This week has been yet another bad week for my plant, my plant has lost about 15 leaves. The leaves that my plant had lost were the bulk of tiny leafs at the end of the plants of stem; this could be the effect of the mealie bugs, for my plant has been invaded with a new group of mealie bugs. The new group of mealie bugs is now much more than the first lot and this time the mealie bugs are almost all over my plants roots making it harder to physically remove them. The reason for this new infestation of bugs on my plant can be due to the fact that the female mealie bugs lay eggs and they hatch in 10 days’ time and this might be where they came from. I have also found out that the male mealie bugs are not visible on the plant and instead they fly and this might be another reason why I can’t get rid of these awful bugs.

Although my plant is under attack by the mealie bugs it was still able to produce another flower but the rate at which the flower is dying is astonishing or is it normal for the flower to die within days of blossoming?

 I had cleaned the container in which my plant was, because the glass was becoming very slimy. Unfortunately I did not have the means of taking water readings to determine the ph levels of the water of my plant. But I do know that there are many ways of testing the waters ph levels, the simple and most easy way would be to test the water with acidity strips such as Tetra and Sera test strips as used in the lab. Another method of testing water would be the old school method of using bromothymel blue, which turns the colour of the tested water, yellow if ph is low and blue if the ph is high.

The water of the plants in the lab were firstly tested with Sera test strips, but these test strips did not give very accurate test results so they changed the test strips to Tetra which gave much more accurate results e,g in Tetra  gave the results a range such as NO3 0-10 and PH 6.4-6.8, where Sera only gave the results NO3 0 and PH <6.4 which is not very accurate.

Here is the water chemistry comparing the first week to the 6^th week

Week 1	Week 6
NO3( mg/l) 10	NO3( mg/l) 0-10
NO2( mg/l) 0	NO2( mg/l) 0
GH <3	GH 0
KH 3	KH 3-6
PH 6.4	PH 6.4

 As we can see there are not significant changes but for the GH reading and the KH reading. These results are quite pleasing for the plant is growing well except I have noticed that our fish was not making ant bubble nest which suggest that the fish was not happy and under stress.

I am very pleased with the plant in the lab but I cannot say the same with the development of my own plant. I cannot wait to put my plant into soil and watch it grow because the rate thing are going now my plant won’t have much longer  to live and it needs good soil to provide the needed nutrients.