Nathan Xavier
August 09, 2020 6:51 PM
Intermediates: Grafting by Nathan Xavier
The spring term had begun with the excitement of a baby shower for his impending second child, and then got a little too exciting when Felipe was excused from classes for undisclosed reasons for a week or so, but now in mid February, things seemed to be settling down again. The weather was bitter cold yet, and Isis was sleeping even less well than earlier in the term, and he was jumping for the floo powder every time she so much as groaned, because her due date was getting close enough that an early arrival was no longer completely outside the realm of possibility, but other than that, the school routine was back in full swing.CATS prep for the fifth years was well underway, and he was handing back the practice written part as they arrived today, along with the mini-research essays the third and fourth years had been assigned to write at the same time.
"Good afternoon, Intermediates," he greeted them, summoning up a smile that was genuine, if a bit tired looking. "You all did reasonably well on those essays and practice exams from Tuesday, please look at the notes I left on your papers for things you could do to improve for next time." For the fifth years, that generally involved suggesting chapters in their textbooks to review that covered some of their more glaring mistakes, and for the younger students, he had given advice on how to improve upon their essay writing skills, which varied anywhere from 'please cite your sources' to recommending more advanced analysis techniques for those he thought could step up to higher critical thinking levels in their work.
"Today, we'll be moving into the final unit of new material before we start focusing on year end review and more intense CATS prep for the fifth years. We're going to learn about grafting. Does anyone know what that is?"
He took a few answers from the class and awarded points for correct answers. "Good. Grafting is a muggle technique that allows different plants to be combined. There are several reasons people might want to do this, including faster propagation for commercial harvests, faster hybrid breeding, repair of damaged plants, improved health, cosmetic looks, and more. We'll go into those in more detail over the next weeks."
"Wizards have expanded upon this technique, and we have a potion here," he used his wand to distribute small vials of it to each student, "that help the process along. Grafting involves the two tissues growing together, and this potion makes that happen faster and across a wider variety of plants. Muggles are limited to grafting related species to each other, but with this potion, wizards can graft any two plants together."
"So today, you're going to find two plants and learn how to do a simple splice graft. This is where you cut each stem to the same shape, usually at a diagonal for more surface area. You apply the potion to each cut, and press them together. Splint the area, wrap it in gauze. Wait two minutes then check your work. You should see that the two stems have knitted together already. Raise your hand when yours is ready. You may use any of the plants you see here in Greenhouse One." The shelves along the west wall had potted flowers of many varieties, the south wall had a few small potted fruit trees, the east wall had shelves with various herbs and vegetables and plants important in potion making. The north wall had some ornamental bushes. Other plants that didn't quite meet any of those categories were mixed in throughout. Nothing was overtly dangerous, though of course some of the flowers had thorns, the cactii had spines, and any number of the plants would be poisonous if ingested.
"Third years, you may want to start with similar species, especially cactuses, as they generally have the best chance of success. Remember to wear your gloves if working with prickly plants. Fifth years, you may chose wildly different plants if you like, but be sure their stems are the same size at the connection point and make your cuts clean and even. If you can line up the xylem vessels, that would help, as growing those together properly is usually the greatest point of failure, and the slowest process when done without magic. Once you have all see it work, we're going to talk about what's happening at the cellular level, but that'll wait. You may work together if you like for this practical. Raise your hand if you're having trouble. Please only take small cuttings of the trees and larger bushes. The gauze and splints are available here." He indicated a table with several rolls of gauze on it, each having a different thickness. Sticks of various forms were lined up beside them, including some Popsicle sticks, some toothpicks, natural bark-covered sticks, and some simple wooden stakes.
OOC: More information about muggle grafting can be found on Wikipedia.
Subthreads: It's a thorny situation. by Dathan Fischer with Ellie Alperton
Is there a difference between remembrance and thoughts? by Jessica Hayles with Jezebel Reed-Fischer
Comfortably Numb by Bridget Ferguson with Felipe De Matteo
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Nathan Xavier
Intermediates: Grafting
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Jessica Hayles
August 11, 2020 7:13 PM
Is there a difference between remembrance and thoughts? by Jessica Hayles
She never would have anticipated what amounted to an Ag Tech class would rank among her happy places before Sonora, but Jessica nevertheless felt her shoulders relax slightly as she stepped inside the greenhouses with a smile for Professor Xavier. In the greenhouses, with one exception, things didn't really go wrong for her. Out here, more often than not, things actually made sense, which was a pleasant escape from most of the rest of the time.The assignment from Tuesday had been an interesting exercise, similar to the DBQs she had expected to start working on at about her current age for AP exams. Curious how she had done, she took the time to carefully pick her seat, then began to flip through the pages, noting with some displeasure that her handwriting had definitely grown somewhat cramped and sloppy in places as she had hurried to get everything down on the pages quickly enough. The corners of her mouth also tended slightly downward when she found bits of critical feedback, though her chin usually also dipped in a nod at the same time, acknowledging the remarks as fair enough. He had, she thought, done a good job with these; she might try rewriting some of the paragraphs and adding these extensions to thoughts he’d suggested, then take the paper to him to make sure she had done it right. Perhaps it wasn’t really necessary to improve her essay writing at this point, but there was also no pressing reason not to improve it.
For now, she just put her hand up when Professor Xavier asked if any of them knew what grafting was. “I think I do,” she said when called on. “I think it’s a thing you can do with roses? You sort of – put two plants together so they grow as one plant from then on.”
Her definition was, it seemed, somewhat imprecise, but it had been going in the right direction. She was not entirely surprised by this. They had a very nice garden at home, and when she was little, she had been in the habit of talking to anyone who would talk to her, including the gardeners. Her father had also leaned way, way into the whole ‘rose’ theme after Jessica had been given a short form of her mother’s name for a middle name. They had a whole rose arbor at home – the picture of her and her mother which Daddy kept in his office at home had been taken out there, as part of a PR campaign – and her namesake line of fragrances were all based around roses, and he’d done some thing with some botanical garden once where sales of some special limited editions had all gone to benefit the botanical garden’s youth program, and somehow this was connected to someone else actually creating a new type of rose and naming it after the company….Jessica knew exactly enough about roses to know that she knew nothing about roses, but this included a surface-level knowledge of a handful of terms surrounding them.
Jessica leaned forward a little, interested, when Professor Xavier revealed that not only had wizards learned to graft things with a higher success rate than regular people – that she might have guessed – but also that they could do it with species that weren’t related. Since they were in a greenhouse at wizard school, she thought that reasonably implied it worked on magic plants as well as mundane…what about fusing magic with mundane? She had a brief but vivid mental image of an oak tree crossed with a venomous tentacula, and the tentacula’s stem growing with the oak tree until it was as massive as the top of an oak tree would normally be….
Not, she thought, shaking her head a little to dislodge that image, something she thought she’d be in any hurry to try even if she had the option. It would be far better to create something beautiful, if she could. There were already enough plain and ugly things in the world without her adding to them.
Accordingly, she went over to the potted flowers first, looking for something that particularly caught her fancy. There was a sweet little coral-colored flower she wanted to shrink down and swipe for her room, but for the purposes of the project….
What could one combine with a flower to get a good effect? Was logic a thing that mattered here? If she grafted the little coral-colored flowers onto a cactus, would the fact cacti retained water be helpful to the flowers, or just rot them somehow? If she tried blending them into one of those fruit trees, would she end up with either a mix of fruit and blooms, or just the plants getting exceptionally confused…?
Her eye landed on some pansies, and an idea occurred to her. Rosemary was woody enough that it could grow into shrubs – there was a neighborhood Robert drove her through fairly often at home which actually used rosemary plants that way a lot – and theoretically a small tree, so it was probably far enough removed from the pansies to show some effort on her part, if she could make it work. Plus, it would double as a Shakespeare reference, and Sonora needed more of those. Nodding to herself, she collected the plants she’d need and went back to her table.
“I think we might have better luck fitting the cuttings together if we take turns with one of us holding them while the other one bandages,” she remarked to her neighbor. “What are you working with?”
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Jessica Hayles
Is there a difference between remembrance and thoughts?
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Jezebel Reed-Fischer
August 17, 2020 5:23 PM
I like to think I have new thoughts. by Jezebel Reed-Fischer
Jezebel was fascinated by today's lesson. It was one of those that she thought she could see applying pretty directly to her future life, even if she wasn't sure what that life would look like. Plus, it was one of the ones that had some fun overlap between other classes, which made this whole crazy world seem a bit more cohesive. And it seemed like something that a general sense of preparedness could help her do well, even as a third year. Her homework had, apparently, been pretty good. Her analysis was good and it seemed her writing was the bigger problem. She wasn't surprised since there wasn't a proper English class at this silly school, but what could you do.She doubted they would be able to keep any of the plants they grafted together but thought that something she might want to keep might be a good starting place. But what would she want to keep? Perhaps something that represented a little bit of all of her? Or at least, all of the parts she was willing to be upfront about. A cactus then, for Sonora, and something that grew nice pink flowers maybe. She thought that a carnation might be a nice choice, although she wasn't at all sure that she could merge the two. Perhaps a Christmas cactus and a candelabra aloe then? She wasn't sure whether succulents and cacti were really that similar, but more similar than a cactus and a daisy probably.
Upon returning to her desk, she was trying to figure out how best to cut into a plant that seemed like it would not be cut-into-able when Jessica spoke up next to her and Jezebel smiled at the older girl. "That sounds good," she said, breathing out. "I've got these two but I'm not even sure how to cut into this one," she said, poking at the Christmas cactus. "I am not sure if I'm going too safe if I don't do magical plants," she added with a frown, looking back to Jessica for her thoughts on the matter.
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Jezebel Reed-Fischer
I like to think I have new thoughts.
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Jessica Hayles
August 27, 2020 12:21 PM
Technically, you remember the last time you remembered a thing, so I guess remembrance is also sort of a new thought. by Jessica Hayles
Jessica studied the problem in front of the younger Crotalus girl. “Hm,” she said. “I mean, I guess you could try to fuse two…sticky-outy-bits from the different plants together, if you just cut them in half and threw away one top,” she said. “Or switched them between each other,” she added, remembering Transfiguration lessons and the attached concept of Switching Spells. With those, it would be simple enough, she guessed, to switch out the fringy bits of the plants, so therefore, in theory, it could work with this…right? Or did the magic bit matter that much?“I think the aloe might have a stem under there somewhere,” she added, examining the second plant. “Maybe you could try grafting one of the…strands of the cactus to that stem? It has to have a root structure, and that probably comes to a single point somewhere under all that, right? So if you sort through all the long bits on them both, you can probably find somewhere that things join up naturally on one of them, and can stick part of the other one there.”
This logic followed to her, anyway. There were some plants that apparently did not have roots in the ground the way most plants did – some orchids, some lichens and stuff – but these were in pots, which meant they needed soil, which meant that there was presumably something under the soil keeping the whole thing together. If that was so, then for it to be a single unit, it had to have a center, or some kind of stems Jezebel could work with.
“I tend to think all the plants out here are a little bit magic, just because there’s so much of it around. That’s why they told me that my laptop and my phone and things wouldn’t work here. And you’re in third year, so. You’re probably okay,” she added to Jezebel’s other concern. "It would be cool though to see what would happen if we tried something like this on plants that grew at home - I'm Muggleborn," she added, having learned from Lyssa that it was probably best to just be upfront about this and get whatever reaction it was going to get. After all, sometimes it could apparently make people react better instead of worse, for all the Jeremy Mordues in the world.
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Jessica Hayles
Technically, you remember the last time you remembered a thing, so I guess remembrance is also sort of a new thought.
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Jezebel Reed-Fischer
September 03, 2020 7:41 PM
This is one of those, "No man can step in the same river twice" things, right? You're not the same man and it's not the same river? by Jezebel Reed-Fischer
Jezebel nodded, smiling a little at Jessica's terminology. "That sounds good," she acknowledged, giving one final, decisive nod. "Especially if you're going to help," she added. "I think our best bet is definitely working together." She pondered whether the Christmas cactus would just fall over if she stuck aloe on it, and decided that Jessica's suggestion may be the best one. Or else she'd need some sort of scaffolding for the little thing. going the other way wouldn't be so hard though, so perhaps that would be a better option? If she worked from the stem though, as Jessica suggested, perhaps she'd get more of an actual hybrid, rather than just a plant growing an arm that was a different plant."That's a good point about magic being everywhere. I always wonder that a little bit at home. Like . . . do we bring magic with us? Is it just inside us or is it around us a little bit too?" She wrinkled her nose. "Like a disease? Or like an odor?" She glanced at Jessica, realizing how that sounded. "Or there's probably a more positive simile. I'll think on it," she promised, forcing a little laugh; she still wasn't convinced this whole thing was anything better than a parasite, feasting off the life she'd been meant to lead. "I'm muggleborn too," she added, in case that wasn't clear from the rest of her response. "How'd you find adjusting to all this?"
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Jezebel Reed-Fischer
This is one of those, "No man can step in the same river twice" things, right? You're not the same man and it's not the same river?
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Jessica Hayles
September 10, 2020 4:29 PM
We're all a million different people from one day to the next. by Jessica Hayles
“Absolutely horrible,” said Jessica, in her brightest, perkiest Miss Arvale tone, when asked how she had found adjusting to life here. She allowed the bright smile that accompanied the words to adjust down to something more natural and self-deprecating almost immediately. “It was pretty rough, seriously,” she said, also in a more natural tone. “I come from a family where there are – were – a lot of expectations about the kinds of things I was supposed to do – my parents already had an outline for what high school classes and programs I was going to do, they were just waiting for me to do my first quarter of sixth grade to set it in stone – and, well….” She shrugged. “I made it less than twenty-four hours before I broke down crying in Professor Skies’ office because she wouldn’t let me at least carry on with math and Spanish until third year, and there was absolutely no point in trying again after getting two years out of practice – I could never work fast enough to catch up to where I’d need to be for SAT subject tests. Going from fifth grade math to AP BC Calculus in three years? Not really workable unless you’re a genius.”She took a deep breath, trying to push the sudden upswing up writhing, burning shame she felt about her sub-par education back to the edges of her consciousness. It felt like something enormous lashing about in her chest, its tentacles slipping into her arms and becoming knotted, trying to tear through her flesh –
“Sorry. I still get kind of emotional sometimes thinking about everything I missed out on,” she said, shaking her hair back even though it was in a ponytail for class and therefore not really in her way to any degree at the moment. “I guess I kind of think of the whole magic thing as like being someone with chronic nosebleeds – everything’s fine until suddenly you’ve made a huge mess and ruined your new sweater and everyone’s looking at you, like, ‘oh my god, do you see that girl who just sneezed blood all over her new sweater’? Or in my case, ‘oh my god, can you believe Jessica somehow locked herself in her room, doesn’t know how she did it, and doesn’t know how to undo it, so we’re gonna have to use an axe?’” She smiled, trying to make a joke out of one of the lower moments of her life. “Still. It gets better here when you have a few friends. If you can find any who come from wizard families and don’t call you names because you’re from a normal family, that’s the best thing,” she said, thinking back over the past few three years.
“And if you can’t do that, there’s always pretending that slicing and dicing on things in here and in Potions is actually slicing and dicing the faces of your enemies,” she added, reverting to perkiness. “Not as good I’ll admit, but it beats nothing. How have you done with the whole…social stuff, and being away from home and everything?”
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Jessica Hayles
We're all a million different people from one day to the next.
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