Preparing Culture No 32 (M32)

Went to the lab tonight and assisted Hj Naza to fill up the bottles with M32. M32 was prepared using new Peptone and Bulbos like it! How's the progress from the sowed seeds? Quite slow... Zzzz

Purchased ACA from Hourai

So many plans this weekend but somehow managed to go to Hourai to pick up the ACA. This chemical, 500ml, costs me RM700! Duuhhh...

Went to the lab tonight and just fill up the record book. Only sowed 3 species... perghh so slow!

Not very productive...

Visitors from Sabah

Cikgu Abas and his wife, Kak Siti came to KL since last week. He attended OUM Convocation on the weekend and dropped by at Seremban since yesterday, visiting his friend Richard Ng at Mantin and also planning to visit few nurseries around here. I fetched him at the hotel and we had breakfast with Hj Naza at Ampangan. Cikgu Abas is an orchid collector who has explored many jungles in Sabah and Sarawak. I've ordered orchids from him few times and planning to go into jungle with him in the near future.

Lab Update

Nothing much! Hj Naza is still sowing orchid seeds. There are so many of them and this may take weeks to complete. From these mother flasks we will cultivate hundreds if not thousands more flasks. So far we are using 3 types of media, M39, M16 and M26k. Seeds sown using M39 were mostly burst seed pods and ACA used has already expired. Thus, there is not much progress. But most 'green seed pods' (not burst yet) show good progress. They are sown without using ACA. So can it be that expired ACA is not effective anymore?

Keeping Proper Record of Lab Work

Went to the lab tonight and keyed in data into laptop for orchid seeds that have been sowed in flasks. So far we have sowed about 21 species starting on 23 may 2012.

Before... from this ancient book

Now... looks better and easy to read

M39 Status... Unsuccessful?!

Hmmm... it has been more than 10 days and the spore has not yet germinated. What's the reason? What went wrong? I know that there are few things that we did not really follow closely i.e. testing using filtered water instead of distilled water. Using expired ACA. Are there any other factors that we have overlooked? Perhaps low lighting or not enough lighting hour? We have rectified that issues for M09 and we'll see the difference later.

Talking about contamination, Mikail said usually there will be 10%-15% chances of contamination. How about ours? For M39, so far there are 32 contaminated flasks. That is about 16% and can be considered very high. We must be careful with the next batch.

We talked to Reen (from Hourai) about ordering new ACA. 500ml of ACA costs about RM700! Wow.. that's expensive but what can we do.. we need it!

Will it germinate?

Contaminated flasks from M39

Cleaning up Front Porch for Future Shelves Area 2

Horay! Today we finished clean up the porch. Though there are still some more works to do but the temporary shelf / table can be placed before the real one later.

This will do for now..

While walking in the nursery, I wonder whether Durio can be used as culture medium? Sounds crazy but perhaps possible .. who knows?

Hmmmm.. yummy!

All types of banana can be used as medium

Wait until it naturally ripens

Looks delicious!

Sowing Seed Using Culture Medium No 16 (M16)

Hj Naza made another medium for seed germination - M16. Starting from M09, we used distilled water instead of filtered water. We suspected that the first medium was unsuccessful due to few factors such as using filtered water and expired ACA. Hopefully this one will produce good result!

Hmm.. should be ok this time, inshaallah!

For trial..placed near window for natural light