Wednesday, April 30, 2008


Chickpeas and allelopathy- a homegrown experiment

I germinated some chickpeas together with various types of beans ( broadbeans, french beans, mungbeans) in a large pot. After about 6 weeks the chickpeas are flourishing and seem to get bigger every day. They are about 20cm tall at this stage. The beans however seem to be struggling.. could this be the effect of secondary metabolites? Some of the beans look like they have been infested with a virus of some sort. Beans I germinated at the same time and planted seperately are about 3 times the size as those growing together with the chickpeas! They look healthy.. I have removed all the struggling bean plants and hope they will survive..
Daffodils look pretty.But they can be vicious defenders of their territory.

Garlic in our garden:
There are hardly any weeds
growing around it. Wild garlic: wherever it grows,it is very abundant and little else can grow around it
















This is a patch adjacent to the garlic in the garden. A lot more weeds grow here. This could be an effect of secondary metabolites used by the garlic..
The Ginger apparently had no or little effect on the lettuce seeds..The walnut however prevented all of them from germinating!
Similarly, the daffodil extrect had a strong effect: No germination!
Some seeds germinated despite of the garlic extract. They didn't grow very well though.



These are two different results for coriander..one with the seeds growing happily, the other with no growth at all. This could be due to different parts of the plant used, maybe someone forgot to add water or maybe there was a mistake meisuring the extract.
The controls show how the seeds grow without impact from plant extracts.


An experiment investigating the inhibitory effects of plant compounds on lettuce seeds