#typha angustifolia

[boschintegral-photo]

Reed (Typha) Münster, Germany

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Reed (Typha) Münster, Germany

[timeless-takes]

A Classic of the Woodland Gardens

Photo credit: Jonathan Chua.

These bulrushes, said to be either the Lesser (Typha angustifolia) or Greater (Typha latifolia), are apparently becoming a classic in the Woodland Gardens in Bushy Park. Their seed heads are now a fluffy mass, ready to disperse their seeds.

[kpuff-creations]

[commodore-puddles]

Sorry for the delay, I have been a bit busy. 

If there’s one thing my thesis has taught me is that you constantly have to adapt your plans because things never go as planned, or ideally. But I think I handle most problems well, finding better solutions for different situations. 

So when I had to take the cattail plants out of their ponds because the experiment was done after 6 weeks (see earlier post for very unhappy frogs); plants were supposed to be separated into paper bags for above- and below-ground biomass. It was raining when I decided to harvest my plants. so I brought them inside because the bags kept ripping... I have access to two labs, one a genetics-based one, and the other a prep room... logic appeared to have escaped me because I brought it all into the genetics-based lab instead of the prep room(Fig. 1). I did manage to take off all the above-ground biomass before my supervisors came in (Fig.2).  Needless to say, my supervisors were not impressed.  I moved the plants into the prep room and then spent the next 2 days cleaning/ sanitizing everything because I didn’t want to contaminate the work-stations.

After moving everything, I began taking everything out of their pots for below-ground biomass. To save the drains (they got plugged once despite my earlier attempts to block the drains). I would dump the pot into a plastic tub, and then pour water on it to separate the sand from the plants  and let them air out before putting them in the oven (Fig. 3-9). Water and sand that came out of every pot was placed in buckets and then dumped in a designated location. Man are buckets of wet sand heavy... I must have carried at least 40 buckets back and forth, before thinking of a better option which was putting about 6 buckets (at a time) on a trolly and pushing/pulling to the dump spot... although I did have to mop the floors after doing it this way because the buckets would splash. This whole process took a few days, and the oven process took 3 days to dry them out completely. I then spent a couple more days to weigh out all of the 900 samples (300 plants separated into above and belowground biomass, and then below-ground biomass was subdivided into rhizome vs roots, so essentially 3 samples per 1 plant) . 

Good news is the next step was to restart my growth of seedlings for the second experiment and then do the data analysis...

[dendroica]

Narrowleaf Cattail, Typha angustifolia (by Dendroica cerulea)