Conclusion to the first three experiments

All 13 plants eventually withered and died.  Once they'd died I cleaned the soil off and found that none of them had put down roots, that the shooting tip of a Rubus plant has the power for upward growth but not downward growth.

This is good.  I know something about brambles now that I didn't know before.  As they say: failure is always an option.

Moving forward then.  For the next batch of experiments (2014 at the earliest) I'll need to graft a shoot onto a root before burying.  Grafting on that sort of small scale is incredibly fiddly and up to now I've only ever made one plant graft in my life.  For now then, I suppose I had better get some practice in.

Rubus 1 is finished

The Rubus 1 group was crippled on Christmas Eve by slime moulds which drained the nutrients from the soil, withering the leaves and leaving them with blackened stems.  There's nothing I can do within the parameters of the experiment to revive them, but nor do I want to let them die.  For the purposes of the experiment, the Rubus 1 cohort is "dead".  If I keep them in the experiment then they'll die anyway, so it all comes to the same as far as the experiments are concerned.  I'll give them some intensive care, maybe I'll try using a UV lamp to nuke the fungus, but anything I do to correct this will mean they cannot be admitted to the study from this point on.

No other plants moved up a rounding bound over Christmas.

The last meal

All the plants got a treat today in the form of some 4:2:6 in their water.  For Rosie and Jim however, this'll be the last input they get from me.  Tomorrow they'll have to face December outside.

Brilliant news

The bud on the top of Tilly 2 has erupted into what is the start of being a small shoot of its own!  A plant which was starved of nutrients and water might have difficulty bringing a bud to shoot, so this suggests that I haven't pointlessly killed thirteen shoots from my bramble.  Biology has its nasty side - a natural consequence of experimenting on live organisms - so it's always nice when you can see that the experiment is definitely going to go forward without any unnecessary suffering or death.

Pics of the bud will be posted here just as soon as I find my camera.