Our
field continues to grow. It looks pretty good, but I’m worried
that we’ve got such small seedlings and it is getting rather
late in the season.
Our
row is growing well. Most of the seedling have at least two leaves
and some have three leaves.
I
thinned an area of a row so there’s only this plant that we can
watch. It will probably grow a little better than the plants in
the last picture. This plant nearly has three fully expanded
leaves. In the Feekes wheat staging system this seedling is in
stage 2, because tiller formation has been initiated. Generally,
when you see a wheat seedling with three leaves you will see a
tiller in the axil of the first leaf (but you have to pull the
leaf back to see it).
This seedling has
some interesting things happening. It has two tillers but they are
coming from different areas of the seedling. We generally think
tillers develop from the
crown area (The crown is the nubby white area about one inch above
the seed. It has several nodes that don’t grow above the soil
surface. We’ll talk more about nodes in the future.) and you can
see a small tiller here. But if you look below the crown area
where the seed and roots are you can see another tiller. That
tiller has a special name. It’s called the coleoptilar tiller
and it is developed from the coleoptilar node next to the seed.
You can’t see these nodes that underground without a good
microscope, so you’ll have to trust me!
Here’s
another seedling with a coleoptilar tiller. They really aren’t
that rare.
