- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
-
-
Hivestorm1 year ago in Pleiotropy
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site1 year ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site1 year ago in Variety of Life
-
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?3 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
Daily routine3 years ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China4 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM5 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey6 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV7 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!7 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!8 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez8 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens9 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl11 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House12 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs12 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby12 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Forcing flowering
What's a guy to do? Spring is not cooperating, and my taxonomy class needs some flowers. Some of the early flowering tree/shrub species are showing swelling buds, so it's time to force some flowering. Most woody species at this stage can be forced into flower. First you just cut some branches, and then as soon as possible you pound the base of the stem with a hammer to sort of pulverize it. This helps the wood wick up more water. The branch is then placed in a bucket of water. It works best to put branches is a cool place, but if you need flowering sooner, put it in a warmer place, like a glasshouse. So what's available? Silver and red maple, witchhazel, alder, birch, filbert, Cornelian cherry, an ornamental pear. Not bad, but our forsythia flower buds are toast. The shrub is hardier than the flower buds, so if any flowering happens this year all the cheerful yellow flowers will be low to the ground where they were insulated by snow. The silver maple flowered overnight, which was way too fast, but TPP will get some more now that he knows. The Cornelian cherry is showing some color, and other buds are still swelling, so we'll see what happens. Hope the students appreciate my efforts. As for Ms. Phactor, she got some artificial forsythia for St. Patrick's Day because there won't be any others.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment