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These bees thought it would add some excitement to their lives if they hired Team Echinacea to stand around them watch their… relations. Naive as they were, they didn’t realize that there was a camera in the crowd and the photos would inevitably be leaked to the Internet. This is sure to cause a scandal among the insects of the common garden when they read of it in the tabloids tomorrow. Hi folks! Here’s the protocol for measuring plants in the common garden this year. The protocol hasn’t changed much from last year, but the description has improved; the protocol is now a html file and there are many nice images from 2007. Thanks to Jameson and Gretel for taking the photos. And thanks to the wonders of digital photography, Pendragon forms, the UMN library’s blog, and contributors to this flog. Wahoo! Let the counting of leaves, ants, and aphids begin!
Here’s a practice time lapse series for plant (28, 943) from July 2nd-6th. I’ll be photographing 16 plants every morning or until people get tired of driving me around to the garden. I didn’t hit the ‘thumbnail’ option when I uploaded this, so if you want to see it in its full glory, right-click and go to “view image”.  Even though I’ve marked the position and height of the tripod with flags, it looks like it’s difficult to get the same photo every time. The changing background, I suspect, is a result of the head growing upwards a bit, causing me to change the camera angle. This shouldn’t be as much of an issue in the pictures taken from above. Bonus! As is probably apparent in this recent explosion of posting, we’ve now got the Internet on the inside of the condos. Neither rain nor mosquitoes nor legions of caterpillars can keep us from our e-mail. To demonstrate our unsurpassed powers of data transfer, I present to you…. a picture that is truly huge. This is the most developed Echinacea head in the common garden* which is remarkable because this time of year is usually the peak of flowering, or so they say. In any case, I’ll be taking pictures of it and some of its developmentally challenged comrades every day or so. The result ought to be a number of sequences that chronicle this awkward phase in their lives, followed by their blossoming and wild reproductive successes (or lack thereof). Yes, much like the reality TV stars that they are, these plants will have no secrets! * except maybe for the 99 garden, where I did not dare venture
Here’s a photo of the crew from the first day of the summer (Julie, Christine, Megan, Ben, Lecia & Gretel). Echinacea hasn’t started flowering in our Common Garden yet, but it will soon. We are ready! Reinforcements from Illinois will start work tomorrow. We’ve been working for two weeks now and we have accomplished a lot already: It’s hard to believe how much we’ve done already (and how few flog entries I’ve posted).
While at eri prairie remnant searching for Echinacea seedlings we were cleaning up the beer cans from the ditches and found many ant nests under them, but on can had a surprise. Amy was shaking the can and a skink popped its head out causing her to drop it. The skink was shocked and was frozen in place for a minute with just its head and neck exposed. Today I learned how to properly use a ratchet strap. I was talking to my mom on the phone last night and mentioned how we squatted all day, but it was hard to do so comfortably without squashing the vegetation. My opinion is that the buckets don’t help much with this, especially on slopes. I thought my mom had a great suggestion: use milking stools. It would pack down less vegetation than the buckets and might be more comfortable (I say might because I’ve never actually used a milking stool). Just a thought. |
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