Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Random plant event: Ardisia elliptica seedlings

Spent a lot of yesterday potting up new plants (from a trade), watering the plants from the basement, or working on posts that won't be ready for a long time, if ever, and then by the time I realized that I still had to come up with a post for today, it was already 9 PM and I didn't even have any particularly good topic ideas. So we have this. It wasn't that long ago that I mentioned that the Ardisia elliptica seeds I'd collected from my plant had germinated; they're now, two weeks later, all showing actual leaves (Not true leaves, granted. These are seed leaves, or cotyledons. It's still a step up from being mere seed-coat-wearing stalks with no trace of green at all.), and I decided that it made sense to go ahead and pot them all together.


It won't be a particularly full plant, but I only had three seeds to begin with, so having a full plant was probably never in the cards anyway.


4 comments:

Liza said...

Dammit, now you've got me conditioned to expect Schlumbergera missive length posts every day. How dare you live your life rather than writing to please me?! I feel so alone, mr_s, thanks a lot.

Unknown said...

Liza's comment cracked me up. ;-) Yay for seedlings, and for having a life too.

emily said...

hey, did you happen to see this article? http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=hot-and-heavy-insects-sense-the-bre-2010-08-09

"Scientists at the University of Haifa noticed that when a goat fed on aphid-infested plants, the aphids dropped off the leaves as the goat approached. It was not the shadow of the animal or vibrations that the aphids sensed - it was the heat+humidity of the goat's breath...

When they positioned the instrument within one centimeter of aphids and delivered a two-second stream of room-temperature air, no aphids abandoned the plant. Similarly, adding carbon dioxide or volatile chemicals common in breath had no impact on aphid behavior. It wasn't until the temperature and humidity of the airstream were increased that there were noticeable effects. Altering either parameter alone produced only modest increases in aphid dropping, but the combination of increased warmth (to 35 degrees Celsius) and humidity (at 90-100 percent) caused nearly 40 percent of the aphids to plummet. The results were published online August 9 in Current Biology."

mr_subjunctive said...

Liza:

But I am trying to write to please you! I'm just not very good at it!

emily:

I saw it on Twitter. Tweeted a link about it, but people don't actually pay attention to me on Twitter. Smart aphids, though.