Welcome back! We’re officially at the project’s halfway point now. Our budding plants have started to actually bloom, and we started a fun new little side project too.
Tomato plants are self-pollinating, meaning that they have both the male and female parts in each flower. Because of this we can use something to “tickle” the flowers to knock the pollen around so that it can pollinate it (otherwise it won’t produce into a mature tomato). I have just the thing for it: a little toy bug that lost some legs so it doesn’t work right… but it vibrates, so it will mimic the buzzing of a bee and pollinate the flowers! Once they open, I’ll buzz them every day just to make sure they get pollinated. I’m very hopeful we’ll get actual tomatoes before the project ends
We also started a fun side project about exposing plants to music in grow chambers. We’ll have them listen to either classical Arabic music or 1970’s synth music for 1,680 hours (70 days) and see what happens. The chamber actually contains the sound well and it’s pretty easy to do! I’ll post some updates and a video about this soon. Not really too technical or anything, more just for fun.
The temperatures and humidity in the grow tent have been very stable, the fan and humidistat we put in have really done the trick! It’s good to finally get to a point where we can be comfortable knowing the conditions are stable and not have to check up on it too frequently.
Last, we have a little update about some of the underperforming plants we have. Several plants have been growing very poorly, but there’s not much consistency between them. For example, S_MFKI1 and S_MFKI2. MFKI2 was the first plant to bloom, but MFKI1 hasn’t grown at all in over 10 days and looks very sickly. The struggle here is that we don’t have a large sample size, which would enable us to know what is an outlier and start excluding things from our data. Unfortunately since we don’t have the space of a proper lab or anything, we’re limited and have to just presume that these seedlings are exceptions and not growing well for any number of reasons we can’t really pin down right now (they could have been damaged seeds or just weak seeds, gotten a little too dry and damaged, got root rot… anything).
OH! As a bonus: no fungus gnats still
If you want to name one of the plants, leave a comment with the name below and we’ll assign it to one!
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Preparing for this experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W0csI-fUn4
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