So this week I continued to work on my new
allelopathy test project but with few changes than what I explained last week. And
that was about putting some crumbled leaves inside the petri dishes with seeds
but Matt decided that I don’t need to do that anymore.
I had my petri dishes ready since last week and I
also had the Sycamore, Sun flower and Orange tree’s leaves ready and completely
dried out for this week experiment. On Monday I found out that the last minute
leaf collecting saved me a lot of time because the leaves dried out naturally
in the lab during the weekend.
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| Oak branches |
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| Oak and Mesquite leaves |
Anyway, last week due to my short time in the last
day I couldn’t make it to collect the Oak and Mesquite leaves, so I took another
journey around the campus to collect the leaves. The Oak leaves are small and
it’s kind of hard to collect the full basket, specially the basket that I have
because it has a big holes on it and the leaves kept falling. But this time I
was lucky and one of the maintenance guys saw me and cut some of the branches
for me, he made my job much easier. Since I needed the leaves to be dry, I let
them to dry for a day but it didn’t work well, so with Matt idea I ended up with
spread them on separate trays and put them in the oven for one more day to make
them dry faster and save me some time.
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| Oak and Mesquite leaves after one day in oven |
Those two days that I was waiting for the
Oak and Mesquite leaves to get dry, I started the experiment with my other
leaves. Grinding the leaves was the first step and I start doing it with mortar
& pestle, which wasn’t that easy and would take a long time, since
technology is always helpful instead of mortar & pestle I used blender to
grind the leaves and I got pretty good powder of each one.
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| Blender was a good idea but too messy! |
Then I made a 2% solution
for each sample, by weighing 20.0 gr of the sample (leaves powder) and adding
200 mL of DI water to it, I closed the lead with parafilm and let them to stay
like that for a day. And finally the day after making the solution, I did water
the petri dishes with 5 mL pipet.
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| 2% solution of each treatment |
After I got done with watering and using the
solution, I made a 50% solution with the remaining solution and I added another
100mL to it. And I set up another set of petri dishes next to the other one in
order to test the 50% solution on germination of the seeds and comparing the
both result together. So this week I was able to finish all the plates and
watering them and also fold all of them with parafilm to prevent the evaporation.
And now I have to patiently wait for a week or more to see the result and start
counting the seeds again.
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| 50% solution of each treatment |
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| petri dishes water with 2% solution |
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| Petri dishes water with 50% solution |
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