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I have some serious plant geekitude. I used to repress it, but really, I think about plants ALL THE TIME. Good thing I have an outlet in this site now. I really think if I had repressed it much longer I would have turned into some kind of maniac. I would have had to steal out of the apartment in the middle of the night to do guerrilla research on local lots and work on papers about it that would never get published because I'd be CRAZY.
OK, this is how totally geeky I am: my coworker and I were talking about plant ecotypes (this is when a populations of a species show an adaptation to an environmental factor - example, lupines from high altitudes are shorter no matter where you grow them, therefore there is a alpine ecotypes, it's not necessarily a separate species, just a small difference) and we started pretending that ecotype meant 'stereotype' and were totally cracking ourselves up. Oh, those lazy, shiftless lupines! Why don't they just get a job?
The salad eating is getting out of hand at work and it's kind of wrecking the experiment we have set up. In my first entry I talked about the expansion of our experimental population of Amsinckia into plots where we had planted perennial grasses (Poa secunda) in a checkerboard pattern. We are maintaining the grasses at a fixed density and want to have a few Amsinckia in each plot before we start our experiment this summer. We will be burning some plots every year, some plots every other year, and other plots every five years. Then some plots will also remain unburned. We are hoping to see effects on the spread of the Poa and the maintenance of Amsinckia numbers with fire frequency. California grasslands have been overrun with introduced European grasses. Historically, California grasslands were composed of perennial bunchgrasses in a fairly open matrix, with plenty of room for wildflowers to grow in between. When the Spanish came to California, they brought hay on their ships from Spain and introduced the annual grasses that have come to blanket the grasslands in the west. Burns in the springtime, before the annual grasses set seed, keep down their numbers and allow early-flowering perennial bunchgrasses to compete. Unfortunately, not all California perennial bunchgrasses are early-flowering, but Poa secunda is.
We're not sure how exactly the fires will affect Amsinckia grandiflora, but we do need plants in every plot for the experiment to work. This week, we'll be going out to plant seeds in the plots, hoping they'll germinate even though it's a little late in the winter. We planted some seeds earlier in the winter when it looked like we weren't getting enough seed germinating from last year's seed fall. But, because we wanted to track germination and survivorship, we cleared the little area where we planted the seeds. Almost all of the seeds we planted germinated, but the plants were easy to see against the dark-colored soil, and almost all of them have been eaten. Rather than netting, which I talked about in my last entry, we're going to plant the seeds among the grasses. We won't be able to track germination or survivorship, but at this late date if they don't make it, we're screwed anyway. In February there won't be enough of a cold, rainy season left to give the plants a good start.
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