For my graduate project I am working under the supervision of Dr. Leonard Eaton and Dr. Vasantha Rupasinghe. My project is to look at the effects local weather conditions have on blueberry ripening. The project is being done in hopes of giving producers an idea of how long fields remain in an optimal harvestable state.
Because I came into this project as a summer student, I thought I would give you some idea of how the project is being carried out
My summer started with painting 1500 tags five different colours, red, yellow, orange, pink and white. Yes I painted white tags white. This was done to stiffen the tags and ensure that the marker didn’t bleed through.
In early April we went out and installed the weather station and chose the clones we would monitor. The weather stations monitor solar radiation, precipitation, soil temperature, and canopy temperature. The pink flags in the picture below mark the location of the tagged clones. The Weather station is visiable in the centre of the photo.
We also took soil moisture readings each time we went to the field.
In Mid-April when the blueberries were flowering we went out and tagged the stems.
Over ten sample dates, six stems from each of the five clones in each of the five fields were collected. As the season progressed it became harder to find the tags. Look in this next picture, can you spot the tag?
Back at the lab I measured the diameter of each berry, grouped them into colour groups, determined the weight and volume of the colour groups and measured the firmness of the blue blueberries.
The next few pictures show you the progression of blueberry ripening over the summer.
This winter I will be testing the grouped berries for chemical traits such as the sugar/ acid ratio, total soluble solids, total phenolic content, and anothcyanin composition.
I will also be entering the reams of data collected in the last year and trying to see if any of the physical and chemical traits correlate with the weather factors.
If you are looking for me I’m probably in some lab playing with chemicals or entering data.