Seeds!

Thursday 5th November 2020

What a great day today. The sun was out and we were able to spend several hours on a practical exercise. The Millennium Seed bank has given 25,000 seeds of Spreading Hedge-Parsley to the university to use for some research. It is on the Red List of endangered species, we will be researching its germination, flowering and production of seeds in various arable environments - over a 3 year period. We spent the first few hours picking out the seeds by tweezer to get 50 seeds to a packet! Then we went out the field near my cottage which has been planted with a variety of crops - we set out various 3m squared transects and sowed the seeds. We were doing the planting with a few students from the second year - really interesting to talk to them. Their year group was 8 - we are about 25! They had a quite high drop out rate - about 3 of the 8 dropped out or have not been seen for a while! But the proportions of mature and part time students was roughly the same. Interesting difference - is it because wildlife conservation is becoming more recognized? or that Covid has made people rethink what is important? Its not clear - but it is great that more people are making a career in conservation.