Hey everyone,

We started off another week with a super productive Monday. In the morning the team split up between crossing and seedling re-finds. Ilse, Gretel, and I finished all the crossing in the morning which was especially exciting because we anticipated today being our busiest crossing day. Since many plants have finished flowering by now, we’re mostly topping off those last few styles with pollen and then waiting for everything to shrivel. While a few plants have hit snafus (pollen X running out before plant Y is finished flowering), the going has been steadily smooth. The seedling re-find crew (Stuart, Marie, Dayvis, Kory, and Sarah B) managed to finish two sites this morning with only one visor. Extra impressive!

Although we’re still sad to see the first of team Echinacea depart (Sara Z on Saturday), we welcomed the return of Mike, Reina, and Pam who spent the last week at ESA. The Gustavus trio spent most of the day measuring photosynthesis with “Helga” and collecting leaves.

This afternoon we all began measuring the Big Batch section of CG1. Although a daunting amount of plants, we managed to make a serious dent and will hopefully get through all of it by the end of the week.

I’ll sign off with a grasshopper photo I took during phenology. Have a good week!

A low key day here in Kensington, not much Echinacea Project work going on today. We bid our sad farewells (those of us who stuck around this weekend) to Sara Z as she left to head home and begin preparing for another year of teaching in Chicago. Today was filled with some cleaning, laundry and grocery shopping as per the usual; however, I did come across this curious sign today on my run, a historic site with arrows pointing in BOTH directions….

So curiosity struck and I decided to follow the arrow that pointed right, and I came across this little gem…

A monument erected in honor of the towns founders. To find out what is in the direction of the historic site sign’s arrow you will have to go see for yourself.

Once again, a hearty hello to readers on the flog-o-sphere!

As with many days this week, the morning started off with phenology. Now that more than half of the plants in the common garden have finished flowering, it can be accomplished in a little over an hour. The Sara(h)s measured plants in the 99 garden while Ilse, Lydia, Gretel, and Marie worked on crossing. Dayvis lurked in the basement of the Hjelm house, alone with his collection of pollinators and an insect identification book. Kory visited Hegg Lake and harvested his first Echinacea head for his experiment! At lunch, Marie practiced giving her poster presentation to the group.

After eating, Sara Z, Gretel, Marie, and Ilse stayed at the Hjelm house to finish crossing and measuring. The rest of the group traveled to East Riley for seedling re-finds. In high spirits after finding (although most often not finding) a seedling, Team Echincea adorned themselves with natural hitchhiker jewelry.

Crew members returned home in a timely fashion to enjoy some homemade pad thai prepared by Sara Z. Thai food is the only thing Dayvis has craved more than a machete all summer long – needless to say, he was sated. When Sara Z first arrived at the town hall, she was under the misguided impression that crew members play board games every night after work; the fact that we don’t has been a constant cause for consternation. At her dogged insistence, several of us joined her for a game of Bananagrams and Apples to Apples.

Have a great weekend!

Another day of measuring, phenology, and crossing has come and gone. Phenology this morning was quite wet, afterwards some of us crossed and the rest worked on independent projects. Crossing has gotten quite challenging in the sense that we have a limited supply of pollen to work with as most of the sires are done flowering. The challenge is to get an even distribution of each sire (pollen donor) to the 4 dams (pollen acceptor) that it goes to, this has proven to be our biggest obstacle. And to top it off some dams haven’t even started to flower yet!

At lunch we got to see Dayvis’s preliminary power point for the presentation he will be giving on his research at the Chicago Botanic Garden next week; Marie will also be presenting a poster on her hybrid project there.

Then it was back to work with measuring the common garden and finishing up crossing jobs from this morning for the rest of the afternoon.

It’s the start of a new week for Team Echinacea. This morning was jam packed with phenology and crossing. We’re past peak flowering at this point which is making phenology go quite a bit faster, however we’re definitely in the midst of peak crossing. Ilse and I printed off nearly 25 pages of crossing information, and together Team Echinacea probably visited three quarters of the plants in the crossing experiment today. Wowee!

The afternoon was spent (as many afternoons recently) crossing and measuring the common garden. After lunch we did spend an hour pulling thistle, which was surprisingly more enjoyable than it sounds (gloves helped). Kory got the record for largest thistle with this bad boy.

Marie made some delish baked mac n cheese with a side of broccoli puree for dinner and the mayor of Kensington stopped by to alert us of construction due next week. Not a bad Monday.