Week 6 was another busy week! We started out with spore counting.
This is the slide that we used to put the solution containing the spores in to. The silver notches are where you pipette the spores into and then they spread across the surface where there is a tiny grid etched in it.
After placing the spores on to the special slide, we headed over to the microscope.
Here’s a view inside the microscope! The very small grid is seen here. The smaller squares are the ones that we counted the spores in.
Here you can see the actual spores. We used a clicker to count the spores in each square and counted 16 squares at a time. These 16 squares are seen contained inside the triple white lines.
Next, we finished one of our experimental carrot plot projects where the carrots were being measured for amounts of soft rot. We went through and counted the number of healthy versus diseased plants in each plot and collected the data to see which treatments worked best.
There were lots of diseased carrots!
We also measured and flagged some plots for future use. One of these plots is for more sclerotia measurement and another one is for mustard growth.
We used this tool, which allows you to see the view from left, right, and center, all at once through the three windows. This makes squaring up the corners a lot easier than using the Pythagorean Theorem and running around trying to make everything match up!
I also picked garlic that had been growing in another experimental plot and chopped off the tops, saving the bulbs. We will then weigh the bulbs and see which plot produced the most.
Beautiful blue skies!
