I Can See the Finish Line!

My study plant, Cordylanthus palmatus (with salt crystals on its leaves)

After much debate, my thesis will be on the germination of one species (not two or three, as previously thought): Cordylanthus palmatus (palmate-bracted bird's beak). It's a hemi-parasitic plant that grows on the edges of seasonal pools in the alkaline/saline grasslands of the Great Central Valley, CA (it's a mouthful, I know).


C. palmatus seedling (little, light green guy), growing alongside its potential host, salt grass (Distichlis spicata)

And here's the really big news: I think I might actually graduate soon! After a big meeting with my thesis committee a few months ago, I now have a time line and a date: July 22nd! Eeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!


A seasonal wetland pool at my study site in Woodland, CA.

Yes, you read correctly. Eek. The finished product isn't due to the Office of Graduate Studies until September 8th, but my deadline for the first draft (which must be as ready-to-go as possible) is July 22nd. After that date I am going to Greece for two weeks and my advisors get to tear my thesis to shreds.


Bird's beak seedlings in the greenhouse

So the next two months are going to be jammed-packed with work. But I'll be around, everyone needs a break. In fact, I'm spending the next four days in Napa visiting Jaja and getting work done in the quiet house on Inglewood Ave (I swear).


Seedlings in April

These photos were taken on my last couple of trips out to my study site (April and May). The plants are just seedlings now, they grow all summer and flower in the fall.


Big, flowering plants in the greenhouse

Wish me luck!


The palmately lobed floral bracts and beak-shaped flowers that give this plant its common name

Re-Searching

I visited my site again last week to collect Atriplex joaquiniana seed. I had to do it incredibly early in the morning in order to avoid the heat, the sun, and the tiny little black flies that threaten to drive me insane.

Here is a picture of A. joaquiniana:



It's a very unique-looking plant, if not that attractive. The whole thing is covered with fruit, so it looks like it has none on it, but that's only because the fruits grow so densely on the stem that they create an almost smooth surface. But if you start to pick at it with your fingernails you realize that it is filled with small black seeds.

Some other species that grow on my site:


an invasive grass that forms little starbursts


The same grass, growing with Frankenia salina, an annual alkali wetland plant

And here are my little Cordylanthus seedlings growing under 15 degrees Celsius. Cute little buggers.

Researchin' the day away

I finally got to visit one of the sites for my study, the Alkali Grassland Preserve in Woodland, CA (ironic town name, as you can see). Here are some pictures that I took myself of Cordylanthus palmatus. This time I don't have to worry about getting permission to post the pics.







We went early in the morning (the PhD student, Tracy, and I) in order to beat the heat and the blackflies. We checked on some experiments that Tracy is working on and I wandered around, going "what's this?" "what's this?" every five minutes. Some of the plants out there I recognized, especially Salicornia, pickleweed. I love this plant, it looks like seaweed growing on land, or knobby little gnome fingers.



We also took some samples of three different Atriplex species, hoping that one of them would be the ever elusive Atriplex joaquiniana, one of the rare plants that I'm supposed to include in the second half of my study. One of the plants we collected was kind of weedy in the site, and I had already shown it to my professor who said it wasn't A. joaquiniana, but we took it anyway. I brought the three plants to the herbarium at Davis and the curator there, Ellen, wonderfully offered to press them and show them to the California annual Atriplex guy, Robert Preston. I just went by there today to see what he had to say, and there are not one, but TWO RARE ATRIPLEX on my site!!! This is big people. Very exciting. Apparently the one that is weedy actually is A. joaquiniana, and a smaller one I collected is A. depressa. Wahoo! This means that my master's research will not be on only one plant, but at least two, if not three. I am sighing with relief.



Things are coming along with my research otherwise as well. Of course there is the requisite stress in between, but things are rolling now, so as long as I continue to make myself massive to-do lists, things will be aaaaaaall right.

Please sir, may I have some more?

So I have another photo that features sauerkraut, sorry. This is a picture of the best way to spend a Sunday morning:



Scrambled eggs, fresh tomatoes, salsa, and sauerkraut, listening to Car Talk on my $5 rummage sale radio, sitting on the back porch early in the morning when it's not so hot yet. I can even wear slippers and jeans that early in the morning, what luxury!

To be honest, I've moved on from eggs and sauerkraut to a new favorite breakfast food. Let me first say that breakfast has always been my favorite meal. It probably has something to do with the fact that you can pass off dessert as breakfast and eat as much maple syrup, jelly, and carbs as you want. It's also just a great way to start the day, taking some time for yourself to make food, then sit and eat it while reading some blogs or the newspaper or something. Of course, that means that you have to get up early enough to prepare said food and have the time to eat it slowly, which I usually do. It's a priority.

So here is the latest breakfast endeavor. I was reading a post by Carlene over at knitsquirrel the other day and I decided to try her "vat of steel cut oats." It was super easy to make and I copied her and stuck the whole pot in the fridge afterwards.



I've been putting milk, flax seeds, and raspberry jam in there. It is soooooo good, and it's basically what I've been looking for in a breakfast meal for months now. I've been making my oatmeal with rolled oats and I've been craving something creamier. This has the perfect creaminess, with a little crunch from the oat kernels that reminds me of the subtle crunch of quinoa, though much smoother in texture, obviously.



A total success.

I also got a CSA box on Wednesday and I get the whole thing to myself this time because my CSA buddy Sarah is out of town.



Basil, "Nantes" carrots, beets, white sweet corn, a cucumber, "Red Haven" peaches, potatoes, and summer squash. So many funny shapes, so many rich and varied colors. I'm going to have to make zucchini bread, it's for sure. I have some more summer squash left over from the BBQ, and I'm never going to eat them all in time. The little goose-necked yellow squash are almost dead as it is. I might also get around to making those carrot spice muffins from FatFree Vegan Kitchen that I've been thinking about too.



The newsletter came with a recipe for Roasted Beet Salad which I'm going to try, though I've been thinking about trying to dye some fabric with the beets as well. Unfortunately, most of the online resources I checked make me think that that won't work too well.

I got a huge bunch of basil and I'm going to try to make pesto. I've never made it, but the last time I got basil in my box I let it go bad in the fridge. I haven't gotten the hang of keep it nice and fresh, it seems to wilt, then when I try to freshen it with water, it rots. It's a mystery to me, I think I'll just try to use it as quickly as possible.



There were four peaches in the box too, but two of them didn't make it to the photo shoot. Whoops.

Posts have been few and far between lately because I'm hard at work trying to figure out my research. Tomorrow I'm going to the Jepson Herbarium at UC Berkeley which I am nerdily thrilled about. An herbarium is basically a large facility with thousands of dried plant samples in it, neatly pressed on sheets of paper. It's an important botanical resource for people to use to identify plants and compare them to specimens that have already been collected and identified. I've been invited down there to go through the old files of Lawrence Heckard, one of the old curators of the herbarium who has passed away. He and Tsan-Iang Chang are the authors of an article that was published in the 70s that is the only published record of the germination of the plant I'm studying, Cordylanthus palmatus. I'm going to see if his records will give me a hint as to how he did it. I actually feel very important, the Jepson Herbarium is really big and prestigious and it's devoted largely to California flora. Nerd it up!

Big News, part 2

This post has been a long time coming (and it's heavy on words today, sorry). I officially have a topic for my master's research! It's been a frustrating process because I did this graduate school thing kind of backwards. What usually happens is a person talks to professors at various schools whose interests match their own, and she finds a project she can join where they have the space and money to support her. Then she applies to the school and that professor vouches for her and proves that he has the resources to pay her tuition etc etc. I, on the other hand, just applied to schools like it was a regular college, not knowing any better. It does make me proud that I got in without anyone vouching for me, but still, it leaves me kind of lost when it comes to support and research opportunities. I've had to figure this all out on my own, and sometimes it feels like I'm just floundering around and drowning, grasping at tree limbs and whatnot as I sink.

But now I have a project! This is big. I'm just realizing how exciting this project is too, because I was so focused on the fact that I actually had one to care much about what it was. So without further ado, here is the tentative title of my project:

Germination of rare and endangered plants in the alkali grassland ecosystem.

Tada! So, some explanation is required. The alkali grassland is an ecosystem that is characterized by highly alkaline and saline soils. It has seasonal wetland pools that inundate plants in the winter wet season, then dry up and experience drought in the summer dry season (this is like the vernal pools I wrote about a while ago). Plants have to be pretty tough to grow in the wetland areas of the grassland, and they need to have adaptations that allow them to live there. This means that there are a lot of endemic plants there, plants that only grow in those ecosystems and nowhere else.

My project will examine the germination of three rare plants in this ecosystem. Basically, what triggers they need to sprout from seeds, and how I can manipulate conditions to get the best germination rates from the small amount of seed available. There's practically no research on the germination requirements of any of the plants I'm studying, so my research will surely get published. This is a big deal. I'm only a master's student, but I will be the principal author in a paper that will most likely be published in an actual journal. Holy crap.

The other reason that I'm excited about the project is that the plants I will be studying are really quite cool. The one I will be focusing on the most is called Cordylanthus palmatus, and it's a hemi-parasite (it doesn't depend on its host for support, but it parasitizes in order to increase its fitness). It also has little salt glands that take up salt and extrude it onto the surface of its leaves, giving it a crystallized appearance.



Better photos can be found on the CalPhotos website, but I don't feel like asking permission to use the photos, so if you're interested, you can go see them using the link above.

Another plant I will be studying is Astragalus tener var. tener. It's a cute little pea. More pictures here.


photo from the Great Valley grasslands State Park, via the CNPS website

And finally, if I can find this one in my site, I will be studying Atriplex joaquiniana, an incredibly rare salt-bush. This photo is also from CalPhotos, but it has different copyright rules.


copyright 2003 George W. Hartwell