Biologists' Report
November 14, 2014
Vincent W. Coljee, Carmel Johnston and Cyprien Verseux
The Greenhab was much cooler today, we had some snow, hail, sleet and freezing rain here, and Carmel kept the heater running during the day. We watered only the indoor chard conditions today, and did those twice, once at 8 am and once at 6:30 pm. Cyprien and Carmel decided to check the boiled regolith condition of the chard for seeds and discovered that we had failed to seed those. That explains (rather clearly) why they had not germinated in that condition. Fortunately some of the radishes are grown in the same conditions (but with seeds...) and will allow us to study them. We will also repeat the experiment (without "no-seed controls" but with the expected conditions) after the rotation.
The radishes are doing well and we have had over 85% germination by now and 81% first leaf. Readjusting the numbers to ignore the two sets of negative controls, the chard have seen 67% germination. That starts to make the two plants species more comparable in germination, with chard just being a day or two slower to germinate.