Morning Glories: Rock tumbler results, 1 by fchilders

fchilders wrote:
Thanks to the generous spirit of Colin, I had 7 hard shelled species to play with instead of 3 or 4. This experiment was to discover just how much tumbling in a rock tumbler it takes to grind away enough shell for germination to come easy to these hard shelled species..

I really like these little experiments, because they always give you some never dreamed of data. Remember the beans?

In this experiment, I used a common rock tumbler, but I used small snoose cans instead of the larger tumblers, because I could get 10 snoose cans on the tumbler, allowing for a greater number of species. I used #80 silicon carbide grinding grit, and tumbled them for nearly 12 hours.

I carefully weighed each group of seeds, before and after the tumbling and put the data in this table. You will have to enlarge it to read it. It amazed me how much some of the seeds weighed.

It is also interesting that if we had 50 species to do something like this with we could create a hardness scale for those species seeds.

The several species that weighed out at no shell weight loss, did in fact have some weight loss, but it was too small to register on my scale, which is sensitive to 1 miligram. Enjoy Frank