Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Five more seeds germinated.

This experiment, though very small scale, is showing results completely against what I thought. Since my last post, five more seeds have germinated, three being gibberellic and two being control. They are exactly even. I have no idea what to say about that.

I also went around and noted the different foliage amounts for overall growth, and I was even more surprised. For gibberellic acid seeds, over the seven I noticed:
Medium growth
high growth
low growth
tiny twig
excellent growth
Frail growth
good growth

Below is what I consider frail



Below is what I consider good



I consider excellent to be three leaves at this stage.

The gibberellic acid seedling that is considered excellent is also the first to germinate.

The eight control seeds are as follows:
Not germinated
Just germinated, no growth
good growth
good growth
good growth
medium growth
excellent growth (three full leaves)
good growth.


Do you see why I'm confused? So far it seems like soaking seeds in gibberellic acid has no effect on germination rate and is actually worse for the growth!

The experiment by no means is done. I'll spray the gibberellic acid seeds in a week from now and set them on a bi-weekly spraying schedule. I also removed the plastic from all of the seeds because of mold forming. I scraped off the mold and will just water them more often.

Questions and comments are appreciated.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

More germination... Flawed experiment?

On Friday Aug 28th two more of the seeds germinated. Both of them were control seeds. Since then, six more have germinated, half of them control and half gibberellic acid. All of the seeds were clumped together in germination time regardless of whether they were treated in gibberellic acid. Six more have yet to germinate, but I'm questioning my methods.. there are so many sources of error.

This makes four gibberellic seeds and five control seeds. So far more non soaked seeds have germinated, rather than the commonly understood 25% untreated 99% treated. There's still much more to the experiment, but I'm starting to think that someone such as me who is in an unsuitable geographic location and can't work with a large amount of seeds is unfit to collect any kind of data. There are too many variables just with seed quality alone to test much without 100+ seeds, but I'll keep posting in case there are any obvious differences.

I put all of the cups on the windowsill with a hole through the plastic for each seedling. The first to germinate is starting to open up two leaves... I think. The first set of seeds I had never did that and instead remained green stumps for a month.

I'll upload pictures tomorrow. Comments and questions are appreciated.