These short, cold winter days have me thinking about the spring and summer days I spent in the greenhouse – sometimes a lovely, warm respite and sometimes a sweltering task. In the greenhouse, I was conducting a seed bank study. A seed bank is a place where seeds are stored, like how banks store money (theoretically). In my case, I was studying seeds that were stored in the soil. I work in restored wetlands on former cranberry farms (also called bogs). The restoration activities remove most of the plants that are on the bogs, but after restoration, a lot of plants grow that were not planted. We are interested in where those plants come from and whether they are growing from seeds stored in the seed bank. In fall 2019, I (with help from several wonderful folks) collected A LOT of soil. I collected samples from the top layer of soil at several former cranberry farms, and I also collected samples from deep under the surface that dated from before the wetlands were turned into farms. When covid delayed my plans, all that soil took up a lot of refrigerator space for a year and a half. It was exciting to finally get the soil into pots and in the greenhouse in April. We kept the soil in some of the pots wet, some dry, and some underwater. Plants grew! Differentiating between different graminoids (grass-like plants) when they’re small is hard! Counting and identifying graminoids underwater is especially hard! All in all, 30 species grew from the seed bank seeds. In the field we see >100 species at some sites, but some species do not predominantly grow from seed or have seeds that do not persist in the seed bank. The most germination was in the wet pots and the least was in the dry pots. Soil from the surface of the bogs had many more viable seeds than pre-farming soil from deep below the surface. We still have more conclusions to draw from this seed bank study, but it is interesting to see the number and diversity of viable seeds in the top 30 cm of soil that was applied by the cranberry farmers. Spreadsheets are what now remains of this study. As I’m working through all the data this winter, I’ll be thinking about counting plants while listening to music in a nice, warm greenhouse.
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