Week 8 was another busy week! It started out with a visit from a group of middle schoolers who were at a camp at the experiment station for the week. We did DNA extractions along with running some gels. They thought it was pretty cool and it was fun to get to help teach other people the skills I’ve learned over the summer.
A few weeks ago, we picked some garlic that had come from a soft rot field. This week, we weighed out the bulb heads and counted how many would count as “marketable” to see which treatment worked best at fighting the soft rot.
Unfortunately, not many of the bulbs were ranked as marketable. But I did find one that looked like a heart!
We also inoculated some Yukon Gold potatoes a couple weeks ago with dry rot. We did this by cutting a small core out of one end of the potato and then used dry rot grown on agar plugs to fill in the hole. Parafilm, a stretchy, breathable band- aid like material, was wrapped around the wounds and then we let them sit in a slightly humid environment for a little while. After seeing some signs of dry (and soft) rot, we decided to try cutting them open to examine the inside.
Here’s a top view of the cored sections where the potatoes were inoculated-
Potato surgery in progress!
We didn’t see quite as much dry rot as we expected. Only one trial really showed growth of the dry rot outside of the cored area. The potato in the below picture in the upper left hand corner actually turned out to be suffering from soft rot. We threw the soft rot potatoes away because we are focusing on the dry rot growth. The soft rot potatoes also smelled pretty bad!
A new project that we started this week was planting a brassica plot.
I weighed out certain amounts of seeds such as different kinds of mustards, broccoli, and arugula. Then I mixed those seeds with sand that had been inoculated with verticillium wilt.
Now we’re going to see how the mustard, broccoli, and arugula combat the verticillium wilt.
We also found a frog! He’ll be keeping an eye on the plant growth for us.
