leaf and last but not least the best way to combat the leaf miners is by applying organic fertilizer such as organic ‘Neem’ oil which mainly function in breaking the insect life cycle by prevent the larva from reach maturity and egg laying activities.
