Week Three!

This week went by quickly. I began making tea from sunflowers on Tuesday and had some concerns about the amount of plant material I had after drying the sunflowers. I had about 2 grams of material from the disk florets and around 7 grams from the inner part of the sunflower. So, we decided to use a ratio of 2 grams of material for every 20 milliliters of water to make our tea. After letting the sunflower components soak in the water for two days, I extracted the tea using coffee filters, which wasn't the best choice because the filters absorbed a lot of the liquid. I tried to squeeze out as much water as possible but only got about 10 milliliters of tea from each specimen. Then, I placed the nutsedge in four Petri dishes, layered them with filter paper, and watered each one with the different teas, reserving one as our control with just water. Josh had doubts about whether the nutsedge would sprout since we had removed them the previous week, and they had dried out. We'll see the results on Monday. To avoid any issues with the incubator, we left the specimens in the lab over the weekend, hoping they wouldn't dry out. Next week, we plan to gather more sunflowers from the garden and fresh nutsedge to repeat the experiment if needed. It's all about trial and error! :)