One aspect of our experiment involves adding inoculum to the roof
garden soils to stimulate fungal growth. The inoculum we are using is
soil collected from a prairie. This soil contains fungal spores and
hyphae that may not be present in the roof garden soils of our main
experiment.
At the end of our main experiment, to see if adding
the inoculum changed the amount of mychorrizal relationships, we must
have a base line measure of the fungal growth of the uninoculated soils.
We are using corn in our MIP experiment.
The
first step of the MIP procedure was germinating the corn seeds. We used
certified organic corn seeds because we don't want there to be any
anti-fungal herbicide on the corn. We used deionized water in the
germinating stage to avoid adding any extraneous contaminants to the
developing plants.
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| Corn kernels half immersed in water. |
After two days , the seed coats began to split and the first root, called the radical, began to emerge.
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| Root radicals emerging from the seeds. |
We chose the seeds with the most developed radicals for our MIP experiment and planted them in our conetainers.
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| Planting germinated corn kernels. |
At the end of our MIP experiment, we will study the roots under a
microscope and score the amount of mychorrizal relationships between the
fungus and the corn roots.
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| Mychorrizal Infection Potential setup after one week. |
