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.