St. Patrick's day is right around the time to start planting in your garden. We often choose this time of year to study the plant life cycle and fill up cups with dirt to watch seeds grow. 

This year you can do all of the plant science with an extra kick of holiday. If you choose to plant clover not only will you have nice flowers for bees later on, but you will have a fun themed science project for St Patty's day.

Just planting clover and watching it grow on your windowsill is a science project. But you can amp it up by creating a series of experiments to see what factors play into the growth of clover. To do this you will need a control.

An experimental control is when you do everything normally - here, your control should be by a window, and watered once a day. This controls the temperature, light, and water.

Now you can devise a series of experiments to see what helps, and what hurts, the clover from growing. For each experiment you will want to compare how the growth is to that of your control and record it on a regular basis through writing or drawing.

Ideas on plant growth experiments include:

• Water: Test how the type of water given to seeds affects their growth. Your control should be fresh water, and experiments could include looking at salt water, sugar water, soapy water, etc.
• Temperature: You can test how cold affects clover growth by having a set of seeds outside, and test how heat affects clover growth by having some directly over a heater.
• Light: Determine if light is important to the development of clover, and if so, what stages it is important at, by keeping some clover seeds in the dark. You can keep them there for a week, two weeks, or indefinitely through the experiment.