August 22, 2012

Seed germination results

I am about half way through the seed germination experiment.  Already trends are appearing in the data.  So far, I've germinated seeds at three temperatures: 75, 65 and 55.  On really hot days I want to crawl into the growth chambers and hang out with a book until it's cooler.  Hopefully there won't be many more hot days this year.   

The maximum number of seeds at each temperature is 50.  So, for defender lettuce at 75 degrees all the seeds germinated by the third day.  As the temperature decreased it took longer for seeds to germinate, and germination was spread over a number of days.  This is useful because it tells a grower or farmer that they don't need to heat their greenhouse all the way to 75 or 65 degrees to have good germination of lettuce seeds.

The pictures on the right don't show what I'm seeing when I count germinated seeds - but they are far prettier.
Tokyo bekana shows a slightly different trend.  Days to germination is similar for seeds sown at 75 and 65 degrees.  At 55 degrees seeds take much longer to germinate, and the percentage of seeds that germinated is much lower.  (You can't tell this from the graph, but it's true.)  So, how is this useful data?  It shows that temperatures lower than 55 degrees will result in poor and lengthy germination compared to warmer temperatures for tokyo bekana.  Eventually I'll add fuel price in as a component to this study, but not until I'm done collecting data.

2 comments:

  1. Great findings! Did you get 100% germination at each of the 3 temps?

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    1. No I didn't - as it gets colder germination rates decrease. I haven't looked at germination rate (percentage) yet, but I will once I finish gathering data.

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