sketchbook pages 2

And some fenugreek seeds,
 

I've put these pages up big because I'm trying to perfect scanning and file compression combinations so you get the maximum wandering about inside a picture without being a horrid big file, though I think Blogger makes you download things before you can do that nowadays.  (Feel free, by all means, if it tickles your fancy, everything I post here is on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License, so you're welcome to do a mash-up with it and a photo of Prince Charles and a big potato, print it out onto stickers for your children to decorate their toy tractors and your nest of occasional tables with, but not so welcome to use it as advertising imagery for your new line in industrial-strength Cheesey Whoosits.)
 
Not there yet, it's very hard to reproduce any idea of the materiality of watercolour work using just photons, half the magic is in the mud, you see.

Time for some more not-science

Well,  here we are again with the marmite and the paint and the test-tubes and stuff.  It's because I want to draw some fenugreek, or methi, or Trigonella foenum-graecum, another beautiful and useful and fragrant plant.

I'm trying to get these fellas (fenugreek seeds) to grow, they sprout a bit and then die after about five days. So while I'm planting them out,  I'm wondering if I can encourage them to nodulate with their bacterial pals...

Do you like my Blue Peter Scool of Laboratory Equipment Test Tube Racks? And my fantastically inappropriate test tubes? I was going to make some agar to grow my seed in but the pressure cooker is full of chicken soup, maybe some other day....

So I got some of the soil and nodules and roots from some local sweetclover to see if I could innoculate my seeds' substrates. When it comes to the favourite flavour of bacteria, both plants are partial to a Sinorhizobium meliloti, I hear.

And here is my nonsense on the windowsill. In good company with the Winogradsky columns.

See the little purple one there? That's with the cobalt blue-violet paint, a tasty snack for S. meliloti.

Nonsense, like I say, I'm expecting my seeds to survive for another four or five days and then die.

Although as  a backup plan I might have a look at the sweetclover or Melilotis officinalis, which I've taken a real shine to on account of its gorgeous perfume and ability to sieze a shitty habitat. 

Here it is doing its phytoremediation work on the ash dump at Musselburgh.