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So in the past several days, we’ve had many interesting goings-on. Jameson has built a garden. We went looking for some baby(ish?) raccoons that Amy saw, but they weren’t there. Instead, there were many dead damselflies and dragonflies. We also have a kill jars full of dead insects on our kitchen table as well as a betta fish and some snails. Jameson has also created the next big thing: hard-boiled eggsicles
As far as the Echinacea goes, it was rough work in the ’99 garden today. the east side of the garden was initially labeled 1/3 meter short, but we fixed the problems and made stuff work. I actually got a good shot of a pollinator (some sort of bee) and Amy found a snake skin. After today, my tick count is 5 (the tick I took a picture of was named Marty the Martyr)
Dear Blog-stars,
Well, we are done for the week and it was pretty tiring, but we are doing well! Julie has nothing positive to say, only that our experience thus far has been ‘buggy’. Indeed.
We are now kicking back in the mando and the Raj Mahal on an exciting Friday night. So exciting that I am bloggin’. We survived the 99 garden with its crazy rows and snippiness by all. I did have to eat a little crow because of some mis-lableing of rows on my part and the shocking rightness of Julie and Rachel. Needless to say, we consulted them in the inbreeding garden when Colin screwed up (again). He can, however, add much better than me.
Here are some pictures:
Big clouds at Hague Lake
Jameson planting his garden
Sweet sweet clouds and boring corn
Bee and loads of pollen this morning
Andy
Mowing went well today. The crew did a good job. I have some notes:
Rows 10 – 33 got blasted from the east by the grass clipping etc from the mower.
Rows 35 – 56 got blasted from the west.
Row 34 didn’t get blasted. Row 34 was chosen at random, row 38 was chosen last year. Each year before 2006 I blasted the whole garden from either the east or the west. That was too inefficient.
Here’s the schedule of not-to-be-blasted rows for the next few years:
year row
2008 31
2009 39
2010 36
2011 28
2012 34
2013 27
2014 32
2015 29
2016 35
2017 37
2018 30
I ran over 4 flags (loose or bent) and didn’t hit any rocks. There aren’t very many new gopher mounds. Look for new mounds far N, Row ~ 35, Pos ~925, and Row 56. I don’t think I ran over any Echinacea plants. I was running blind in R~40-42, up to P935, and P865 in R10-12. Also, I had to add flags in R 10 far N. The brome is flowering super thick this year. The CG looks so different from last year because of the brome. Some brome infl are eye-level W of the garden in pos <910! Those fence posts in R 13.5 and ~38.5 are annoying and must go. The cottonwoods need to go to too--too much shade. Deal with trefoil & phalaris.
I can think of some things I will do differently next year. I’ll only do them next year if I remember. Next year I’ll have to look at this flog to find the unblasted row. Here’s the plan.
Preparation:
in fall, leave flags in the 98 garden or put in staples
get flags delivered in plenty of time (consider color coordination)
30″ are much better in non-burn years
sharpen blade, buy gas
mow entry paths & set up stairs
flag perimeter & unblasted row
mow perimeter
mow aisle on both sides of unblasted row
Orientation (print maps beforehand):
wear safety glasses, ear protection optional
place flags 10cm N of each plant
search for plants or staples
emphasize that plants can be difficult to find, but the goal isn’t to find every one (measure if necessary to get good coverage in thick areas)
walk E & W in unmowed areas & anywhere on mowed areas
lift legs over rows
pull pins & collect plastic
start flagging in positions 860, 935, 960, 983, then flag on either side of unblasted row
coordinate so rows are flagged before mowing
after a few rows, get folks working rows 50 – 56 & 10 – 16. Don’t bother flagging cg96.
Remove duff from all plants in an organized fashion.
Equipment:
flag bags
meter sticks (we need more, we only have six)
safety glasses
ear protection
mower sharp blade
gas
gloves for all & gloves for SW. Get the XL; L is too small.
Plan to spread mowing over two days to avoid exhaustion. Sharpen blade in between.
After duff is removed weed thistles, sweet clover, trim shrubs & trap gophers.
To do–cut cottonwoods, ashes in ditch, trees E of CG.
well I just took a shower. Showers are a big event for me because recently at least they are very infrequent. I suppose I should start taking showers more frequently because my current living situation is more civilized than when I am at school and everyone else takes showers more or less everyday so … well there are many reasons why i should take more than one shower a week here but if you want to know more i think that you should ask me. or maybe you should ask why I think it is reasonable to only take one shower a week. Anyway my hair and beard should be different now because the last time I bathed was last friday at a indoor water park in Ohio in heavily chlorinated water. My beard and hair is naturally curly/wavy but the chlorine straightened it out a bit. Let me tell you: It takes a long time to clean several weeks of oil, grease,and dirt off of you. I don’t know if anyone is still reading this but as you might be able to tell this blog is not about Echinacea at all; up until now that is. But none of our lives are completely consumed by Echinacae, except possibly stuart’s, so you should not be surprised by the varied content of this blog, and/or field log
and now for something completely different
I’m trying to stay until $13 a week for food this summer because at least I heard that that is the amount that we can get reimbursed. I calculated today that that is less than $1 per meal -in fact it is less than 62 cents per meal. I’ve spent a large chunk of it already (this being the latter portion of the first week) so if limit my spending to $5 next week and $10 for the remaining weeks i should come close to my goal
I’ve started to keep a running tally of all the ticks that i’ve found crawling on me or embedded in me. So far after the 5th day here and the 4th day of work i’ve found 15 ticks on me -3 of which were attached. I just realized that i’m missing a day so those numbers are approximate. Still that’s a lot of ticks and several more than other people have gotten. i seem to be a tick magnet. Also a mosquito magnet but not as to as an unusual extant. I guess that it’s not really worse than if i were back at the Homestead, where I perpetually had a mild case of poison ivy and was continually scratching myself and getting caught on the multiflora rose that has taken over there.
I just got a notice that i’m getting paid for the Alumni Reunion Weekend that I was part of staff for back at Denison tomorrow. i thought that I had already gotten paid for that so now i’ll actually have some spending money, but i don’t think i’ll be needing it very soon anyway.
i bought a bag of cherries at the grocery store the other day. They were in a cart and all in bags that prominently said 99 cents apparently because they were very ripe. Anyway the cashier rang them as $3.99 a pound so i ended up paying more than $10 for the bag, which i didn’t realize until 2 days afterward when most of the cherries were already gone. i’m going to go in with the receipt next time i go to the grocery store to try to get my money back. That might not be for a while though. Oh well I have to go to bed. Work is at 8 tomorrow because the Echinacae already. There are lots of things to do.
i didn’t get to the completely different stuff. too bad
maybe tomorrow
I just finished mowing paths between rows in the common garden. I was so pooped by the time I pushed the mower to the truck, it took me 15 minutes to psych myself up to lift it into the truck (it didn’t help that I laid down to psych myself up). I would’ve fallen asleep listening to the chipping sparrows and a N. oriole, but a mosquito told me she was hungry.
Now I am getting psyched to go back to the CG to look at the flowering plants for our phenology observations. I am shocked how early they are flowering this year. I peeked at the CG on Monday and thought we’d have a good week before they’d start to flower. I don’t think they’ve ever started flowering by solstice before. Recently, the field season has started after the solstice.
These long days are a double-edged sword. We get all this daylight, but that means we can do field work for many more hours. I should clarify. The crew finished before 4:30 and went home–I can work for many more hours.
> (983 – 860 + 4) * (56-10)
[1] 5842
That’s how many meters I mowed today. Well, I have to subtract
> (960 – 935) * 8
[1] 200
I carried the mower 200 meters around the 99 garden (in 8 trips). Next mower I get should be lighter than what we have now, a snapper 21″ steel deck, self-propelled “M” model with a Tecumseh 6.0 hp engine.
Gosh, I was about to say something cliché about getting old & tired, because this seems like such a big job. But back when I was younger (e.g. last year) the garden was smaller!
OK, all this thinking is making my shoulders and back sorer–back to the common garden!
PS: Stuart, remember to bring the gas can back!
Today was a day of firsts, realizations and first realizations. It was our first unexpected change in schedule due to weather, and realization that the early flowering of many plants will mess with pollination experiments. It was also our first day in the Common Garden and possibly first experience with chiggers, as we have many unexplainable itchy red bites. I think that we all realized that it’s going to be rough work out there. Mosquitoes swarm all over at all times, the sun/heat is unrelenting and there are thistle plants the size of Christmas trees to deal with. I realized that there is nothing better than a ridiculously long shower after a day in the field. It even seems to make sunburns hurt less, mosquito bites (of which I have many) itch less, and will always be the one place that ticks and chiggers can’t get me.
Day 4 of the Echinacea project and still no blog postings from the ladies of the group. Not to pass judgment on the fairer sex, but they seem to lack general motivation. Hopefully their negative attitudes improve with time.
Hey, it’s 7:47 in the morning in Minnesota. Notice the timestamp on the blog entry. How do we make the timestamp correct?
If y’all like nerdy blogs, check out this one, made by a guy named Johann in Sweden:
http://insect-plant.blogspot.com/
Well, we are off to bed in the men’s condo, or the ‘mando’. I am excited to use the new shower caddy that Colin assembled earlier in the day.
I think Stuart’s idea about measuring anther asymmetry is definitely do-able, especially if we can do some neat batch files to process the pictures automatically. I think this technology exists, as one of Stuart’s volunteers did something similar at the CBG.
The field season is off to a great start. We’ve spent time collecting data on two experiments and we are getting new equipment & gear organized. Not everything is roses though.
We have determined survival of plants in our experimental “recruitment plots.” Seeds were planted during fall 2000, 2001 & 2002 in plots with different prescribed burn treatments. We have kept track of survival every spring. Five plots down, four to go! We will write down our equipment list & the protocol for this experiment later this week.
We searched for and found seedlings in three remnants (sap, nwlf & kjs). The goal is to find plants of the 2007 seedling cohort and determine their survival this summer & in future years. We want to compare seedling recruitment & juvenile survival from year to year and among remnants. This project will offer insight into the differences in population dynamics in small & large remnants. We’ll also be able to gauge masting in Echinacea.
Distinguishing between seedlings and small plants is difficult. Some plants were obviously seedlings because we could see green cotyledons or brown shriveled up cotyledons. Other plants were the same size as seedlings, but were obviously not seedlings because we could see remains of a dried up leaf from last year. Then there were some that we just weren’t sure about: small plants with no leaves from last year and no cotyledons.
Some problems are impossible to solve right now (distinguishing seedlings). Other problems are solvable–and we have a lot of them. We have many new gadgets to get working this summer: kites, digital cameras, video cameras, high-precision GPS, etc. We will push some of our equipment to the limits (like using binoculars to follow flying bees). We’re feeling a bit overwhelmed and worried that we won’t have everything figured out before flowering starts. And flowering will start soon–one plant at kjs (#1919) looks like it could start flowering tomorrow.
Fortunately, field biologists are a resourceful lot. It is no surprise that Andy & Josh surmounted the problem that we had with downloading large video files.
We will face many challenges in our pursuit of efficient data collection in demanding, harsh field conditions far away from civilization with pressing time constraints. But science must move forward! New discoveries await! We are up to the challenge! Stay tuned to the Echinacea field log to read about new adventures of the Echinacea team…
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