html> Lostvestige: My Fern Clones

My Fern Clones

I have two fern clones...

Four years ago in school I took a cell culture class and one of our projects was to make clones from a fern my teacher had and record their growth all semester. It was my favorite thing I have ever done in school and I loved my little ferns so much I wanted to keep them! 

They have grown so much in the past few years.


To clone a fern you just snip a piece off one of the runners they put out, sterilize it so it can't catch any diseases and then put it in sterile growth media and watch it grow!  I couldn't resist adding pictures of my lab notebook, my notes crack me up. 
There's also tons of typos, eek! I was also a little wild that semester and wrote all my notes with a calligraphy pen. My hand writing doesn't normally look like that.



Steven had looked through my notebook and found it amusing.







 I don't think anyone had ever taken their ferns home with them before, but I couldn't imagine leaving them behind!  Before I brought them home I had to transfer them to new media on the last day of class after the final exam (probably why no one ever took theirs home before!)  luckily my teacher happened to have some laying around and made up some fresh tubes for me! When I got them home they lived on my bedside table for the next year :)


Here they are after a few months of growth in their new tubes. The top one if fern 1, and then bottom one is fern 2. 


When they were big enough it was time to plant them in soil, what an exciting day! I found these little plastic containers that acted as perfect little greenhouses. Since the ferns were so used to living in a high moisture environment, it would have been too much of a shock to just plant them in a pot right out of the test tube. 

 Here they are in their first pots! Fern 1 is on the left and fern 2 is one the right. It's funny how fern 1 has always been more long and straggly, and fern 2 has always been a leafy mess. I've always been able to tell them apart! 

And here they are now, enjoying the summer on my front porch!


Fern 1



And fern 2. I still remember when I bent the runner in half trying to get it in the media for the first time. I thought it would die for sure, but it ended up being the stronger of the two!

I love my ferns and I still can't believe I grew these little guys from a test tube!




Labels: , , ,