Here’s a picture of a Stipa seedling in the Common Garden. I’m about to create a form for entering data on our seedlings. We are debating if we should count and measure each leaf or count leaves and measure the length of just the longest leaf. Most of our time will be spent finding the plants and/or the toothpicks that we put in to mark them. So, taking the measurements of each leaf shouldn’t add that much time. Any thoughts?
Stuart and I did an initial investigation of about 30 locations where Stipa was planted. We found plants at 40-50% of the locations! Caroline, what was your estimate for germination of these seeds?
Wow, Gretel, great photo! Based on some old literature, we expected less than 10% germination of cold stratified seeds. Looks like that might be exceeded in the CG!
I think anything you chose to measure will be great, new data for this species. Measuring just one leaf might be less manipulation of the seedlings, though, which from the photo look pretty delicate.