Things are Growing!

As the weather is getting warmer lots of the seeds I have planted have started to grow! As well as the onions I have spinach and peas.

 The strawberries and potatoes are also doing well.

Pot Sampling - Day Four

Today was the final day of sampling. We had 7 more pots to harvest. This meant more digging out of the little meshes and more washing of roots. The difference between these pots and the ones we harvested on day two because these barley plants do not grow root hairs. The inside of the pots look very similar because the root hairs are very tiny and you need a microscope to see them properly.

Laurie used a penetrometer to measure the strength of the soil in the pot. It's smaller than the one they used in the field.

This is the end of our work in Dundee and we celebrated by eating an ice cream. Tomorrow we head back to Southampton.

Field Sampling - Day Three

It was the final day of field sampling today. A large group of us met up at one of the barley plots on a lovely sunny morning and split into small teams. Tim and Laurie used a penetrometer to measure how hard the soil was, Paul and Naveed took some more soil core samples, Nico and Glyn collected small soil samples with roots, which it was my job to coat with plaster of paris to protect them. This was a tricky job as the soil samples were very fragile and the plaster of paris dried very quickly.

The sampling started off well, although having spent so much time in the lab looking a idealised soil samples, we had forgotten that real soil in fields contains stones, which can make sampling challenging. 

It was great to be outside in the sunshine, however, it began to rain. We all carried on with our task, but as my hands got cold the coatings of plaster of paris I was applying got messier!

After lunch the sun came out again. Nico and I moved to the second barley plot to collect samples from there. The soil in this plot was more crumbly that the first as it contained less clay. The soil samples were so fragile Nico couldn't even lift them from the soil without them collapsing. So we tried putting on the plaster of paris while they were still in the field. This was very tricky and was virtually impossible to do without disturbing the soil. In the end we gave up as we were damaging the sample too much while trying to preserve them.

Field Sampling - Day Two

While I was washing out the roots, Nico and Naveed were in the field collecting soil cores. To do this the first thing they did was cut off the top of the plant they wanted to sample.

Then they positioned an auger containing an aluminium sampler over the top of the plant.

Next they used a large hammer to push the auger into the ground.

Finally, they removed the aluminium sampler from the auger and put a red lid on the top and the bottom to stop it moving around.

They did this many times all over the field and by the end of the day had collected lots of samples.

Pot Sampling - Day Two

Today we began collecting samples. We split into two groups. Some people collected samples from the large pots, others collected samples from the field. I was part of the pot sampling group.

First of all, we opened up one of the large pots. In this picture you can see the cylinder of soil that was inside and some of the roots of the plants. Nico is taking a small soil sample from different depths inside the pot.

This sample is then weighed. Once it has dried it will be weighed again so that we can work out how much water was in the soil when we opened it.

 Here are all the glass jars that were prepared for collecting samples. As you can see there is a lot to do!

After these small soil core had been taken, we dug into the soil to remove small cylindrical meshes that had been put in there before the plants grew. This is so we could collect small samples of soil with roots in. Some of these will be x-rayed to see how the roots interact with the soil. Here are the mesh cylinders before they were filled with soil and one after it had been dug up.

The samples that were not being x-rayed were washed so the roots could be separated from the soil. This was my job. Here is the washing station. There is a hose attached to each tap. I emptied each of the mesh cylinders into a sieve and then used the hose to wash the soil away from the roots. I then put the roots in ethanol - a chemical that preserves the roots until they can be studied.

I'm not very experienced at this sort of thing and I had a big mistake - I let go of the hose while the tap was on. Water went everywhere including all over me! Here is a picture of me looking bedraggled!

 Tim to do the same thing as me, except he had to do it for the rest of the soil in the pots, so he had big buckets of soil and roots to clean up.

 In every experiment it is important to have a control. This is a sample that you don't do anything to. I our case this meant a pot with no plant in. In the control the soil looks really smooth.

 It took all day to wash out all the root. But my favourite part was cleaning up at the end of the day because we had to get rid the soil that we had washed away. And what do you get if you mix soil and water? Lots of lovely sticky mud!

Field and Pot Sampling - Day One

Today, Nico and I travelled up from Southampton in England to Dundee in Scotland, a distance of 388 miles (624 kilometres)! We are going to stay for a week to help gather some sample from field and large pot experiments that Tim and Laurie at the James Hutton Institute have grown for us. When we arrived we were given a tour of the site and shown the plants.

Here is a photo of the barley plants on the field. There hasn't been much rain in Dundee over the last few weeks, which is unusual, so the plants are quite small.

Here are barley plants that have been grown in a large pot. This pot has been in the glasshouse, a giant green house, and has been water regularly. As you can see it is much bigger than the plants in the field. Tomorrow, we will get to work harvesting the samples that we need.

Onions!

The onion seed I planted have finally sprouted! Here they are growing next to the garlic.

I have also planted one in a pot and taken it into the university so that we can x-ray it. We will wait until it is a bit bigger before we start scanning it.

Herb Garden

This weekend I planted a herb garden. The herbs will be added to other food that we cook to make it extra tasty! I have decided to grow fennel, sage, parsley, mint, thyme and curry plant. The mint plant smells the best!

Preparing for Chickens

When we bought our house there was a large chicken coop in the garden. We plan to get chickens as pets to that we can have fresh eggs. Before the chickens arrive we had to prepare the coop for them. For this we had two jobs to do. Firstly, some of the wood in the corner of the chicken house had become rotten because it had got really wet. When wood rots you need to remove it or the rot will spread through all the wood and the structure will become unstable. So we cut away the rotten wood and replaced it with some special treated wood that should rot slower.

We also had to build some nesting boxes to give the chickens somewhere comfortable and safe to lay their eggs. We made them out of an old bookcase and an off cut of laminate flooring.

Seedlings

Some of the seeds I planted have started to grow! I now have garlic, spinach and cauliflower seedlings.

Unfortunately, no red onions have appeared where I planted seeds. This probably means they are not going to grow. One of the frustrating aspects to growing your own vegetables is when things don't grow and you can't see if anything is happening until they appear above the soil. This gave me an idea for another x-ray experiment. Can we watch an onion growing beneath the soil? I'm going to plant a seed in a pot so it can be x-rayed as it grows.

Planting potatoes

I am growing potatoes in bags in my garden. This is to save space in my garden for other plants. I am using black garden bags, which are a bit thicker than your normal bin bag. I put some holes in the bottom so that water can drain out. I buried 4 to 5 seed potatoes in each bag and watered them. Now I have to wait for them to grow.

Mini Greenhouse

This weekend I built myself a mini greenhouse. I took some plastic shelves and wrapped a clear (apart from some goldfish!) shower curtain around them. This will keep the plants warm and protect the seedlings from insects. I placed the mini greenhouse next to the wall of the house. The bricks will be heated by the sun and hopefully some of this heat will be reflected into the greenhouse keeping it warmer at night.

Digging Done

We finished all the digging! As well as digging up the lawn, we also added some new top soil to the beds. This is a picture of it in front of our garage. We had to use a wheelbarrow to move it all into the back garden. This soil is half soil and half compost so it will provide lots of nutrients for the plants.

I have planted garlic, onion, spinach and pea seeds outside so far. I have also planted cauliflowers inside. I am also chitting some potatoes. This means that I am leaving some potatoes in the sun, inside so they are warm, to encourage them to sprout shoots. You might see this happen if you have had some potatoes in your kitchen for some time. Hopefully, this will mean lots of delicious vegetables later in the year. This is a picture of the finished beds. You can just about make out pieces of string which show where I planted the seeds.

I have covered some of the soil with boards. This covers some of the area where I haven't planted seeds and should help stop any weeds from growing.

Digging begins

With some help from my parents, we dug up the plants that were in the wrong place in the garden and put them into pots or planted them in the chicken coop. When we get some chickens this will give them an interesting environment to live in.

Nick cut up some wood and made a raised bed where two vegetable plot will be.

While digging, we found that the soil in our garden isn't very deep. Underneath the soil there is a layer of hard-core, stones and bricks, that the vegetable won't be able to grow through.

This means that I can't grow long root vegetables like carrots and parsnips.

We are going to build two more raised beds, but we have to remove the grass first.

New home, new garden

Recently, Nick and I moved to a new house and we now have our own garden. I have decided I want to grow my own vegetables. At the moment it has an area with plant and a big lawn as well as a shed and a chicken coop! I need more plots for planting my vegetables. So I drew plan of what I wanted the garden to look like

Then I measured it out in the garden and marked it out string

 

Now I will have to do a lot of digging! I will let you know how I get on.

Projectile Pooing of Penguins

Some scientists have worked out how much pressure is required by penguins to shoot there poo away from their nests, about 60 kilo-pascals. This is about the pressure you would experience if you were swimming 6 meters under water!

This research was published as Pressures produced when penguins pooh - calculations on avian defaecation by Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and Jozsef Gal in Polar Biology, 2003.

 

Here is a cool video, paper planes flying continuously with the help of fans

Using your dog as a compass

You may have used a compass to find out which way is North. Did you know you can also use a dog? Some scientists have found out that when dogs are doing a poo they preferred to face north or south rather than east or west!

This experiment was published in the article Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth’s magnetic field by Vlastimil Hart et al. in Frontiers of Zoology, 2013

Whirlygig toy = Centrifuge = Life saver

Have you every played with a whirlygig? Or a button spinner?

This simple toy has two handles connected by two pieces of string and a disc in the middle of the string between the two handles. It is then possible to make the disc spin really fast by pulling of the two handles. There are lots of videos of how you can make your own on Youtube, including this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCutHjdDFvY



Some scientists at Stanford University have taken this simple toy and are using it to save lives. In order to work out if a patient has a particular illness, doctors often need to take a sample of blood. Blood is made up of four main components: red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets and plasma. It is necessary to separate the blood into these individual components to identify an illness. To separate these components the blood is spun around really fast. In a lab this is done using a centrifuge, which is very expensive. The scientists at Stanford have shown how this very cheap simple toy can be used to do the same job.



Here is a video showing it in action and the scientists explaining more about what it can do: