Looking Into Compost

Last year I watched Halloween pumpkins outside our house slowly rot and I thought that I should see what would happen to different fruits, vegetables and flowers over time.

When it was the first day of starting my project I wondered about which fruits or vegetables would rot faster… Do some fruits or vegetables do something really weird? Do other fruits or vegetables stay exactly the same as on the first day? Do some flowers fade their colors after wilting? Do some kinds of flowers wilt faster than other kinds of flowers?

I chose to document about a month. And I discovered some incredibles. For example, each day as I observed the garlic, I saw green sprouts shooting out of its body. In addition to that, the garlic was sitting on a pile of mold by the end of the month. But it still didn’t rot! I concluded that the reason why the garlic didn’t rot was that it has a spicy flavor that bacteria don’t like.

Another interesting fact I observed about the fruits and vegetables is that the orange, grapefruit and lemon didn’t rot at all. They only dried and shrieked a bit. With this in mind, I observed that really only the sweet and mild tasting fruits and vegetables rot a lot. I concluded that bacteria really love very sweet and mild tasting fruits or vegetables, and this is probably the reason why there was mold on these sweet fruits or vegetables.

Unlike the fruits and vegetables that molded a lot, the flowers didn’t have any sign of mold on them. Some flowers continued to grow, others started to wilt. Eventually all the flowers dried into very crispy flowers. Not all the flowers but some flowers did lose a lot of their color.