Knotting and gardening

I got home yesterday from the genomics meeting and Thairo is leaving for the field for a few weeks tomorrow. So what are we doing for our one day together? Gardening and practicing knots. My favorite website of the day has good animations for tying knots. We marked out the square feet for the garden which now has over a ton of compost. The plan was to plant peas, beans, edemame, and some lettuce today but it's fairly cold so we held off on any planting.


We also got the netting made and up for the beans in the front yard using an alpine butterfly and sheet bend. It doesn't look too bad, if this whole research thing doesn't work out I think I could tie net good enough to catch a few fish.

Coolest talk so far today

Today has been really interesting so far. The first talk was pretty interesting-whole genome comparison of 3 strains of a single bacterial species. But the second talk was about a massive sequencing effort guided by phylogenetics rather than peoples favorite organism.

Curling Binge

I've gotten to watch a draw each night this week, whahoo. Today Manitoba beat Newfoundland/Labrador and are now playing Ontario. Tomorrow is the final. It's almost too much. Actually we had played with the idea of going to see the World Juniors which is being played just a few miles from our house, but decided that really would be too much curling.

The garden plan

This past week we've been working on the garden (ok, he's been working, I've been thinking). Our little urban garden has gotten fairly big. I think that we are now pretty happy about the size of the garden and the number of plants we can have. So, we'll have two 4x4 foot beds, one 4x15 bed, and four containers.


Here's the plan, each square is one square foot. We're going to build trellises (trelli?) out of 1x2 pine boards for the tomatoes and peas.

We're trying replicate tomatoes, one of each variety in a single square foot and one in 2 square feet. That still doesn't seem like much room for a plant but apparently if we keep them pruned to just one or two main branches they'll be fine.

I love contour plots

Thairo and I went over to the island for the past 2 days. I hung out in a dark room watching presentations from a chunk of people that work on the same transect. It was really interesting and I learned tons. I also found that we really are doing something new, working on the bacteria and archaea. And I have to say, contour plots are cool.
Here's a nice one showing oxygen in the Pacific. The y axis is depth. x is latitude so south on the left, north on the right. Yellow is low oxygen and blue is high oxygen. Pretty graph.

Garden is started

Quick garden update while the last few analyses run. Thairo planted tomato, pepper, and chili seeds that we had left over from last year. Some of the tomato sprouts were visible today: brandywine, purple calabash, and a mexican midget. We have an improvised nursery set up using a heating pad, aluminum foil, and a grow bulb. So far it seems that the heating pad is working, last year the mexican midget's took several weeks to sprout. The layout for the garden is still a work in progress but I'll post it once we have a reasonable draft done. We're trying square foot gardening this year, stay tuned for reports on how that's working out.