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Yesterday in true Team Echinacea 2015 form, we planned our day surrounding eating adventures and a little bit of ecology. When I finally emerged from bed, I was greeting with the sweet sight of Amy hard at work in the kitchen preparing cinnamon buns for us all to enjoy! They were topped with a delicious cream cheese frosting.
 Cinnamon Buns! Sometime in the midst of this decedent feast, we wandered outside to discover heaps of corn and squash awaiting us on the front stoop! We have heard tales of secret zucchinis snuck into cars by gardeners with a bumper crop, but we never thought we would be so lucky to receive such treasures ourselves! Later in the morning, Stuart told us that the anonymous deliverer was in fact a friend of his and Gretel’s named Bob. Bob, if you are reading this our deepest and most satisfied thank you goes to you.
 Ben, Gina, and Taylor ogle our special delivery!
After a lunch of grilled cheeses, we did some grocery shopping in Alex and prepared for a grill out at Runestone Park! Despite the loud thunder we heard as we loaded up the cars with grillable goodies, we remained optimistic about our evening plan. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans for us. As we approached the park, a torrential downpour hit and we decided to head back home to eat our dinner in the dry comfort of Town Hall. We ended the evening with a rousing viewing of “Cane Toads: An Unnatural History.” Which I believe all team members would recommend to documentary enthusiasts young and old.
 A froggy friend visits Taylor during measuring today. The team went out to the remnant sites this morning to assess phenology. Of the 1863 flowering heads from the remants this summer, only 26 are still flowering. Of these, 20 are in their “end flowering” phase, which means they only have a few days of flowering left. We finished doing all phenology, including p1 and p2 before 11 this morning. This is quite a contrast to a couple of weeks ago when pure phenology was an all-day job. We even had some time before lunch to clip sumac and Salix, two woody species which have crept into p1. At lunch we said goodbye to Stuart, who is flying to Baltimore for the ESA Annual Meeting. He will give a talk about the Echinacea Project tomorrow. After lunch we did a bit more land management work, pulling thistle and sweet clover from p8. After that much of the group headed back to p1 for more measuring. Today we measured plants that were planted in ’96, ’97, ’98. We contemplated the fact that many these plants are older than Will, Taylor, and Abby. Ali, Matt, and Ben went to Hegg to work on Ben’s independent project. They were testing different methods of seed collection (hand harvesting and using a seed sucker) on Galium. They came back with lots of seeds! This week we will continue measuring plants in p1 and working on independent projects.
After a very heavy rain last night, we got to start our work day 45 minutes later than usual. Even though we started late, we were able to finish phenology at all of the sites (including P1 and P2), and crosses for Q3 before lunch. At peak flowering time, we had over 2000 plants to check on in the remnants and today that number was down to 211.
Rare sight! This plant hasn’t begun flowering yet!
Gina and I had time to do an aphid treatment today. The results were very exciting! Of our 33 addition plants, 25 already had aphids on them. We also only found 1 aphid during our exclusion treatment!
Here are some of those cute little aphids!
Everyone measured for awhile before heading out to P2 to finish off our thistle pulling job. Stuart brought a watermelon out there for everyone to enjoy. It was the perfect way to end a great week!
Rainy weather covered the research area this morning, so the team worked on their independent projects, entering data, working on plant identification, web resources, and learning R! At 11 Stuart gave us all a lesson in statistics, that involved analyzing Taylor’s data using a linear model and an ANOVA test. The analysis gave some interesting results!
After lunch the whole team headed out to P2 at Hegg lake to pull thistles. We pulled hundreds of thistles, maybe even thousands.
 Abby, Ali, and Amy pull thistles in p2  Katherine in pain as she holds a bundle of thistles waiting for me to take a picture After an hour or two storm clouds started to roll in over Kensington, headed in our direction. We decided to call it a day before we got to wet.
Storm Clouds headed towards us
Some heads in p1 that are just about done flowering. With so many of our remnant Echinacea done flowering (less than 300 down from the 2,000 we visited at peak!), this past Tuesday found the team with some extra time on their hands. Instead of starting out with phenology, we got a chance to make progress on our independent projects. Abby and I headed out to p1 to spend some time with the specialist aphid, Aphis echinaceae. For the past few weeks we’ve been applying addition and exclusion treatments to 100 study plants in the plot with the goal of understanding some of the effects of the aphid on its host plant–continuing a study that Katherine Muller began a few years back.
The wet and dewy Tuesday morning marked our seventh round of treatments. Since starting out we’ve learned a lot about handling (“herding”) our aphids–how best to coax them from their colonies, how to keep them happy during the move between leaves, how to get them settled on their new leaves. Aphid transferring is a delicate process that requires patience and a loving touch. Offering words of comfort and encouragement seems to help ease the transition for the aphids.
While we started out with a pretty scarce supply of aphids in the garden, only able to add a couple of aphids to each of our plants and struggling to get colonies to establish, we’ve noticed a recent spike in the population. After managing to apply about 10 aphids to each plant in one of our recent treatments, we finally had some successes. On Tuesday, we found about half of our additions plants with small colonies taking hold.
This collection plant had some of the most aphids we’ve seen yet in one place! Some hypothesize that specialist aphids can have a more positive effect on their hosts as compared to generalist aphids. In just a week or two we’ll start assessing our study plants for fitness characteristics like basal leaf count and length of longest leaf, as well as for patterns in herbivory and senescence, to see if years of these addition and exclusion treatments have impacted the plants. I’m excited to move on to this phase of the research!
August 5 saw the team on its second day of measuring plants in P1. Ruth was there to help and we appreciated it! We found a lot of plants and learned about some of the insects that are found on the plants. If we had a lot of aphids on a plant we told Gina and Abby so they could collect them for their aphid project. We are learning how to do the process and getting much faster at it. Looks like rain tomorrow, so we may be delayed in getting back to it.
Today was one of the first days where the end of summer felt notably, and sadly very near. A big contributer to this feeling was that we finished doing phenology at all of the sites (p1 and p2 included!) before lunch. Several of the sites including East of Town Hall, KJs and North of Golf Course, are finished flowering all together! While Riley’s used to take many hours, it only took me and Will a few minutes to finish up phenology there this morning. At lunch Will taught us a puzzle/riddle which while difficult to explain in a flog post, elicited many laughs and caused hats to be thrown in frustration across the picnic table of the Hjelm house. After lunch, the most of crew went to p1 to continue working on crosses for the Q3 experiment. Many of those are done now too, and we have seen a lot of style shriveling hopefully indicating compatible pollen addition and a successful cross between flowers! Tonight we have a special guest appearance from Erica, Lea’s sister! While we’re all excited that she’s here, it’s bittersweet because it means that Lea is leaving tomorrow morning 🙁 We’re all feeling a little snuffly about Lea’s departure, but excited to stay in touch with all members of the 2015 Echinacea team.
 Team Echinacea shows off the many troll-phies and ribbons earned at the Flekke-5k! Today was a winning day for Team Echinacea! Ten members of the crew (including Hattie and Per) got up early to run the 5k at the annual Elbow Lake Scandinavian festival with the catchy name “Flekkefest.” The humidity let up for us and the morning was a cloudless, cool, and crisp one as we assembled for the race. Approaching the registration table we found that Abby’s dad, who was in charge of organizing the race, had made us a “Welcome Team Echinacea” sign. The sign must have been some encouragement; five kilometers later we had quite a few trophies under our belts. Our very own Amy got first place overall for women! Between the rest of us we also earned second and fourth for women, as well as a few wins for our respective age groups. My favorite part about the race was that they gave out troll trophies–which we dubbed “trollphies” for short.
 Amy’s troll-phy for first place! Maybe most exciting of all, however, every participant of the race got a free book coupon for the book sale going on downtown. We spent the next hour after the race finding used book gems (like the ones below), before enjoying an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet at a small place across the street.
 Some treasures picked up at the Flekkefest used book sale. Home, well-fed, and showered, we proceeded lazily with the rest of the day at Town Hall. Curled up with our new (old) books, a few of us ended up napping–not surprising given that our day started at 6am!
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