Day 7 update

If you recall, I planted this group of fastplants last Sat.  (That was day 0).  Today is day seven.  Here’s a poor photo from Day 5

Note that in some cups there are way more than the two plan to raise per cup and some cups have none.  I have only a few ideas why the cups with no plants turned out that way.  I did check out the fertilizer/water levels on Thurs. and decided to top off the reservoirs with fresh fertilizer solution even though they didn’t need it quite yet.  I added enough of the fertilizer mix to bring the solution up to almost the bottom of the planting cups.  The planting systems went from Sat. to Thurs. with essentially no care–for the first week.  This will not possible going forward now that the plants are growing.  Next weekend they will be big enough that the plants will drain the reservoirs every 2-3 days.  I’ll need to be vigilant.

On day six, I decided to thin the plants.  Thinning the plants simply meant cutting off select plants in each cup until only two remained.  I did do something I usually don’t do with my students–I transplanted some of the excess from one cup to cups without any sprouted plants.  Normally, this is beyond the skills of most students (and beyond mine as well).  I just thought I’d experiment a bit.  Sometimes when I am fishing, I forget to take photos of my experience.   Yesterday, I was concentrating so much on the thinning process and transplanting that I simply forgot to take an progress photos.

Here’s what the plants look like on day 7.

Looks like they have survived the thinning/transplanting process just fine.  Note that most are now straight up.  I rotated the planting systems, yesterday as well.  Check out how hairy some of these plants are.  Maybe I’ll do a selection for hairy but the best time for that would be tomorrow or Monday (day 8 or 9)  I don’t think I will be available to do all the counting necessary.  We will see.

More plants with quite a few hairs.  You should also note that most of the plants have at least on of the true leaves now and several plants have more that one.  You can also see in this image one of the plants I thinned yesterday along with some of the cut stems.

Now here is a common problem.  Take a close look at the plant in the foreground–the one with the large cotyledons.  What do you notice?  Look closely, it looks like there are no growing, true leaves.  This happens and could be the start of an interesting set of questions.

Here a shot to show how close I still have the lights.  If I don’t come into the lab before Tues.  These plants will be growing up in the lights.  Now that I look at this, I’m wishing I had raised the lights just a bit.