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.