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Hi flog,
Instead of posting from Kensington, I’m posting today from the lab computer at the Plant Conservation Science Center at the Chicago Botanic Garden. This morning, I met up with Lea (who devoted flog readers will remember from the summer) and Sam, an undergraduate Biology student at Northwestern who will be working at the Garden this Fall. Sam and I were able to bond over how the bike ride from Evanston was longer than we both expected. I also got to meet Chris and several of our excellent and expert volunteers for the first time. They taught me how to dissect heads and separate the achenes from other flower-parts (the “chaff”) and gave some helpful advice from years of their own experiences. After that, Sam and Stuart brainstormed some cool projects that Sam could get involved with. I then looked at some materials for counting and classifying achenes as full, empty, or partially-full in x-ray images using an informative tutorial that Danny wrote last year. These classifications are used to estimate seed-set size, an important part of quantifying Darwinian fitness, as well as assessing the amount (or quality) of pollen these flowers are receiving.
 Volunteers show Sam, Lea and me how to dissect heads and count achenes. From left, Suzanne, Bill (in back), Char, me, Art, Aldo, Sam, Lea, Susie.
We’re reaching our final days at the House of Hjelm. Amy and I have a list of things to wrap up here in the last few days before we go to Chicago. The biggest task by far is harvesting Indiangrass (Sorghastrum) in P1. Those who saw P1 a month ago may remember the red tint that the stems and seeds of this tall grass gave to the plot. Amy and I spent much of yesterday afternoon and this morning harvesting the seeds (some of which are not quite ready yet) to broadcast in the area where the goats have been feeding on buckthorn. Stuart is hoping that this will stop the buckthorn from reestablishing and will also provide a source of fuel for burns. In addition to harvesting buckthorn, Amy assessed senescence in plants involved in the aphid experiment, then helped me out in mapping out the positions of gopher mounds in the plot. We also pulled out a lot of flags. The plot looks different than it did even two days ago. We also have been following the scout creed of “leave no trace” by removing twist ties from the heads of plants in some our remnant plots the last couple of days.
Amy made lasagna tonight while I picked up our final CSA in Morris. We’re overwhelmed by the vegetables we have here, and there’s no way we can eat all of them in the next three days. Amy made some tomato sauce and we’re hoping to freeze a few more things, but if you have any ideas on how to creatively use up or preserve (and travel with) cabbage, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, or chard, please let us know in the comments.
 Spider on a flag in p1 munching on a fly.
This morning, Amy, Will and I found ourselves in Alexandria without coffee. To remedy this, Amy and I went to Perkins, the restaurant sponsor of Team Echinacea (Will did not come because he was too busy — he had to get a haircut). We actually quite enjoyed the food at Perkins (also known as the restaurant equivalent of a farkle), but our visit was truly noteworthy because we sat a couple of tables over from our favorite cashier who works at Cub Grocery. We were too shy to actually talk to him, but we had fun talking about what we would have talked about with him if we weren’t so shy. From there, we went to Goodwill. There, Amy bought a pepper grinder, and I bought some tape cassettes that sounded like they were recorded inside the engine of a moving car. We also visited Alex High School and watched what we thought at first was a football game, but was actually turned out to only be a practice. The afternoon was mainly spent in abject sadness because Will did not come to Town Hall to play Settlers of Catan with us. For dinner, Amy and I ate some roasted vegetables over coos coos, while talking about death, and some other things. To deal with this anxiety over our own mortality, we ate ice cream and watched Arrested Development clips. On and on, sun rise and sun set, ad infinitum.
Today was our last true weekend-day of the summer — we’re going to do a full day of work tomorrow so we can get ahead on our list of things to do for the week. The living up here has been good — there is something very calming and freeing about days off in Kensington. Soon we will be in Chicago, a place as frantic and stimulating as Kensington is simple and charming. But for the time being, we have plenty of things to do here.
This morning, the Little Team on the Prairie headed to Krusemark’s, a real bear of a site. We had to walk through a half mile of corn to get there, just to do demo on a measly 19 flowering plants! Stuart said walking through the corn was like the movie Aguirre: Wrath of God, although Amy and I haven’t seen that movie, so the reference went unappreciated. In addition to demography, Amy and Stuart collected a lot of Side-oats grama and Onosmodium molle (softhair marbleweed) to broadcast in p8, while I found a flowering plant with a tag from 1996 and struggled mightily to get a data connection on the GPS. In the afternoon, Amy and I did another round of remnant harvests. There are only four heads in remnants left to harvest, plus a few heads left at Staffanson. The season is truly winding down, folks. After that, Amy and I returned to Railroad Crossing to collect more Side-oats and some Little Blue Stem seeds. Amy found some of black-eyed susan at Railroad and I found some at West of Aanenson — we may try to document and map this and other competitive species around our study areas in the next week. Meanwhile, Stuart packed his bags and left for Chicago, making today his last field day this summer. I hope he had as much fun as I did.
Amy checks off another thing on our very long to-do list. What a whirlwind week!
After a slow start, Amy and I did demography at some of the recruitment plots near Hegg Lake and p2. The flowers in plots HE and HS, near P2, were doing especially well; we counted a total of 34 flowering plants combined in those two plots, with several having multiple heads, and were able to find nearly all of the plants there. We also returned to a stand of Cirsium hillii near p2 that we measure each year, and found that at least three of our study plants flowered recently. Whether they flowered this year or last year is not yet clear — the leaves definitely looked gray and crispy. Stuart made the long trek back from Chicago today and harvested some Astragalus canadensis for broadcasting and corralled an escaped goat.
The highlight of today was finding a flowering (second day!) Echinacea near the Cirsium study area. We finished phenology in all of the remnants and plots several weeks ago, and have even harvested a good number of heads that are ready to drop their achenes. How this one is flowering so late in the season is a mystery — it may have to do with some recent mowing. We look forward to revisiting this plant to see if, by some miracles, it gets lucky and some of its styles shrivel.
 Flowering (second day!) Echinacea found today near P2. Outrageous! Amy and Chek look for Echinacea from the car.
Hi, loving readers,
Today was another day off for us. We decided to enjoy the day and pursue some of our own interests. Amy’s making great progress on the socks she’s knitting. I made a loaf of bread and got the dough ready to make pretzels tomorrow. The major excitement of the day is that we’re trying to use up surplus food items left over from earlier this summer so that we don’t have to go to the grocery store any time soon. We’re doing well on tomatoes, peppers and other odds and ends, but running dangerously low on coffee and are out of ice cream. For dinner, we made scrambled eggs and eggplant fritters (using a recipe which, unlike what the authors of Joy of Cooking want you to believe, absolutely does not make six servings. What is this — a meal for ants?). We then ate a dessert of watermelon from our CSA while talking about how much we miss the rest of the team. It’s early to bed, early to rise as we get ready for work tomorrow. While the rest of the country takes Labor Day off, we’ll be at Staffanson and the Hjelm House, since the prairies don’t observe national holidays.
Scott
As we gazed upon an apple in the eye of a dying bonfire, Stuart tried to recall an old tale from Laura Ingalls Wilder, about a boy who left a whole apple in a fire in an effort to cook it. Or was it a potato…?
Today, Amy, Jame and Will first did total demography at KJs (where you can’t shift your weight without accidentally crushing another tag), hitting 99 points, then did demography at the flowering plants on the North side of Aanenson. This task kept them busy until lunch time. Meanwhile, I went to Staffanson to collect data for Lea’s aster phenology experiment. There are still two flowering Liatris plants on the East transect, with Solidago plants in all stages of flowering. At lunch, we discussed the ways that time travel can, will, and probably has already, impacted and improved research by the Echinacea Project.
Now, was that potato story the tale of Almanzo…?
We saved harvesting in experimental plots for the afternoon. Lots of plunder was taken from P1, but it seems like something is consistently beating us to the punch in P2. Today, as well as the last few times we’ve gone, rodents (or somebody else) have eaten off parts of the Echinacea heads and left them, with broken achenes, strewn about the plot. We’re trying to recover these heads so we can accurately assess the seed sets of these experimental plants as a proxy for their reproductive fitnesses, but alas, they are no longer of this world. But don’t worry too much, because the interns will think of something clever to get around this (gulp). Meanwhile, I went back to the Dermatology clinic in Alexandria (my third time this summer — a hat trick), where the doctor and I assessed phenology on my worts.
But wait, I’m still not sure if it was apples, or potatoes in that story…
After work, we went to Elk Lake and grilled some vegetables while watching high schoolers dive (fall off) the diving platform there. In what is either a testament to or indictment of our cooking, the vegetables actually turned out a lot better than anybody expected. The fare included marinated eggplant, zucchini, cauliflower, tomato, corn, leeks, onions, watermelon, cheetos, and for those who love the taste of living creature, burgers. After this, we returned to the Hjelm house, where we lit bonfires in the backyard with some remaining buckthorn and two thirds of a bottle of lighter fluid. In a fashion almost as circular as this flog post, Stuart began to tell us the story of Almanzo —
Ah, yes, there was also the tale of the milk-fed pumpkin…
Other highlights:
- Talking to the four-wheel man at KJs
- Stuart’s watermelon-seed spitting
- Finally learning whence the wind comes. It comes from Wind Cave. In fact, that’s why it’s called wind — it’s named after the cave.
Other lowlights:
- Amy’s potty-mouth at P2
- Grilled watermelon
- Tomorrow is Will and Jame’s last day of the field season. Next week they begin classes, although they’ll still try to skype in to help with seedling searches.
Candid shot of Jame enjoying Kendrick Lamar’s masterpiece album Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. Stuart, mid-spit Jame is now the third-tallest team member, after Will, and bonfire.
With Lea leaving this morning, the remaining crew members Amy, James, Will and I, took the day off. There was no work to do, and thus no work was done. Kensington was cool and cloudy today, but it should be back to 80 degrees this week, when we plan to finish demo at Staffanson, continue harvesting, recheck p7, and check Lea’s Liatris and goldenrod transects.
 Map I made of recheck status for all positions searched in p7 this year. Black dots represent plants found, red dots represent positions where plants were not found that will be rechecked, gold represents positions where plants haven’t been seen in three years, and blue represents plants that should be remeasured. We’ll hopefully recheck p7 this upcoming week.
Harvest
Today, we began the harvest season — cultivating the heads of Echinacea that are soon to drop their achenes. These heads are harvested so their achenes (which may house seeds) can be counted, a way to quantify the reproductive output of individual plants. These can be used in an aster analysis to estimate fitness of individuals, but there are plenty of other ecological and morphologically interesting questions that the seeds can help answer, such as how effectively flowers have been pollinated. We harvested this morning in P1 and the 99 south garden, clipping and storing a modest total of 48 heads. But first — we spent a little bit of time herding the goats between paddocks in the backyard. For what it’s worth, we lost zero goats and endured zero shocks.
 Jame is a miner for a heart of gold… Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
We came dancing across the highway, with our clippers and our boards… This brought us to P2, where we spent most of the afternoon, and maybe a little bit of the evening. Here, like in P1, we checked the status of every single head in the plot for the signs (dead cauline leaves, brown involucral bracts) or for loose achenes. However, P2 had over four times as many heads to check as P1, making for a long afternoon. It seems like P2 was on a slightly earlier flowering schedule than P1, for we think that we had to harvest nearly half of the heads we came across. Amy and I worked for about four hours and only managed to move through 13 rows of plants, some of which we enlisted Lea to help with. I don’t remember what exactly we said, but I remember laughter — perhaps at this macabre reminder of our own mortality, or perhaps because we were carrying around a shopping bag with more than 100 crisp flower heads in it.
Old man, take a look at my life, I’m a lot like you After the Gold Rush
Lea made excellent pesto tonight with some of our leftover fennel and sunflower seeds, while Amy and I went to Morris to pick up the CSA. At dinner we went on a journey through the past, talking about Team Echinaceas from past and present, then finished off our evening with ice cream. Our aching bones and weary fingertips required rest, so we retired early and will sleep ’til the morning comes.
Regards,
Scott “Southern Man” Nordstrom
Friends,
We’re drawing down here, folks. Today, we drove the team from the Hjelm House to work at Steven’s Approach in a single car. There, we did seedling searches, checking 18 focal plants for some of their old seedlings. There was a bit of confusion (and internal screaming) since tags there are replaced so often, and plants are mowed on the reg, but we finished by 11:30, and thankfully will have mostly easier sites remaining for seedling refinds. Yes, there were cucumbers at lunch.
In the afternoon, we hit cruise control, finishing total demography North of the Golf Course in just an hour. It turns out that the demography records at this site actually included plants from Liatris Hill, a site I haven’t visited before that we’ve mostly ignored so far this year. Man, what a pretty place it was, blanketed with sunflowers and cordgrass with leaves five feet tall, hidden from view of the roadside by a line of conifers and a hill slope. There were no flowering plants there, but several Echinacea basal plants are still alive and kicking. After finishing NGC, we returned to P1 to recheck some of the “can’t finds” from our exhaustive measuring there. We got a considerable proportion of the replants done, covering hundreds of meters and uncovering several hidden Echinacea basal plants, narrowly avoiding losing our meter sticks. Just as the aphids are slowly leaving P1, some corners of the plot are slowly being settled by paper wasps. Future re-checkers and harvesters beware.
 The team breezes through total demo at North of Golf Course without a sweat (note: that last part is not true) After work we enjoyed watermelon slices on the porch of the Hjelm House, while Roxy enjoyed eating (mostly begging for) our rinds. We enjoyed these with our hands, mouths and faces. This was in part a celebration of our new sexy bright yellow GPS-pole, which James will lovingly nurture and employ tomorrow shooting points for his independent project (see picture). For dinner in Kensington, we tried our lot as Russian peasants, eating borscht and a home-baked loaf of bread for dinner. Yes, there was ice cream. We finished the evening with invigorating games of hearts, where James won one game and Lea won another by shooting the moon. Hmm, that’s funny, I can’t remember who came in last — there must not have been a loser.
Sweet baby (and) James Finally, shout out to Laura “Puff Daddy” Leventhal, whose last day of work is tomorrow before she heads back to Akron for a wedding and school. It was fun working with Laura, who always had good jokes or propositions for odds, let us look at her burgeoning wisdom teeth at the dinner table more than once, and was generally cool in other ways. She will be writing the last in her series of hilarious and topical flog posts tomorrow. Bye, Laura!
Where is the category for “team members sleeping”?
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