As the season nears its end, the seasonal members of the Echinacea Project have all returned to school. This week, Grace flew back to California to start her junior year at UC Santa Cruz, leaving only a lone juggling ball for us to remember her by. Now only me (Maddie DiMarco) and Maddie Sadler remain as interns to conclude the field season. With measuring done in the experimental plots and (almost) all demo sites finished, our main focus is harvesting. We spent the first few days of the week harvesting whenever possible, filling up several bags with harvested echinacea heads. Soon, they will all be ready for cleaning and counting of achenes.
However, we cannot harvest in the rain, and this week had lots and lots of rain. While we are trapped inside, Maddie and I have been working with our data, ensuring that there are no missing, duplicate, or incorrect records. During a break in the rain, I also trekked out to exPt01 to revisit some of the plants we needed to check.
The rain has brought us many boones. Mushrooms were plentiful, found near the goat paddocks and the experimental plots, including a magnificent Chicken of the Woods. We have also seen our first salamanders of the season. Two eastern tiger salamanders were spotted on the roads—we shuttled them to safety. You can tell by my face how excited I was.
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