The post that had no title

Today was a continuation of harvesting. Instead of harvesting heads in experimental plots, we harvested Echinacea heads from many of the remnant sites. At every site we visited, we collected five randomly selected heads as well as the most and least isolated heads and the first and last to end flowering. We were surprised at the number of heads that were ready for harvesting yesterday, but today we had an even higher percentage of heads with ripe achenes. Our rough estimate was around 50% of heads harvested. We spent the afternoon rechecking P9 for any missed plants, and Scott proved himself the musty champion of searching with around 15 Echinacea found.

After work we had some great rootbeer floats, while discussing the rest of the week. Stuart is headed to Chicago, so it will just be us younger folks for the rest of the week. Thankfully, he left us with some sage advice to help us survive the week, “Work hard, but don’t forget the ice cream.” I believe this is advice by which to live.

Since I can’t think of much else to write, I’ll leave you with an image generated through my independent research. I want to know if there is a relationship between the distance of a plant to the nearest habitat edge and reproductive fitness. I recently completed the first step of assigning distance to the nearest edge to each flowering plant. Below is a visual depicting the edges of all remnant sites (also included because I didn’t remember to catalogue any of today’s events with photographic evidence).