Adolescents ranked food and nutrition knowledge among the most important aspects of food literacy for them to develop healthy eating patterns. Focus groups identified that adolescents did not pay attention to food labels or dietary guidance due to not understanding their application. With this, use of Nutrition Facts Labels and recognizing nutrients of concern, as identified within the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, were focused on in the Teens CAN nutrition lessons. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends consuming healthy eating patterns with adequate intake of essential nutrients through a varied diet that incorporates each food group. Though the curriculum was written to align with the 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, recommendations for adolescents did not substantially change with the newest edition. Food cards within nutrition lessons included foods typically considered unhealthy and high in empty calories since adolescents frequently consume these foods, as well as healthy alternatives to allow for comparison. Additionally, whole fruits, vegetables, and grains were heavily featured to encourage consumption as adolescents are well below meeting recommendations for these foods. With adolescence being a time of increased autonomy, all primary nutrition lessons and application activities were written to support adolescents planning for meeting their own nutritional needs. Furthermore,hydroponic nft to tailor lessons to adolescents, all characters presented in lesson activities were high school-aged adolescents. Culinary skills education has been called to be incorporated into nutrition education for application of concepts through hands-on food preparation.

While adolescents from the previously mentioned focus groups ranked food preparation skills as of low importance, other findings suggest that limited opportunities for hands-on food skills practice are a hindrance leading to low food literacy as young adults. Due to this, primary learning concepts involved enhancement of food skills and opportunities to prepare food. Adolescents also acknowledged that while budgeting and shopping for food were not immediately important in their current life stage, these concepts would be later in life. With this, budgeting and shopping for food was added as one of the cooking lesson concepts. Cooking programs provide an enjoyable experience that introduces youth to preparing and tasting dishes containing new, frequently healthier, foods. Culinary application activities in Teens CAN feature cultural cuisines, advise consumption of produce grown in the agricultural space, and allow opportunities for participants to have independence in ingredient selection. Participation in cooking programs also motivates youth to continue practicing learned food skills at home, which has been associated with more nutritious eating patterns. Adolescents who participate in food preparation at home are more likely to continue enjoying cooking and preparing healthier dishes as emerging adults. The application activities integrated in Teens CAN may indirectly improve adolescent health as community gardening experience was found to be positively associated with willingness to try fruits and vegetables in low-income high school students from an urban community. Additionally, participating in farm to school related activities has been associated with willingness to try fruits and vegetables in addition to improving nutrition knowledge and self-efficacy.

Providing opportunities for involvement in agriculture, even if just through gardening, is important given that childhood, in combination with recent, gardening for first-year college students was found to be associated with higher fruit and vegetable consumption compared to those who have never gardened. Teens CAN lessons introduce adolescents to agriculture concepts and encourages growing food at home through application activities. This could perhaps establish a mechanism for adolescents to continue gardening into later adolescence and adulthood. Teens CAN has since been translated into Spanish. Having the curriculum available in Spanish helps reach more participants as almost 40% of the population in California is of Hispanic descent. This allows for the curriculum to be utilized for development of language education, such as district-level programs that encourage multilingualism. Additionally, the materials allow for adolescents to engage Spanish-speaking family members with the home application materials. Planned implementation of Teens CAN was designed to align with recommendations for older adolescent food literacy programs. For example, Teens CAN may be incorporated into classroom instruction, but was conceived with the intention of being employed within existing after school and youth development programs over twelve weeks. Each of the twelve modules feature experiential learning activities intended to cultivate teamwork, which is important for after school educational programs, and build knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy associated with food literacy. With Teens CAN primarily intended for low income adolescents, facilitating the curriculum within after school programs is particularly important for introducing youth to science-based programming applicable to daily living that they otherwise would not be permitted to access. Another recommendation for food literacy programming is to include peer-modeling.

A study implementing the Shaping Healthy Choices Program curricula within 4-H found that teen teachers were inadequate at facilitating the curricula with satisfactory program fidelity It was postulated that teen teachers required additional training, especially in regard to curricula content, before they could be competent facilitators. Following participation in Teen CAN lessons, it is anticipated that adolescents will have improvements in relevant knowledge and skills that will enable them to effectively facilitate food literacy programming with younger youth. Adolescents acting as teachers for younger youth, known as cross-age teaching, is a common practice within 4-H. Cross-age teaching can be beneficial for adolescents as it reinforces learning concepts for themselves in addition to building confidence in teaching. In contrast to tutoring, cross-age teaching involves specific training for the teen teachers who then facilitate lessons from a given curriculum over time to a group of younger youth. In particular, cooking education has been successful in a cross-age teaching model. Cross-age teaching perpetuates observational learning and can thus improve self-efficacy for various skills,hydroponic channel including those valuable for food preparation. Additionally, these programs allow opportunities for team building and improve peer relationships while also encouraging implementation of cooking skills for younger youth at home. A long-term nutrition and gardening program utilizing teen teachers for elementary-aged youth provides an excellent example and highlights the scalability of a program of this nature. Applying this model employs adolescents that are culturally competent being from the same community and living within the same contexts as the younger youth they are teaching. Adolescents have been found to be as effective, if not more effective than adult educators. Cross-age teaching programs provide opportunities for community service for teen teachers in addition to opportunities for improving the health and self-efficacy of participants, whether teaching or learning, and increasing opportunities for introducing food literacy concepts to youth. Beyond food literacy-related constructs, cross age teaching is also beneficial for developing leadership, critical thinking, and problem solving skills that are essential as adolescents mature. Educational opportunities to advance food literacy in adolescents may encourage healthy eating and have long-term implications for preventing obesity. These programs may be further strengthened by utilization of cross-age teaching to improve knowledge retention while also granting soft skill development in addition to improving the health of all involved. A major limitation of this project was the inability to assess the impact of participating in Teens CAN lessons on dietary behavior of adolescents. A pilot to assess Teens CAN implementation employing a two-tiered cross-age teaching model was started just before the COVID-19 pandemic. This model included undergraduate students trained in learner centered pedagogy to facilitate lessons with high school-aged adolescents in after school programs and subsequently, adolescents were to be mentored and trained by the undergraduate students to teach local elementary school-aged youth using garden-enhanced nutrition curricula. As this study was halted early on, it will be resumed when safe and allowable. This study will include multiple data collection time points to assess whether adolescents have improvements in food literacy relevant constructs, such as nutrition knowledge and cooking skills self-efficacy, after participation in Teens CAN lessons and whether outcomes are further enhanced after acting as teachers for youth. Additionally, anthropometrics and dietary intake data will be collected from both adolescents and younger youth throughout the school year. These data will provide valuable input on the effectiveness of Teens CAN individually and when integrated into a yearlong mentoring program.Apart from the availability of adequate quantities of nutrients in the soil, it is also important to have a proper balance between the nutrient constituents present both in the soil and the plant. All the essential and other beneficial elements are involved in mutual interactions among themselves. Interaction between nutrient elements can be synergistic or antagonistic and the type of interaction is characteristic of the plant species.

Increasing the content of one cation in a plant usually decreases the content of other cations and the total cation equivalents are not greatly changed. Application of potassium to an inherently potassium deficient soil increases magnesium deficiency due to the antagonism between these nutrients in plant and soil. Uptake of nutrients, particularly cations, is seriously influenced by potassium fertilization. Thus K has been shown to affect the absorption, translocation and distribution of other cations . K and Mg also influences many of the processes that are important for the formation of yield in plants such as water economy, synthesis of carbohydrates and the transport of assimilates . The importance of vegetables in human nutrition is well known as it is a rich and comparatively cheap source of vitamins and minerals. Among vegetables, okra occupies an important place on account of its tender green fruits. Hence a study was conducted to determine the interactions between K and Mg in plants using okra as the test crop.Application of magnesium at the rate of 10 kg ha-1 as MgSO4 caused an increase in the dry matter production but a further increase in Mg caused a decrease in dry matter. The increase in the dry matter production by the addition of Mg at the lowest level may be due to an increase in photosynthetic activity induced by the application of Mg . But further increasing the Mg levels caused a decrease in the dry matter production. At all K levels combined with Mg application at 10 kg ha-1, an increase was observed in dry matter production, while at higher levels of Mg a decrease was noticed. Increasing K levels up to K2 significantly increased dry matter production but further increase caused a reduction probably because of the dilution effect due to the increase in fresh weight of the plant caused by an increase in water storage induced by high K levels but the dry matter production remaining low . The application of increased levels of K in the presence of low levels of Mg increased the dry matter production significantly but higher levels of Mg decreased the dry matter yield. The initial increase in dry matter production by Mg addition also implies that S assists increased dry matter production since Mg was applied as MgSO4. Higher Mg application decreased dry matter production because above a certain level, growth of the plant is impaired since an excess of sulphur contained in the plant is not metabolized to proteinaceous sulphur . Though high rates of Mg addition markedly decreased the dry matter production, K uptake was not hindered . Hence, reduction in growth was directly caused by excessive levels of Mg and not due to a K deficiency induced by excess Mg. Excess Mg may also interfere with the uptake of other nutrients like zinc or manganese thereby restricting plant growth . Addition of Mg at moderate levels along with K significantly increased the yield of okra fruits when compared to the treatments receiving K alone. Similar to the effect on dry matter production, Mg application only up to 10 kg ha-1 significantly increased yield. This effect was more pronounced when K was not added. The decrease in yield at K0 was overcome by the addition of Mg up to Mg2 but further increasing the Mg level reduced the yield significantly. Thus Mg addition at moderate levels increased crop yield in the absence of K, whereas in the presence of each level of K, there was a decreasing trend in yield at higher levels of Mg. The influence of levels of K and Mg on the uptake of nutrients is given in Table 2. Application of K at K1 markedly increased the N uptake while a further increase did not show a significant increase.