Today marks the beginning of the end of germination for the prairie restoration plants I will be working with this summer. Among the four species I am working with two are sufficiently planted and two have been partially planted in the hopes that other seeds with germinate.
These are the seeds in agar petri dishes in an incubator to induce germination.
Initially, two or three populations of four different species of seeds were placed on agar and have gone from cold to warm environments to start the germination process.
These are some of the different seeds on agar.
Today, most of the seeds have germinated and have been planted in cone-tainers. Already I have been recording first leaf dates as the seeds begin to grow.
The two above pictures show sections of the cone-tainers the hold the growing plants. The toothpicks indicate which ones have a first leaf date.
As the summer goes on the plants will continue to flourish and thirty-five days from their germination I will take functional trait measurements.