Bicarbonate extractable soil phosphorus

The procedure for extracting phosphate looks more difficult than that for nitrates :(

OH NO!! Someone took these super helpful videos off of youtube! I can't find any replacements either. Uber sad face!

KCl extractable soil nitrate

Susanna and I are working on writing a protocol to extract ions from soil particles
into a solution that can then be analyzed by the ion chromatograph. This
guy from UCDavisIPO seems to know what he's doing. I am posing this
video for my as well as your benefit.


OH NO!! Someone took these super helpful videos off of youtube! I can't find any replacements either. Uber sad face!

This is the Ion Chromatograph:

The Ion Chromatograph.

Welcome to Frustration City, State of Aggravation. Population: 2, Susanna and myself. We have the exciting task of figuring out how to bend the will of this machine to our desires. Susanna, pouring over manuals and guides, and I, sifting through books and surfing the web, are searching for the answers.

High-precision Analytical Balance

On my first day, one of my tasks was assembling and calibrating this $7,500 analytical balance. I was so excited. Balances like this are by far my favorite laboratory equipment. It was shipped so neatly packed, as to be expected. It took me over an hour to set up and calibrate it but was completely worth it. This thing is accurate to 1mg. That's 0.001g! Astounding!

$7,500 analytical balance.

Before: crazy.

After: clean.

Also on the first day of the internship, Susanna and I unpacked and organized all of the equipment into the new lab space.


On the plus side, I was given my own lab workstation to use.

My humble workspace. 

Pre-internship work

The sedum and native prairie plants that we are going to use for our experiment arrived several weeks ago and needed to be planted quite a while before the start of the internship. And so, we planted them in their respective roof garden trays as the experimental design dictated.

Planting the native species in a predetermined random configuration.

Sedum species planted to cover about 80% of the soil.

I proceeded to water the trays until the start of the internship. I felt rather silly watering the empty, control trays, but it was necessary. The experiment, and really every experiment, need to have a control group as a base line to compare with the treatment groups. The empty trays, containing only soil and inoculum, act as our control groups.

Watering the sedum as well as the empty, control trays.