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Upcoming festivals and weekend events

After the fourth

The 55th Annual Waterama is July 19th-25th, 2010 in Glenwood .

Grant County Fair: July 22, 2010 – July 25, 2010 in Herman.

Hoffman’s Harvest Festival will be held August 13,14th, and 15th.

Douglas County Fair: Thursday, August 19 – Sunday, August 22, 2010.

fireworks on the 4th

Fourth of July fireworks on Lake Darling, just NW of Alexandria.

View Larger Map.

July 1st Update

Well, it’s been almost 2 weeks since my last post. How time flies.

Accomplishments:

Friday the 25th my seed envelopes (of remnant and restoration plants) arrived all sorted from IL. Thanks to my father and all the volunteers for working so hard to get that all done! Great job!

We finished measuring the first 9 trays of my seed plugs. I think almost eveyone in the team has been helping with this, so my thanks are profuse to you all.

Laura and I have been working hard to sort all of the purchased seeds into coin envelopes. (30 envelops for each species and source (3 species/3 sources) = 270 envelopes; 20 seeds per envelope = 5,400 seeds).

Laura and I have also been working on her project together. It’s a lot of fun to visit her remnant sites and see how the floral neighborhoods change over time. Her data’s going to be very exciting!

Early this week I was given verbal permission to plant my 10×10 meter plots of seeds and plugs at Hegg Lake, Runestone Park, and Bob Mahoney’s. I will hopefully have all the paperwork done soon for that!

I’ve spent some time working on FNC and pollinator data, but not nearly enough. Hopefully, I’ll be able to devote more time to it soon, especially because I have less than 3 weeks to finish putting together my poster! Eeep!

To Do:
The big goal is to get my plants in the ground ASAP! To that end:

Today, Laura and I will be marking out my plots.

We need to finish measuring the 2nd group of 9 flats. It’s particularly important to get the Alive/Dead status for each plug, so I can plan for next week. I hope I can wrangle up more volunteers here, although I know everyone is working hard on their own projects. (Btw, special shout out to Lauren and Hillery who’ve been helping a lot with this!)

I need to assemble my data to create new envelope labels with the location information for the plots, I’m hoping to get that done and and envelopes labeled by the end of the weekend.

News:
Parents are arriving today for a 4th of July visit! Hopefully they’ll get here in time to enjoy burger night at the K-town bar and grill, but if not they can meet everyone Friday morning.

We will be exploring Starbuck Heritage Days on Saturday (people are free to join us). There will be fireworks at 10 pm.

Some pictures from the weeks news:

Climaciella brunnea: the Wasp Mantidfly is really neither of those things (well, it’s a mantidfly, but you know what I mean). It’s not a wasp (order Hymenoptera, includes bees and ants, too) nor is it a mantis (order Mantodea, pretty much just mantids). It’s actually more related to lacewings and antlions (order Neuroptera).

Doesn’t it just look strange?

Echinacea Flowering in the Common Garden

June 21, 2010 marked the start of Echinacea flowering in the common garden this year. As of June 28, 2010 113 plants had started producing pollen. Approximately 775 plants will flower this season with a total of 1062 heads. We will be busy keeping track of the first and last day of pollen production per plant. As you can see from the pictures above, the pollinators are back at work, too!

Update on my phenology project

My project seems to be going well, I now have all of the sites picked out and data recorded for them. I have now seen all four of my plants in bloom at least at one of the sites. Here are a few pics I was able to capture of some of them.

festival in Barrett

Here’s the schedule of events for Barrett’s Old Settlers’ Reunion.

Erigeron strigosus (Prairie fleabane)

Here are the locations of E. strigosus plants in the common garden:
32 953, 33 954, 38 960
Plants have just started to flower!

Seedlings found doing Recruitment

Exciting news! Amy and Hillary found some seedlings at a Hegg Lake plot, the one thats on a hill (the hill with all the phlox on the side) near that blind corner. Anyway, there were nearby flowering plants so its great their reproducing! There were also a couple seedlings found outside the frisbee sized circle area.

here are the pics:

This one is a close up of the shriveled cots (with an achene next to it), can you see it!?!

The seedling finders, working hard!

This was in the morning, getting ready for work:

This is just a prairie lilly (Lilium philadelphicum) that I spotted at Staffenson. First time ever seeing one and I think their beautiful!

Lastly, this is a reminder for me to show Stuart my preliminary data collection sheet:
data table for project.pdf

-Katie

More photos!

Broken up from the previous entry so as to not make things too messy in the Stipa category.

Carduus out at KJ’s

Some critter snipped the stalk and laid some eggs, looks like.

This sad-looking Echinacea was out at NW of Landfill, along with other bent over and crummy-looking Carduus and others. The grasses and legumes around it looked pretty OK, so I’m wondering if perhaps these were hit by some herbicide overspray earlier in the season before the grasses grew up around it.

Categories

Experiments

Upcoming festivals and weekend events

fireworks on the 4th

July 1st Update

Look at this weird insect

Echinacea Flowering in the Common Garden

Update on my phenology project

festival in Barrett

Erigeron strigosus (Prairie fleabane)

Seedlings found doing Recruitment

More photos!

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