It's vacation right now so no students were around today. The college secretary helped me record data. She also helped me weed the bags. Thanks, Ana!
We counted the number of trees that germinated in each treatment condition. I'll need to track down a way to run the statistics, but there's action for sure. First of all, there was a main effect of nicking. The germination rate was much higher for the seeds that we nicked open than for those we left alone. At this point, 93 of the 200 nicked seeds have popped up, but only 17 out of 200 of the un-nicked seeds.
I had hypothesized an interaction between nicking and soaking. There is one, but not what I expected. I thought that the nicked seeds that we soaked would do the best, but I was wrong. The best germination was for the nicked seeds that were planted dry. Soaking actually has hurt our germination rate. How weird!
Here's my data. (I love data.)
Here are photos of the different conditions, from the older group of trees. Condition 1 was dry, un-nicked seeds. Only 3 have germinated as of today.
But look at the difference--here's group 2, dry seeds that were nicked to help the seedling break out of the hull. 45 of 50 seeds germinated! We planted 2 seeds in each of 25 bags. Soon, we'll remove the weaker plant from each bag. I was planning to throw the culls away, but maybe I'll put them in their own bags.
Here's group 3, not nicked, and soaked. 7 germinated in this condition.
That's the results from the first planting week. We got 100 bags (200 seeds) planted that first day, then it was time for lunch and everyone left. A week later I got a crew together and did it all again: 25 bags for each condition. The data for the second week is similar to the first week.
I'll collect data each month. What I want to know is whether the important outcome is in terms of how quickly the seeds germinate or how many germinate. Maybe the other conditions will catch up over time and it will turn out that the effect of nicking and soaking means nothing in the end. We shall see. Whatever the results, there's enough going on to justify a presentation at a conference. That will be a great resume-builder for the Peruvian college students I'm working with.
And the important thing is that we have baby tara trees for our community!
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