dodont: (Default)
dodont ([personal profile] dodont) wrote2007-04-20 06:13 pm

(no subject)

All of my plants are dead. I killed them and put them in the oven like the gingerbread witch.

I have so many tubes of stained roots. 43 now I think, and 12 slides. Very very worried about time, but I can do it I can do it I can do it. Eeek. I will do it. I have to do it.

This weekend will be spent writing the damn thing, with fill-in-the-blank spaces for results, graphs, etc. My notes are up to 5000 words already and I haven't done the method which shouldn't take very long (and I've got a bunch of papers explaining each step). On Monday I weigh my poor desiccated plants and stain the roots of 75 barley plants. That will take all my efforts to finish the staining in two days. And then I have to assess the colonisation percentage. And I have to do stats on all my measurements, although I don't have time really to see which characteristics best predict dry weight so I will probably just use height as an indication of growth. Means. Standard deviations. t-test. P-values. Pretty graphs. Etc.

I can do it. I will do it.

At the end I will have 203 stained root samples (at least two for each plant, one for strongly adhered and one for loosely adhered roots), 609 slides. I guess I should make up the spreadsheet now so I just have to write in the numbers. Really I could use my own x40 microscope, I wonder how much they cost.

I can do it.

I'm also in quite a lot of pain, for a change.

[identity profile] surliminal.livejournal.com 2007-04-20 10:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Even I feel attached to your plants by now - was it hard to do?

[identity profile] andabusers.livejournal.com 2007-04-20 11:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Actually no, I'm more attached to my experiment than my plants. Although I've still got root stocks in the greenhouse so I still have some vegetal ties, maybe it'll be different when they're done and dusted.

I think I'll invest in a big pot and plant some corn in my conservatory though, they would probably get big enough to have corn on the cob by the end of the summer :) I need to live somewhere warm with my own vegetable patch.