My first post-college job was as a lab assistant at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. This was a very cool job. It looked great on my resume. It sounded impressive. I beat 200+ applicants to get it.
The reality of this job was:
I got to commute across San Diego morning rush hour traffic
I got to work in a place that looked like this:
and this:
I got to set up, carry out, and analyze a couple of really cool experiments for a post- doc's work.
I spent the majority of my working time starting thousands of seeds.
Obviously that job wasn't my first time seed starting (I'd grown gardens before and worked in a plant lab as an undergrad), but it was the first time in my life that seed starting was my primary task for days on end.
You learn a lot of tricks, even for really simple tasks, when you do them over and over again. Read on to hear about some of the techniques that I've carried over into my flower growing.
The Tiny Seed Problem
If you have ever seen any flower farmers discussing seed starting, you've probably seen that some of the most loved varieties of flowers have tiny, tiny, seeds.
Snapdragons, for example, have itty bitty seeds.
The species of plant that we worked with in the lab also has tiny seeds. When you are setting plants up for experiments, it really matters that seeds end up where you want them to, we always used the toothpick method to place those tiny seeds into their flats.
The toothpick method is simple; you just use a wet toothpick to pick up the tiny seed, and then set it down on the moist potting soil. Using this method you can make sure that you're placing a seed exactly where you mean to. This is a great way to make sure that you don't miss any spots in your flat, and also to be certain that you only place 1-2 seeds down, not 10.
This can be a real life saver for things that you need planted perfectly, expensive seeds, something you don't have a ton of. I've used this technique every year in my flower growing, and while it does take longer, it is actually a very relaxing task.
Thinning the Herd
Lately, because I have three little kids and time to work on tasks is short-lived and hard to come by, I have been forgoing the more correct toothpick planting to instead just tap tap the seed packet over each pot. Like how you plant carrots.
Like carrots, however, this will result in miniature forests inside each of those pots as all of those seeds germinate and put up seedlings. Fortunately, the other task that I spent whole weeks at work doing was thinning plants. Everyone who has ever gardened knows about thinning, but it was a task I really struggled with. Not because it is difficult, but because the emotional toll of pulling out perfectly good baby plants who were just trying to grow was real.
After several hours in the grow room at Salk, you sort of get over it. I culled thousands of plants, heaping their bodies on paper towels destined for the autoclave. The surviving plants were able to grow and thrive in their absence.
To Avoid Confusion
In the lab, it is crucial that everything is labeled so that others know exactly what it is, who made it, and when. For our plants there wasn't a risk of explosions, but we were planting dozens of flats at a time of identical plants. If we didn't know which was which we could ruin an experiment, or even contaminate a seed line.
Correctly labeling my seed starts wasn't something that vegetable gardener Amber had really bothered to do, on the basis that a tomato was obviously a tomato and not a cucumber. As a flower grower, however, that idea isn't as true. We're often growing multiple cultivars of the same species, and a Benary's Giant Zinnia isn't visibly different then a Queen Lime Red Zinnia until they bloom. I consider labeling to be one of the best habits I took with me out of the lab, even if I do have to restrain myself from putting my initials on my own trays.
If you are going to mix more than one plant or variety in a single tray, something that we did in the lab to correct for other variables, and something I do with flowers to save space and because I don't need 2 full trays of Apricot Statice, then a flat map is also a useful tool.
For experiment plants, I used to assign a number to each line (variety/cultivar) and then randomly fill in the blocks on an excel sheet to match the space in my flat. For flowers this is usually simpler; I can't imagine why you would need your different varieties randomly placed. Sometimes this can be as simple as writing on a sheet of paper which side is which variety, though if you are doing more than 2 varieties in one tray it will be helpful to map out what is in every row. Labels are pretty easily lost. Sharpie washes or fades out. Having a backup copy of what is in each tray can be a lifesaver-- particularly if they have different plant out schedules.
Some Things Never Change
It's spring now, and that means that I am once again spending most of my "working" hours starting seeds. For the next few weeks I will be washing and filling flats, placing seeds, thinning seedlings, and watching for true leaves. On paper this is a very different direction of work, but I took so many "lab" skills with me out into flowers, and if I ever go back into research I know that there is so much I would carry from here. There's a lot that is done differently in the two worlds, but also a lot that translates.
The grow rooms were really cold, though, and now I can start seeds in the sun if I want to.
Who knew science and flowers had so much in common! So interesting to read