My greenhouse trial on the legacy effects of farming systems and climate change has concluded! Over this past fall and winter, I maintained a total of 648 pots across three replicate trials (216 trials per). In the past few weeks, we harvested the plants and took various measurements: all-day affairs that required the help of several dedicated undergraduate researchers.
In case you were wondering why research can be so time and labor intensive, over the course of the trials we hand-washed 648 pot tags twice, 648 plant pots twice, planted 7,776 wheat seeds across two conditioning phases, 1,944 wheat seeds and 1,944 pea seeds for the response phase. We counted seedling emergence for those seeds every day for a week after each of the three planting dates in each of the three trials (9 plantings all together). Of those 11,664 plants, we hand-plucked 7,776 seedlings and grew the other 3,888 until harvesting which required watering nearly every day for over four months. At harvest, we counted wheat tillers or pea flowers, as well as weighed the biomass on those 3,888, and measured the height on 1,296 of them. And this is only a side study to the larger field trial I am helping conduct! All told, we have a massive amount of data to process, but we hope to have a manuscript ready by mid-summer – stay tuned!