From Shrubs to Grasses (A post from Oliver)

So, I figured it was about time I made a post on our "Online Family History Journal" as I like to call it. So here it goes. WARNING: Be prepared to hear about some boring school stuff!


The first 2 months of the semester I was in a pretty intense Botany class where we dived into the world of woody species of plants of Utah. We learned about 90 species out of the 350 native to the state. It was pretty fun to go on a field trip at least once a week with a Van full of crazy plant loving Utah natives. I'm pretty sure I learned as much about Utah as I did about plants.

As our final project, we had to press and collect at least one species from 30 diferent woody plant families which was pretty challenging, and we couldn't use trees you find in neighborhoods, because those come from nurseries and aren't considered Utah plants. Fall is so beautiful here and I loved getting to spend class time up the canyons. If you need a science credit, I highly recommend taking some sort of field botany class...way fun!

So my class renewed my interest in plants that I've had my whole life, so it wasn't hard for my teacher to convince me to take the next block botany class offered, Intro to Grasses. In the shrubs class we looked at about 50 different FAMILIES of plants, and for the next 8 weeks we'll focus just on one family.....the grass family. It's pretty crazy. It's actually pretty tough to key out grasses to the genus and species and even worse, variety level. We get to use our book on all of our tests, so that's cool. We get to look at all the different parts under the microscope which is kinda fun. No camping or field trips though =(

In my microbio lab last week we took swabs of things around campus and are gonna grow them out in an incubator over the weeekend to see what all is growing on stuff we use every day. Some things we swabbed were: the courtesy phone, the keyboard in the computer lab, the drinking fountain, a doorknob, the men's locker room shower floor (GROSS!) and a PE issue basketball. On Monday I think I'm going to start wearing gloves and a face mask after what we are gonna see.


Next week we are actually gonna swab ourselves (nose, throat, ears, fingernails, etc.). Joy.


Well, hope I didn't bore you too much. Back to tending to our cute litle guys. They are so fun to play with.


Adios. Oliver