This morning I arrived early with the help of my pass, meaning I could help Louise with the first task of the day, cleaning peas! Although, this didn’t take very long as they weren’t very dirty to begin with. It was quite a fun task really as some of the peas were really pretty up close. This took us to break time where I caught up with the other staff and once again observed the daily crossword challenge!
After the break we headed over to the field trials for this we needed a car as the fields we grow on are about 2 miles away from the main site. Liz hired one of the company cars and drove us all over with our equipment. We were told to bring a jumper as the wind can really pick up in the fields as there’s no protection from buildings to cover us, however, the sun popped out on our way so I hastily applied sun-cream and ditched the jumper in the car.
The first job out in the field was to label the crops with bed, plot and row numbers so that they can be uniquely identified through all stages. This took a long time to go through as the species needs to be identified and checked before we can be certain that it’s labelled properly.
One of the jobs that I was assigned to by Mike Ambrose via email a few months ago was to “photograph reference spikes and upload into the GRUs information management system for a Doubled Haploid mapping population of wheat that was developed to study abiotic stress.” For those non-biologists out there, this basically means that I had to take photos of the labelled species and upload them into a computer database. This involves going through the fields and taking close-up photos. Kneeling down taking the photos, I could see that I may easily get lost beneath the grass!
This job was loads of fun, there were so many different names for the species and some of the seeds were all sorts of different colours, especially the barley species from Ethiopia. Moreover, many of the names of species were probably lost in translation (see right) and proved to be bundles of hilarity!
We drove back to the main site at lunchtime so Louise and I sat down together over our food for a good chat! After our break we drove back to the field site and I continued taking photos while getting a bit of a tan on! When we continued with our work I got the scare of my life, the device used to scare away the birds (see left) is an explosive gas cannister on a random timer so you never get used to it going off! It is extremely loud so I’m going to have to psych myself up for a few more loud bangs through this month!
I can’t wait to continue with my new project and upload all the information into the database for many other scientists to use!
Intern Rachel 