The seasons have finally begun to shift here at the Garden with the last heat waves of summer breaking onto crisp October shores. Friday morning, I continued my working weighing biomass, adding 88 new samples to the data set. There are still many samples to be weighed but I believe I have now passed the halfway point.

In the afternoon I returned to counting seeds. Stuart explained that the seeds I was counting were no ordinary seeds, but in fact ones that were very rare and difficult to collect, and that my counts would play a pivotal role in determining whether they were to be preserved or propagated. I felt proud that I was contributing to prairie conservation in such a direct and meaningful way. It was also fascinating to see firsthand the multitude of designs and strategies plants have for seed dispersal!

On this day, September 24th, 2019, Erin, Drake, and I planned to have a regular field day. The weather was nice and the motivation was present, but somehow things just didn’t go our way. Early in the morning, I went into G3 to find another mouse was trapped trying to get in the seed drier (for context, we found 4 mice in traps yesterday (Monday) and Drake was going to flog about them but forgot). Nonetheless, it was a surprising start to the day.

Then things started going downhill… and no, we didn’t measure P2 today (for those of you who are unaware of the layout of P2, it is arranged on a slight slope. Yay puns). We went to do demography at the Town Hall site, but ended up venturing through dense thicket and corn only to find ourselves in a random person’s yard. They had a dog and it was scary. Only later did we find out that those points were no longer meant to be in the stake file. Rat! Even after avoiding those points entirely, demo at Town Hall was rough. Many of the points were under a pile of lopped juniper; dry awn leaves are deadly, and my hands are still bleeding from digging through desiccated branches.

After our adventure at Town Hall, we did demo and seedling refinds at the aptly named East Town Hall site. There, we found 4 new flowering Echinacea (which is actually quite amazing considering we only visited 30 existing plants). We also found a deer skull. AND AN ENTIRE DEER VERTEBRAL COLUMN. My mind essentially imploded when I realized I stepped on what I thought was a rock but turned out to be a spine... Wow. Just wow. 

After lunch, Erin and I finished harvesting heads in P1! All experimental plot harvesting is done now! Hooray! did some measuring… Except the mosquitoes were incredibly bad and I forgot water. After one row, we went back to Hjelm to get some bug spray but thing quickly got complicated. As I emerged from the kitchen of Hjelm after refilling my water, Erin pulled a honey bee out of her hair (she thought it was a Bouteloua fruit). The honey bee decided to be cool and stab her finger with its stinger. Not a great place to be stung if you need fingers to measure and use Visors. Fortunately, the cool, refreshing taste of an ice pack was able to keep Erin going, and we were able to measure more rows in P1 and collect some sideoats seed as a team before the day ended!

This morning Priti and I learned how to use the computer to count scanned achenes. I found counting to be a much smoother process than cleaning and, in a couple of hours, had counted over 5,000 achenes. An average Echinacea head produces about 150 achenes. The number of achenes a head produces is a pretty good indicator of what is called “reproductive effort”, the energy expended in the pursuit of reproduction. Sadly, a harsh reality of life is that reproductive effort doesn’t always translate into reproductive success. A much better predictor of fitness is seed set or achene viability, however this is difficult to find without splitting open every single achene. However here at the Echinacea Project they have quite the clever work around, X-Rays! Each sample of achenes are randomized and those fruits that make it through are collected into sheets of 20 samples and doused with low, completely safe levels of white-hot X-radiation. The X-ray images are fed into a computer program which allows researchers (like me!) to see inside and classify them by the fullness of their embryo (Empty, Full, or Partial). This provides a stronger indicator for the fitness of the individual plant. The coming week I am excited to learn more about what affects Echinacea seed set or reproductive success.

Today was a new type of day for me and Erin. When we arrived to the farm, we arrived to a ghost town. No other members of Team Echinacea present, Stuart was away, and Dwight and Jean were even out of town. The only other folks present were the goats. It was good to see at least someone was in town.

Unbeknownst to me and Erin, the goats were plotting escape. Last night, an extremely powerful storm swept through Solem Township (and most of Northern Minnesota). When Erin and I looked outside during the storm on Labor Day evening, rain appeared to be coming down in sheets. Needless to say, it was extremely windy. This left multiple escape points for goats to exit the paddock due to large dead trees and branches lowering the fence. Fortunately, Erin made a heroic decision to check if the fences had any debris, and when we saw that they were being dragged down by trees, we sprung into action.

Our plan was simple… Erin distracted the goats with food on one side of the paddock while I went to work making sure dead tree parts were off the fence. However, while we were planning, Baby, tried to escape the fence at the section in the photo above. A while ago, Baby and I got into a bit of a tussle when I tried herding her back into the group by grabbing her and more or less dragging her back into the herd by force. While I was doing that, I tripped… Some observers said that Baby “gave me a full-out suplex” that day (that, of course, is just a rumor). Nonetheless, Erin was able to stop Baby in her tracks while she tried to escape. Erin out-muscled and out-smarted Baby to get her back into the paddock while I set up a temporary fence. Only later did I find out that Erin is the current WWE Champion.

In the end, Erin did a wonderful job distracting goats while I moved and sawed dead trees and branches. It is good to know that all the hours we spent training to herd goats finally paid off, and the two of us were able to do it alone.

The rest of the day, Erin and I went out to Staffenson Prairie Preserve and finished flowering demo, did seedling refinds at Nessman, and did some measuring in P1 (while hearing the goats bleat at us the whole time… we bleated back some, too). In the end, it was a good, productive day, and I look forward to the next few weeks of field work with this ultimate skeleton crew.