It has been a busy summer in the Agroecolab! Bri and Dani have been in the field, while I have spent 99% of my time in the greenhouse. It has been strange not having summer field work. Because I study cover crops which get planted in the fall and growth throughout the winter, and spring, most of my field work happens between September and May. Irregardless, my helpers and I have had an exceptionally busy “off season.”
I have spent the past few months working on a project to elucidate the mechanisms behind the rate and fate of forage radish N loss. Because of how insane it can be having your field season during the school year, I decided to start tackling this question in April. When I started planning I had GRAND expectations. But as with any new project, these grand plans fell through many times over.
First challenge, I assumed I would need to grow my radishes in an environmental chamber to get the same physiology I see in the fall. Unfortunately all the growth chambers were occupied at the time.
I decided I would try growing the radishes in a greenhouse bay just for the heck of it. Of course they grew, but not like they do in the fall. Of course.
After many weeks of emails and panic and probably a few tears on my part, I must have made the greenhouse manager feel bad for me, so he plugged in a very old growth chamber. By the way, we have the best greenhouse staff at UMD, Sydney, Meghan, and Shaun are awesome.
Back to the growth chamber. It was a good gesture, but it was just too old and kept malfunctioning. I had radishes “growing” for almost two months but with malfunctioning lights and near-freezing temperatures not much is happening. The good news is someone moved out of the newer chambers early so now my radishes are in a large, functioning chamber. Progress!
My second challenge has been figuring out what exact questions I want to answer, which ones I am capable of answering, and what we need to build to answer them. I’ve learned how challenging it can be to design an experiment no one in your lab has ever done. I came into the summer expecting to be able to measure 6 different things by the end of the summer. I’ve had so many setbacks (mainly with growing radishes) that I might have one set of preliminary data by November and it will only include 3 of the variables I wanted to measure. But that’s ok! I have time to work out my method.
My third challenge was helping Amy, my high school intern, develop a compelling research project since our original idea of her using a subset of my data was obviously going to fall through. We ended up figuring out a cool study based on Amy’s interests and she will hopefully be presenting that data at several events throughout the school year. I’m hoping Amy will like to write a guest post on this blog, but if not we can chat about that later.
As I sit here realizing school starts in less than a week (I’m TAing this semester, woohoo!) I look back and I’m a bit disappointed that my entire summer ended in only 5 preliminary datapoints for me, but I worked very hard and we learned so much, I feel we are going to start making some good progress. I also want to thank Amy for her help on my project and Dani’s project and for creating such a great summer project. I also want to thank Amanda, a volunteer on my project who saved me from several mental breakdowns and helped me get many aspects of this project up and running!
I have spent the past few months working on a project to elucidate the mechanisms behind the rate and fate of forage radish N loss. Because of how insane it can be having your field season during the school year, I decided to start tackling this question in April. When I started planning I had GRAND expectations. But as with any new project, these grand plans fell through many times over.
First challenge, I assumed I would need to grow my radishes in an environmental chamber to get the same physiology I see in the fall. Unfortunately all the growth chambers were occupied at the time.
I decided I would try growing the radishes in a greenhouse bay just for the heck of it. Of course they grew, but not like they do in the fall. Of course.
After many weeks of emails and panic and probably a few tears on my part, I must have made the greenhouse manager feel bad for me, so he plugged in a very old growth chamber. By the way, we have the best greenhouse staff at UMD, Sydney, Meghan, and Shaun are awesome.
Back to the growth chamber. It was a good gesture, but it was just too old and kept malfunctioning. I had radishes “growing” for almost two months but with malfunctioning lights and near-freezing temperatures not much is happening. The good news is someone moved out of the newer chambers early so now my radishes are in a large, functioning chamber. Progress!
My second challenge has been figuring out what exact questions I want to answer, which ones I am capable of answering, and what we need to build to answer them. I’ve learned how challenging it can be to design an experiment no one in your lab has ever done. I came into the summer expecting to be able to measure 6 different things by the end of the summer. I’ve had so many setbacks (mainly with growing radishes) that I might have one set of preliminary data by November and it will only include 3 of the variables I wanted to measure. But that’s ok! I have time to work out my method.
My third challenge was helping Amy, my high school intern, develop a compelling research project since our original idea of her using a subset of my data was obviously going to fall through. We ended up figuring out a cool study based on Amy’s interests and she will hopefully be presenting that data at several events throughout the school year. I’m hoping Amy will like to write a guest post on this blog, but if not we can chat about that later.
As I sit here realizing school starts in less than a week (I’m TAing this semester, woohoo!) I look back and I’m a bit disappointed that my entire summer ended in only 5 preliminary datapoints for me, but I worked very hard and we learned so much, I feel we are going to start making some good progress. I also want to thank Amy for her help on my project and Dani’s project and for creating such a great summer project. I also want to thank Amanda, a volunteer on my project who saved me from several mental breakdowns and helped me get many aspects of this project up and running!