Frequently Asked Questions
For current participants
Weeds are growing next to the seedlings, should I remove them?
Many of you will observe herbaceous plants growing inside the seed protectors. They appear to be weeds for Your GardenOfTrees! While it is tempting wanting to remove them, we kindly ask you not to do so, but to keep the micro-environment under the seed protectors undisturbed until the end of the first vegetative season. In the autumn, when you will take off the seed protectors to measure the height of the seedlings, you could remove the unwanted plants (if they were still alive).
Why do we ask this? When you remove the seed protectors and weeds, you could perturb the soil and move (or occasionally even remove!) the seeds that are not yet germinated. Beware that germination could happen till the end of the summer, especially when the soil is dry during the summer. Nevertheless, if you observe large herbaceous plants growing outside of the seed protectors that shade/opress the seedlings, you could remove these, while being still careful with plants with long roots (e.g. Hedera sp. or Rosa sp.).
Lack of rain: seeds are not germinating and/or seedlings are drying out. Should I water them?
No. One of our objective is to study the natural regeneration capacity of different provenances of silver fir and beech at different sites. You might want to help the seeds or seedlings facing a dry spring or summer by watering them. However, this artificial treatment would alter the germination rate and growth and we would not be able to evaluate the real natural regeneration potential of those provenanes. This means that we might lose a lot of seedlings to drought.
I performed the observations, but I couldn't submit them using ODK Collect. How can I find my observations in my phone and submit them manually?
The good news is that your observations are not lost and can be found in the file system of your Android phone!
First of all, you need an app like "My Files" (Samsung phone) or "File Commander Manager" (downloadable from the Play Store) to access the file system. Then, you can follow this path:
Android>data>org.odk.collect.android>files>projects>xxxxx-xxxxx-xxx-xx(numero de serie)>instances>
Inside the folder instances, you can find each saved form you created, e.g. Germination_2022-04-xx (date of creation).
You can simply click and share them with us via email (info@mygardenoftrees.eu). Don't forget to do the same with the media folder, so we also have your associated photos!
I bought fence material to protect my garden. Can I be reimbursed?
When needed, we help our participants to purchase the fence to protect the trials. Contact your local coordinator or the team at info@mygardenoftrees.eu to explore this possibility.
I am a new participant. How do I set up ODK with Google Drive or ENKETO?
The instructions to set up ODK and ENKETO are available in this page.
Should I use the ODK Collect App or the web form ENKETO for data collection?
Do you have an iPhone? Then please use the ENKETO web form!
Do you have an Android phone? You are free to choose between ODK and ENKETO but beware that:
If you are part of an organisation and different people will monitor the garden over time, we recommend to use ENKETO. ENKETO does not require a login nor a google account.
If you will likely be the only person in charge of monitoring the garden, we recommend to use the ODK App.
Instructions on how to use ODK and ENKETO can be found here.