Bubble Tea Sale and Butterfly Garden check

So we had our bubble tea sale today, a fundraiser that we also hope will generate interest in our project amongst our school.

At 6:50AM, we collected the bubble tea from the Dunman school vendor. There were 250 cups, the entirety of which we managed to sell.

Below is a photo of us after fundraising, counting the money we made:

In total, we made a profit of about $200, to be used to buy more butterfly host and nectar plants for our school garden.

During the CmPS meeting with Mrs Lee, we were thinking of other more prominent alternative locations for the expansion of our butterfly garden, and one suggestion was the shelves of plants in between the KS Chee Theatre and the canteen. We checked on our garden and were happy to find about twelve caterpillars on one plant. We think that the caterpillars are the young of the Plain Tiger butterfly, but we are not sure, hence we plan to email photos to Mr Anuj to check.

Sadly, there are aphids on most of the bloodflower plants, too many to cut off.  The temporary measure of wiping majority of them off was taken, but we plan to find an eco-friendly spray that will get rid of the aphids more or less permanently, so that they will not harm our plants.

Caterpillars of the Plain Tiger butterfly on a Blood Flower plant

A Plain Tiger feeding from the flower of the Blood Flower Plant

More caterpillars.
Notice the small orange caterpillar

More more caterpillars.

The small yellow specks on the stalks of the flowers are the aphids. They're on most of the Blood Flower plants.

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Repotting Part 2

Beverley, Wang You and Zek Min continued our repotting project, as part of our efforts to rejuvenate our school garden.

Wang You and Zek Min digging the soil.

To our surprise, the healthy plants we replotted last week are all drooping and the flowers are all gone! We plan to ask Mr Anuj for advice as to why the plants are not faring well, and how to counter that.

Beverley and Zek Min digging the soil.

Beverley and Wang You carefully relocating the lantana plant.

We did not finish repotting as we felt that we should observe how the plants' growth are affected by the repotting. Hopefully, the new plants will fare better in this plot of garden.

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Butterfly Survey 3 and Visit to Science Centre Singapore

Today, we (Zek Min, Beverley, Vivian and Kate) went for the weekly butterfly survey. There was a surprising amount of plain tigers around, as well as (to our delight) a Common Mime (Papilio Clytia). Attached are a few of the photos we captured of the butterflies.

Vivian and Zek Min watching the plants for the butterfly survey.

Beverley and Zek Min during the butterfly survey

A Plain Tiger on a Snakeweed plant

A Plain Tiger on Lantana camara

The Common Mime which we spotted, on Pseuderanthemum reticulatum plant

Autumn Leaf caterpillars really like the Pseuderanthemum reticulatum plant.

After that, we visited the Science Centre Singapore to check out what it's like (some of us haven't visited it for years) as well as to brainstorm for ideas as to what we could do for our collaboration with SCS. Yuexin and Zhang Xuan met us there.

SAYES was kind enough to let us use their clubhouse for our discussion. Eventually, we decided that hosting a workshop during the June holidays might be a better idea than a booth, as booths require quick and fun activities that can get our point across, which we could not come up with at this time. Instead, a workshop about an hour long could help us spread awareness more effectively and to more people. We will need to write up a proposal and send it to SCS to see if they can help us with it. However, we hope that we can host a booth at one of the upcoming science events hosted by SCS, such as Singapore Science Festival or Kids Science Fest, but this will really depend on how much SCS is willing to help us (big thanks to them for collaborating with us so far!)

We also discussed our Inter-House Games (IHG) plan, which will involve an amazing race. Details can't yet be put up on a public blog, but we will be working on our proposal, as well as on a booth for Open House (hopefully). Meanwhie, we are also in collaboration with a German and Filipino school, as well as RGSEC, the science and environment club in our school.

Photos are attached of our discussion.

Discussing details

Science Centre from the view of the clubhouse. May not look like it in this picture, but it was actually quite crowded!

Picture after the session!

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Repotting Part 1

We did some work on our school gardens recently (23rd Feb), repotting some of the plants which we had bought but hadn't had time to plant properly yet. Most of plants had thrived where we had left them, especially the Snakeweed plants, which shot up despite little tending.

We managed to repot 3 Snakeweed plants (Stachytarpheta indica) and 2 Wedelia biflora in about an hour. Below are some of the photos taken.

We spotted a cocoon on one of the Wedelia plants, to much joy!

Wang You and Kate busy repotting.

The soil was exceptionally packed and hard to dig that morning.

Carefully cutting the plant out from its plastic binds without damaging the roots.

Wang You repotting a Wedelia plant.

One of the many, many, MANY earthworms we saw that morning. Earthworms improve the quality of the soil, though, so that's good news.

More repotting, this time with Wang You, Vivian and Kate.

Zek Min posing in between digging.

One of our repotted plants!

A huge rock that was in the way of the hole we were digging. Finally managed to get it out.

Given the current speed of our progress, with a bit of work put in on Wednesday after our CmPS meeting we ought to be able to complete the repotting by next Thursday.

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Butterfly Survey 2

When we were carrying out our second butterfly survey, we discovered that the garden attracts more than just butterflies. Indeed, upon closer look, the garden is teeming with insects and animals. For example, there were bees that are large enough to cause a flower to sag when they landed on it, many types of snails, centipedes, millipedes and many other insects. 

We observed some caterpillars on the underside of the leaves, especially so for the Pseuderanthemum reticulatum plant. After clarifying with Mr Anuj, we found out that the caterpillar in the picture above is actually a caterpillar of the Autumn Leaf butterfly, and the plant is their common host plant.

Unfortunately, we also observed many birds flying overhead. This is worrying as birds are natural predators of butterflies and may pose a problem to the butterfly population in the coming weeks.

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Propagation workshop

We have been collaborating with members of the Nature Society (Singapore) since back in 2011, and they have been immensely helpful in aiding us and our senior group, Project canSOAR, in establishing our school butterfly garden. 

At the end of last year, the NSS extended a further kindness in educating us as to an alternative method with which we can expand our school garden-- namely asexual propagation.  Propagation is a trickier method of breeding plants; however its advantage lies in that it does not require any monetary expenditure on our part.  We would like to thank our NSS mentor, Mr Anuj, for taking time to host a workshop on plant propagation to ensure we grasped the technique well. 

Unlike sexual propagation, asexual propagation involves growing a new plant from parts of an existing plant-- there is no exchange of genetic material and therefore the new plant is very similar to the parent plant.  There are several methods of plant propagation; however the one introduced to us by Mr Anuj was stem cuttings.

This method of plant propagation basically involved cutting off certain parts of the parent plant and planting them.  A clean cut contributes to the chance that the propagation will have a higher chance of success.  The base of the cutting is then dipped in rooting hormone, which serves to stimulate the cutting to grow roots from the wound in its stem.  The cutting is then planted in a separate container, and excess leaves are trimmed so as not to 'overwork' the cutting by placing too much stress on its developing roots.

Unfortunately, our in-expertise in horticulture resulted in the propagation being unsucessful.  However on the occasion of the workshop we did receive seeds of Aristolochia tagala, Stachytarpheta mutabilis(Pink snakeweed), and Crotalaria retusa (Rattlebox), which we hope to plant soon.

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Butterfly Survey 1

We carried out our first butterfly survey yesterday at Dhoby Ghaut Green (refer to map) on 4th February. A butterfly survey basically consists of counting the number and type of butterflies that visit a plot of plants in 2 minutes. 

Through this, we are helping the NSS (Nature Singapore Society) to collect data regarding which kinds of butterfly plants attract which kinds of butterflies. The data will be used as a guide for future butterfly gardens. NSS has collected similar data from all the other hotspots on the trail, except for this one and the Tanglin Trail at Nassim Road. We chose to collect data from Dhoby Ghaut Green as the Tanglin Trail was recently set up in October and hence the data collected might not be accurate.

This is one of the butterfly hotspots along the ButterflyTrail@Orchard, Dhoby Ghaut Green. It is one of the more successful hotspots along the trail, isn't it beautiful! There are always butterflies flying around this area.

There were some butterflies we could not identify initially. However, after clarifying with Mr Anuj, our NSS mentor, we found out that the butterflies are called Plain Tiger butterflies and Autumn Leaf butterflies respectively. The Plain Tiger seems different from the ones we saw previously as it has orange hindwings, while the ones we saw previously had white hindwings instead. It turns out that these Plain Tiger butterflies are just a rare species of the same family.

We will be travelling to Dhoby Ghaut Green every week to carry out these surveys until around mid-April.  By then we will have conducted about 10 surveys and collected sufficient data for analysis.

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