Update 2-14-14

  For the last week, I have been practicing my presentations for science fair. It is nice to have my board while I am doing this. My board is probably the best out of everybody else's, as far as my school goes. Pretty soon I am going to move my tomato plants out of the greenhouse and into pots because they are getting so big.

Update Feb. 6, 2014

I almost forgot. You know what I've done.

Update 1-30-14

  This week I have been putting in my statistics and everything related to that. I am happy that all these numbers are being put together in a meaningful way, and that it really shines a new light on how my experiment will be interpreted.
  With that in mind, I have decided that January 28th will be the cutoff date for my data on plant growth. That will allow me to get all my results straightened out and put on a board for the regional science fair on February 15th.
  Within the weekend I would like to perform the soil nutrients tests that I have and see if there were any notable changes there. Then next week I will pull my muslin out of the soil and inspect it for the degradation that will indicate microbiologic activity.

Update 1-24-14

Things are really coming together this week, it seems. Yesterday, I got some muslin cloth to do my bacteria activity test. Also, throughout this week I have seen at least one plant sprouting in each pot.
Wednsday night I turned in all my forms for the science fair, so that's good. I am pretty glad that everything seems to be working out now.

Update 1-17-14

  This week has been a good week for the project. All of my grasses are growing great in some of the pots, including the unidentified species that I did not plant. Every night I come up to the greenhouse and turn the lights out at approximately 8:00 p.m. So the plants are getting about 12 hours of light.
  I am watering them based on the amount of water they would be getting in Andrews county in March. I used a formula that I learned from a permaculture class that I took through the University of Oregon. It comes out to about 40 gallons per square foot of soil.

Update Jan. 9, 2014

  My two week hiatus was an eventful time for my experiment, so I feel a need to play catch up here. On December 21st I found something that startled me, weeds were starting to sprout in my soils before I had inoculated them. Now I know what your thinking, that's no big deal because these things would happen out in the field where you would be implementing this. While that is true to some extent, I was worried for two reasons: one being that the roots of these weeds would be interfere with the growth of the plants I was measuring, and two, the plants would have a positive effect on bacterial numbers due to root exudates that they release. The second reason was bad because I felt that this would give these particular pots and unfair advantage when it came time to actually grow.
  This caused be to do something drastic; strain the soil and remove all seeds that I planted and any seeds that were already there. After I did this, I actually inoculated the designated soils with biochar and compost, and left my leaf mulch where it needed to be, along with getting the coffee filters filled with compost and biochar into their particular pots. With that done, I replanted. So that was about a week and a half to two weeks ago.
  Within the recent days I have had an unidentified plant sprouting. It is sprouting in several pots. It appears to be a foreign species because it is sprouting in pots with no overlapping species. The fact that I missed it when I strained the soil is troubling, but I will have to live with it. I may actually be able to use it by measuring its growth as well. From what I have seen so far, it is doing very well in the soils inoculated with biochar and compost, in fact, it has only sprouted in two other pots, and those plants are not as large as the others, and are not growing as quickly.
 So, my experiment is full throttle now. I am working on my papers while I watch the growth and will hopefully figure out what that plant is. While I have experienced several problems from the one mentioned above to spilt compost tea, and a mess up with making biochar, I am happy with my experiment still. It will be interesting to see what works and what doesn't at the end of this experiment.

How far have I come?

As far as this six weeks go, I have met my goal of exploring the various remediation efforts that have been carried out for remediation of desertification. The UN's website was a great help as far as that goes. For my experiment I will be using biochar, compost, leaf mulch with (possibly) compost tea, and a combination of biochar with compost in used of coffee filters.
These particular methods were chosen based on low expense, availability of resources, and simplicity of use. I should also mention that the leaf mulch is being used to mimic the effects aforestation after the trees have been established.
The experiment itself is coming along slowly. Unfortunately it takes about two weeks to prepare biochar and compost tea, and I am 3 days into that.
So I will try to have everything together in about a week.