Trust me. I’m aware that it’s a Saturday. But I don’t care. Yesterday I wanted to write about my son’s special day. Today I want to share highlights of my week in ecology. It’s my blog – stop whining! 1) Accepted – An important paper got accepted this week. This paper is the first paperContinue reading “Friday findings – volume 6”
Tag Archives: Plant ecology
The cure to heatstroke?
What a day today. In the morning I started off developing a mild heat stroke, as we were labeling and sorting plants in the absolute blistering heat. What can I say. It’s not great labeling in blistering heat, but it was important! The alternative was labeling inside the greenhouse. In that sense we used theContinue reading “The cure to heatstroke?”
Friday findings – volume 5
I had a jam-packed and almost overwhelming week in ecology this week. I sometimes feel like I’m doing too much and that I forget to breathe. Some of these things I can’t say no to as they are a non-negotiable part of the job description, and others I often don’t want to say no to.Continue reading “Friday findings – volume 5”
Friday Findings – Volume 3
A short overview this week, although not for lack of interesting things that happened. Here are the highlights from my week in ecology: Collaborate – collaborations are vital in academia. You can do more together than alone, and multiple brains are smarter than one. It’s also much more fun to discuss and discover with others,Continue reading “Friday Findings – Volume 3”
Plant talk
I just finished a 3.5 hour drive this evening, to the university town of Jena, where we are currently running a tansy chemodiversity field experiment alongside the bigger, older, boringly named, yet much better-known ‘Jena Experiment’. Briefly I considered spending the night in Lederhose, just so I could tell people I slept in Lederhose. AsContinue reading “Plant talk”
It all starts with a seed
Today was time for the next step in our latest experiment. After leaving the pots filled with field soil to acclimatize for a week, and watering them several times to reach a more homogeneous soil moisture, we sowed our experiment today. I say we, because I was helped today by two wonderful and motivated PhDContinue reading “It all starts with a seed”
A silly clown
It’s quite funny how hysterical professional gardeners and greenhouse staff get when they see aphids. I get it, aphids are the devil – that is, when you’re a tomato grower or whatever. I cannot count count the number of times I have been warned about all the horrors that are aphids – as if IContinue reading “A silly clown”
I discovered the root-washing station!
Another ecological experiment was successfully finished today. Oh well, almost. The most important harvest is behind us now. I started my day collecting a shitload of liquid nitrogen at the nitrogen tank (silo? What are these things called?) outside our building. This was done with the purpose of flash-freezing our leaf samples in the greenhouse,Continue reading “I discovered the root-washing station!”
My love-hate relationship with rain
Over the past weeks, I have mentioned quite a couple of times the tansy plants that were still growing in our greenhouses, after we had established our field experiment in Jena. First of all, there were the original 120 ‘mother plants’ that were the source for the 18 selection lines that I created and cloned.Continue reading “My love-hate relationship with rain”
I would make the worst orchid tour guide (but I can talk about snakes…)
Before returning home from our trip to the Chiemgauer Alpen, we decided to take a short walk in the Achental, from Marquartstein to a viewpoint called Windeck (probably because it is always windy as fuck – which it was today). The hike was short enough for our son to almost walk all of it twoContinue reading “I would make the worst orchid tour guide (but I can talk about snakes…)”
Robin Heinen 