This morning (Wednesday), I got a bit of a late start because I made a double-batch apple crisp this morning, and the apples weren’t quite cooked yet. For the crisp, I used combination of northwest greening and haralred apples from the trees around Hjelm, and Mia and Wesley kindly helped me slice up the mountainous 8 cups of apples. When the crisp had finally cooked, I met up with Mia and Wesley, who had just finished adding stapes in p1. (check!)
Wednesday morning apple crisp
Next, Wesley and I headed out with Collins to finish up total demo at tplot and shoot a few more flowering plants at hegg in an area which is being renamed nrpal, or near pallida. Total demo is now done! (check!)
Bottle gentian at hegg
After lunch, Wesley and I tackled the remainder of the Andropogon harvest sites. Our record was a plot at kjs with 163 Andropogon culms! Andropogon harvests are now complete. (check!)
Daily Andropogon haul
In the evening, we had another bonfire, and we were joined by Stuart’s parents. The rest of the crew cooked up some fabulous breakfast burritos for dinner, crowned with Mia’s famous pickled red onions. The wind had been gusting all afternoon, and now it pitched in to help fan the flames of the bonfire, which caught rapidly. We ended the day with some delicious home-grown apple crisp!
Today was indisputably exciting for all parties at the Echinacea Project and even the DNR.
Started the day out with a nice sunrise at the Elk Lake house
First off, check the sunrise. Nice and foggy. Neat.
We woke around 6:30 this morning to make a cake to celebrate the 25th birthdays of the echinacea Stuart planted in 1996. We ended up making two cakes because the first one didn’t turn out exactly as anticipated (apparently accidentally substituting ingredients can cause problems) but the second ended up lovely.
We packed the good cake—the other we’ll eat later with copious quantities of ice cream to mask the questionable taste and texture—along with the noodles we made last night and headed to work.
Alex and I spent most of the work day playing with the GPS units, but I think Collins was feeling kind of cranky today because her case shut on both of my pinky fingers on separate occasions.
We saw the DNR at Hegg Lake in a Marsh Tracker, an amphibious vehicle that could be mistaken for a Marsh Trampler, as their main functions are the same.Once upon a time there was an echinacea right here. Ashes to ashes.A leafy spurge hawkmoth caterpillarNewly discovered flowering echinacea, 9 rows deep in the cornWe had some exciting finds in a corn field; the field has grown suspiciously larger over the years and is covering area that was once prairie remnant.
After work, we stayed at Hjelm because conditions were finally right to have a bonfire and get rid of some wood piles that had been accumulating. This bonfire also doubled as the birthday party for the ’96 plants.
The birthday meal spread: cantaloupe, cucumbers, plum tart, chocolate cake and peanut pastaStuart lights the fireJared fans the flamesCool guys don’t look at explosions.Going on its own!
The bonfire had calmed down by around 8pm, when we packed it up and called it a day. The coals need to be cold to the touch tomorrow at 8am to be in line with regulations, so if the pile is still in any way “on fire,” it’ll be getting a dousing with a hose.
Huzzah, Wesley
Last but not least, a butterfly. I think it’s probably some sort of sulfur that has seen better days.
We’ve been missing Laura, John, and Kennedy this week, but we’ve had to forge ahead without them. Today, Mia and Wesley finished rechecks while I staked random points at nice, eth, and koons for our Andropogon expedition later in the day. After staking, I met with Stuart to learn some R-Studio data wrangling skills. At lunch, Wesley reported on the Liatris pollinator observations – the team conducted 95 total observations this summer and mapped over 2,500 plants!
Wesley with the original Liatris plant: LA1
After lunch, we learned a new protocol for harvesting Andropogon gerardii (big bluestem). We visited a third of the random points at each site and counted and harvested all the Andropogon culms within one meter of the point. Jared and I collected three full bags of Andropogon at East Riley, a site which had been burned, but we didn’t find a single culm at the other sites (spp and on27).
Jared searching for Andropogon at Staffanson
After work, the Elk Lake house spent all evening cooking up a giant batch of Wesley’s peanut noodles in preparation for the bonfire tomorrow night. Mia wisely used the food processor to grate the carrots, so no fingers were lost. We doubled the recipe, so there were an awful lot of carrots!
Alex and I started my last day off with going to Hegg to do some total demo!!! Alex and I headed out and started our journey. We got out there and started to get some points where the echinachea is thanks to Darwin (the gps). We were just about to start when I realized we forgot our visors. So we were like “Oh Kennedy can get them on her way here after practice”. But sadly practice was running late and she wouldn’t get there early enough. So I headed back to Hjelm to retrieve our visors. By the time I got back to Hegg Alex mapped a good majority of the sight. A little while later Kennedy arrived just in time as we started!!! We finished in no time and brought the picnic table up onto the porch for lunch.
We got cake on our last day! Thanks to Mia! I cut the cake and of course Kennedy had to give me a little trouble on how I was cutting it! Well to be fair it’s hard to cut a cake into five pieces! After lunch we headed out to P1. We were working on rechecks!! It took a good amount of the afternoon and we ended up finding lots of mushrooms out there! AND THE SECOND SMALLEST MUSHROOM IN THE WORLD!!!
After we continued P1 we headed up to clean out our bags and say our goodbyes. Goodbye Team Echinachea!!! I’m going to miss all of you so much!!! Want to know what I learned over the summer, is that you never full appreciate something until you have to say goodbye. The team taught me well, and i’m glad I was there to be a part of it.
This was my first week with the Echinacea Project, and I feel like I have big shoes to fill after all the fantastic team members earlier this summer. It’s been an eventful week, and I think I’ve seen more Liatris plants than Echinacea so far.
Laura, Alex, and Darwin flagging Liatris
This week, the team focused on completing the project to map the Liatris aspera plants at all the sites. We spent a lot of time at Koons Hill, which supposedly had only 200 plants, but we found over 600! For the first time all summer, the team had to contend with rain, but we finally finished rechecking Koons Hill today, and we revisited all the sites to pull the neon flags, which had formerly marked the Liatris plants.
Wesley, Collins, and Kennedy braving the rain
We weren’t the only ones visiting the Liatris plants. This afternoon, we spotted numerous pollinators, including several bumblebees and a monarch, which were enjoying a sweet nectar treat.
Bumblebees on LiatrisMonarch on Liatris
At the end of the day, the wasps wanted to share our sweet cantaloupe as well, but fortunately, Wesley devised a system involving a tupperware and some ice packs, which encouraged them to chill out.
On Friday we finished measuring p1! This was a big push to get it done last week and on Friday it took some expert timing and carful radar studying but we got it done.
Mia (research intern 2020-2022) and the field crew finish measuring experimental plot p1!The waterproof measuring crew
This was a massive feat for the team, and it is super exciting to have it done. There are 10,673 total positions, out of that we found 2,899 basal plants, and 81 flowering plants, we found around 3,523 staples. Thanks to Wesley’s Time Motion Study we know that we spent 198 person hours measuring p1. Below you can see our nice completed map of p1!
Lavender are completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
I now have some coding to do to get ready for rechecks but for now the team is having a well-deserved break from measuring p1.
I missed a day but we have made significant progress measuring in the past few days.
On Wednesday (Aug 18) we dropped the number of segments from 32 to 19 in an afternoon with 2 measuring pairs. This was Allie’s last day measuring and we very much missed her today.
Lavender are completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
Today (Aug 19) we missed Allie and John but not so much that we couldn’t get anything done. The opposite in fact we got 11 segments done with 2 pairs (5 people) in ~4 hours. We have 8 segments left (woo!), today was very much a penultimate day and tomorrow might be a very big day out in p1 check back tomorrow to find out how we did.
Lavender are completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
Since I have been scheduled to flog today, you’ll be getting one last flog from me!
I left Andes at around 5:30am to get to MSP to pick up my dad (JR?) for the road trip back to Albany. After getting a little lost looking for what I’m pretty sure is an imaginary cell phone lot, I successfully retrieved one father and we got underway.
We made sure to stop at Culver’s for lunch, so my dad can experience what is truly the best of the Midwest on this whirlwind tour. The verdict? Fried cheese curds are amazing.
The Culver’s lunch pit stop
After that was driving, some more driving, traffic, driving, road work, and then – you guessed it – more driving!
I have now driven 791 out of the 1,371 miles to get back home in about 12 hours, covering 4 1/3 states. Yikes!
Luckily we have some good podcasts and music for the long drive.
This morning the whole team (which consisted of six of us) went out to the Riley’s for total demo. Even with getting out there a little bit late, we finished in good time. With the little bit of time we had before lunch, the crew split up to quickly harvest Echinacea heads in the experimental plots. Wesley and I harvested at P7 and P9 as well as the one Echinacea plant in Amy D’s plot (Amy your head is harvested!).
Lunch consisted of lots of acorns, which some of us got in head by. Jared collected more acorns and ended up designing a mini experiment with them. He left 30 acorns lined up on the picnic table, tomorrow we will see how many have been taken by the creatures living at Hjelm.
Jared’s acorn experiment
After lunch and the acorn experiment, Kennedy, Allie, and I headed out for more total demo. While it was hotter in the afternoon, the wind kept the heat at bay. Unfortunately the wind also decided to take my maps and blow them across the site we were working at. Throughout the afternoon the three of us finished total demo at Aanenson, West of Aanenson, and Tower. Including what we did at East Riley this morning, the three of us completed 343 locations today!
On Friday the team made great progress measuring, with the help of Gretel (World Record holder for fastest measurer) the team completed 16 segments in ~3 hours with 3 measuring pairs. We now have finished the 99’s both north and south and are off in the Q-gen/big batch experiment. We have a total of 33 segments left out of 141 segments so we are 77% complete! This is amazing and I expect that we will be done before the end of the week.
Lavender is completed records green is what we have left. positions go N-S rows are W-E
