I went into the greenhouses and cleaned up all the leaves and debris left behind by the large trees that I previously removed. Tim and his kids helped me deconstruct all the benches, remove them. I put all the plants on the floor and selected around 90 of each of the three available species (Pisonia, Tournefortia, Scaevola). Within each species I selected plants that were about the same size and health. The Pisonia were much larger than the other two species, so I was not able to make sure that sizes were similar between species.
I wrote out all the tags for 80 Pisonia, 80 Tournefortia, 80 Scaevola, and 80 Cocos. I used a black permanent marker, which I hope won't wear off or fade. Just in case I wrote the labels on both sides of each tag. Labels were abbreviated in this manner:
Pisonia number one, high nutrients = HP1
Cocos number 12, medium nutrients = MC12
Scaevola number 3, low nutrients = LS3
etc...
High, Medium and Low nutrient treatments were assigned different colored tags as well (orange = high, purple = medium, green = low).
I mixed up all the tags, placed all the Pisonia in five rows, then moved down each row, assigning each plant a random Pisonia tag. The trees were then moved to the middle of the cleared floor of GH5.
Tim and his helpers also mixed up 70 pots of sand in the new and improved manner (double pots, staggered drainage holes, bottomed with perlite. The first 12 pots used vermiculite that was slightly finer than the remaining pots. It seemed like the size of the vermiculite wouldn't matter too much as long as it was relatively close. Even so, I marked the pots that contained the smaller vermiculite in case there is any difference.
I recollected samples from from the test plots and took them to Herrin and Y2E2. I started a second round of KCl and P resin extracts. That actually took most of the day due to all the washing, labeling, shaking, cleaning etc involved.
9.5 hours
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