A Day in the Greenhouse

An average day in Rausher Labs is full of bags of soil, bright blooming flowers, and soggy wet floors. I start my days in our office space. I am always greeted by my mentor Jonathan Colen around 10:00 is every morning, 11 am on programming days. Then, we walk down to the greenhouse for our first tasks of the day, flower scoring, detangling, and seed collection. Morning glories are beautiful flowers, but one of the most annoying things about them is their ridiculous need to get tangled with each other. Because we don’t want cross-pollination, we detangle the flowers one by one every morning. As we do this, we also inspect each plant for seeds. These seeds will be used in the field for the field experiment later on in the summer.
Around halfway through detangling my mentor goes back to the office to work while I finish up collecting seeds. Once I am done in the greenhouse, the next stop is the growth room. The growth room is filled with our young morning glories that have yet to set flowers. Here I water the plants, detangle them, and if any of ready to be transplanted, I transplant them into bigger pots.
By the time I am done in both the greenhouse and growth room, it is usually around 3 pm. On Fridays, after work, my mentor and I have paper discussions over past papers done on our topic. After that, we usually walk back to the office and break for the day.