Today was awesome, because I got to do what I’ve been looking forward to ever since I dreamed up this Senior Project: seed banking.

 

“Well, Priyanka,” you might ask, “How can you possibly find enjoyment in squinting at objects about the size of a grain of sand and attempting to sort them into neat piles for hours on end until your back and neck hurt and your eyesight goes wonky?” But trust me, it’s incredible. And that’s what I did today.

 

It also occurred to me that I spend way too much time blabbering on about my day and less about what I’m actually doing. So I will attempt to rectify that by detailing the workings of the first step of the seed banking process: cleaning and counting. Also, picture guide!

 

Step 1: Retrieve packet of seeds. We get seeds mailed to us from various corners of the world, and we also go out and collect them ourselves. Either way, we end up with a packet full of seeds. Each packet contains seeds from one particular plant of a particular species, and is therefore assigned an accession number. This accession number helps to identify it later on. Today, I did Physaria didymocarpa var. lyrata.

 

Step 2: Dump contents of packet onto a flat surface. I like to use a paper plate.

 

Step 3: Sort through plant matter and pick out the seeds. This is pretty tough: you have to go through it very carefully so you don’t end up throwing out seeds with the dried plant remains, and for the plant I was doing today, the only way to get the seeds out is to pulverize the dried seed pods with your fingers, so that caused a lot of dust in the air.

 

Step 4: Count the seeds, separating the good seeds from the bad. The difficulty of this task depends on the number and size of your seeds – it’s not very common to get more than a hundred seeds. Grouping your seeds in clusters of ten helps to avoid losing count of them.

 

Step 5: Write the plant’s accession number, name and seed count on a glassine envelope. Put the good and bad seeds in different envelopes. Divide the good seeds into two groups, A and B, if you have more than ten.

 

Step 6: Put the seeds in the proper envelopes, tape up the edges, paperclip the envelopes together and you’re done!

 

I worked another 9 to 3 day. At least, I would have, but the door was locked and Ed and my dad spent 25 minutes having a conversation in the parking lot while I skulked around in the lobby reading an article by Maddy Case (she did her senior project here, by the way). The other BBG employees were going to go to PSU to check out the science building and greenhouse (more on that later), before heading to some lecture, but I couldn’t go because I had Frisbee :(