We have to study the root anatomy of almost 480 plants, 80 plants after every 2 months for 1 year. Kindly suggest whether should we plant the seedlings in pot in greenhouse or in experimental plots in natural conditions? Which will give us better results.
What sort of plants are you growing? Corn or Arabidopsis? What are you measuring? Root length, mass, branching structure? What do you mean by "better": recovering all the root, or maintaining a typical architecture?
If it is a large species, then you might need large pots, tons of soil and many bays of greenhouse space. That is potentially expensive, but you'll find all the roots when you sample them.
If it is a small species, growing in soil plots risks losing the outer roots when you dig them up as they could grow much further than you expect. It will be more work sampling and transporting back to the lab.
@ Matthew Wheal
We are planning to work on 1 year old oaks! We are trying to look into some root anatomical parameters and measurements of quantitative attributes like root vessel diameter, frequency, stele diameter etc.
So, I am mainly interested in the main root of the entire tap root system of the plant to cut sections!
With better, I mean better and clearer sections from roots is my main goal in order to study the anatomy.
But I am not sure, which technique of planting will be more feasible so that the plants survive all throughout the year(in extreme weather conditions) and the sampling of roots be relatively easier?
It's definitely a "realism vs. feasibility" tradeoff. Growing them in pots with loose soil will make extracting roots much easier, but the shape of the root system can be strongly affected by pot shape and size and soil texture.
Multiple seedling containers in a greenhouse might work (see picture attached). Of course, you would have to adjust the spacing, as I was using those for other purposes.
Open field is always prefered. Also depends on type of plant, duration, and purpose.
I think open field condition will give you the actual phenomenon in vivo. You can bore deep hole in the field, fill it with convenient material (light soil) and when you want to take the data, you can ball them out. You can dig around the plant, deep and then you can take the plants easily. Since you're interested in the tap root, dig the hole, place a PVC tube up to 1 m long, fill it with growing media and grow your seedlings. You Can simply pull your plants whenever you need them.
The plants in greenhouse and in pots can only remain around 4 months, afterwards as mentioned there is deterioration in the roots and the substrate degrades. However, it depends on the objective pursued, because in these conditions the plants will be better cared for than in the field. Likewise, both methods can be combined and are valid. In the field, its root system will develop better and consequently the aerial part, but they will be subject to climatic and herbivore threats
I have experience with growing oaks from seed. We always stratified the acorns in a refrigerator or left them outside over the winter. Because we were interested in plating the roots later, we planted in Turface MVP, a calcined fired Montmorillonite clay soil conditioner that allows the roots to be cleaned easily. However, that's highly artificial, and our root anatomical properties would not be anything like what they would be growing in a forest soil. As Dr. Ribiero suggests, you would need pots designed for plants with a strong taproot, and his suggestion of surrounding the pots with a buffering soil is a good one, but roots will escape through the bottom and make sampling difficult. Oaks would be strongly affected by seasonality, so if you grew them in a greenhouse it would have to be an unheated one. I really think you would do better with outside plots, but I don't know what you are studying.
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