EKU students put seeds into the grow bags.
On March 7, Dr. Jennifer Koslow, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at EKU, volunteered 15 students in her “Chestnuts and Change in Appalachia” class to plant 426 chestnut seeds. The course is comprised of students in EKU’s Honor’s College who are not science majors, but are earning their laboratory science credits while partnering with TACF. Keith Chasteen, Paul Finke, and Ken Darnell of the KY-TACF Chapter joined the EKU Team to assist and to learn about this new planting process.
Dr. Koslow coordinated with TACF Mid-Atlantic Regional Science Coordinator, Tom Saielli, to test new grow bag containers. Tom advised that the grow bags require more planting medium than the standard plastic planting tubes, requiring larger planting holes to be augured in the EKU Orchard. The larger planting bags will allow larger seedlings to grow in the greenhouse. These seedlings will be large enough to conduct small stem assays this summer. The grow bags are also a fraction of the cost of the rigid plastic one gallon containers used in some other plantings.
The goal of the small stem assays is to assess the cankers of the containerized seedlings and only select the few best, most blight-tolerant specimens to plant in the EKU Orchard, which is a partnership between EKU and the KY-TACF Chapter. This procedure increases the work to plant the seeds, but reduces the work at the orchard.
The seeds for this planting came from Dr. Martin Cipollini, Dana Professor of Biology at Berry College in Georgia, as have many other chestnuts in the EKU Orchard.
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