Dakota Gardener: Lucky Shamrocks

Mar 15, 2024

By Kelsey Deckert

Do you love to partake in St. Patrick’s Day festivities? Many of us do, whether it is simply wearing green, setting up leprechaun traps with your kids or enjoying a green beer!

There are many traditions associated with this Irish celebration, such as finding a shamrock that will bring you good luck. Legend has it that St. Patrick used shamrocks for teaching the Holy Trinity.

In the month of March, shamrocks can be easily found at local greenhouses and nurseries. What exactly is a shamrock? Have you ever found a three- or four-leaf clover in the landscape?

Shamrock is an Irish word that means little clover, though it is unrelated to clover. Shamrocks are a species of Oxalis, also known as woodsorrels. If you see a shamrock in your yard it is most likely yellow woodsorrel. Unless you are trying to incorporate more pollinators in your landscape or are a low-maintenance gardener, it is considered a weed.

Yellow woodsorrel has thin, green stems and may take root where the nodes touch the ground. It also has dainty yellow flowers that can attract pollinators.

The shamrocks that are sold in local greenhouses are different varieties of Oxalis that make great houseplants. Most have three or four leaflets. The leaves come in shades of green, red or purple. They also have flowers that can be white, yellow, pink or red.

Shamrocks are easy to care for preferring slightly moist, well-drained soils. They do best in bright, indirect light with cool nighttime temperatures. Their leaves may even fold inward at night or on an overcast day.

If you have a shamrock houseplant, you will want to fertilize monthly while it’s actively growing. After a few months the plants will start to decline and go dormant. When you notice the leaves are starting to die back, stop watering and allow the leaves to dry out and turn brown. Remove the dead leaves and place your shamrock in a cool, dark spot for 2 to 3 months depending on the variety for a rest period. After the rest period, move the container back to a bright window and begin watering and fertilizing. Sometimes you may need to repot the shamrock.

With St. Patrick’s Day upon us, consider getting a “shamrock” to bring some luck to your life or just to simply enjoy this wonderful houseplant.

Source : ndsu.edu

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.