I set up the WHOLE experiment (with a student worker's help) today.

Outside of teaching an hour-and-a-half lab, it was the ONLY thing I did today.

But it's done. And I'm glad. The hard part of it is over. Now all I need to do is monitor the seeds each day, record germination and growth, water them, and weekly give half of them doses of the putative allelopathic chemical, and half of them doses of deionized water (as a control; the chemical is mixed in deionized water).

I'm fairly proud of my design, considering I knew next to nothing about this type of experimentation a couple months ago. I did a LOT of reading of background, especially the controversies involved with this type of experimentation, and came up with a simple factorial design that will answer (hopefully) a couple different questions and yet is fairly applicable to the "real world" (in that I am using 'real' soil from a site infested with the plant, and from a site free of it).

And I even know the best way (I think) to analyze it: a simple chi-square. (I tend to think it's better to set up experiments so you know what analysis to do - and simpler analyses are better if possible, rather than setting up experiments and then agonizing over how to analyze the data in the end.)

If this gives interesting results, I'll present it at next summer's prairie conference. (Which will make 10 years' worth of prairie conferences - they are biannual - that I've presented at. It's a little thing, but I'm kind of proud of it.)