Allelopathy test

 This week I kept continue to work on the allelopathy test. After setting up the petri dishes with seeds (radish, lettuce, chard and carrot) for test, I needed to get ready for the next step, which is creating leaf extraction and it’s obvious that the first things that I needed was whole bunch of leaves. So first, I went to the Phoenix College garden and searched around it to find the trees; Sycamore, Orange, Oak and sunflower, and collected the leaves. So I collected a full wire basket leaves of each one of them, then in the lab I started the leaf extraction. Then I washed a white plastic tub really well, maybe you ask yourself why I’m telling you the color and it doesn't matter, but the truth is that it does matter and it’s really important in this experiment because in leaf extraction we need to see the color change in water, so using the white tub it’s the best way to recognize that. After that I got 1 Liter DI water in a flask, and placed the leaves basket in middle of the tub. Then I poured the DI water all over the leaves and waited for couple seconds to get all the water inside the tub, and then swash the basket of leaves around and poured the water back into the flask.

 Again poured the same water in the flask on the leaves and after swashing, pour the water back to the flask. I kept repeating it about 30-40 times, until water started to change color slightly. And then when it changed color slightly, according to the research, that’s supposedly five percent extraction and that’s the standard extraction that you use for some experiments like that. Then I started watering the petri dishes with the seeds on them, with pipet and added 5 mL of the leaf extract to each petri dishes. So the sunflower was the first leaf extraction, I watered all the sunflower treatment petri dishes and foiled each five of the same seeds together to prevent the evaporation. Since I should do once at a time, it took me more time but I could finish the leaf extractions and watering the seeds in two days.

sun flower leaves

sun flower extract

Orange leaf extract

Sycamore Leaves

Sycamore leaf extract 

Sycamore leaf extrac

Oak leaves and leaf extract

ready petri dishes

Next week I’m going to open them and see the germination, also to check which ones and how many seeds of each petri dishes grow, and do some percentage and calculation. I'll also start doing the same experiment on some other trees and plants.