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Having stickered and scanned all of the collected Stipa seed (great job Ian, Hillary, and Lauren!) we’ve gone through and stuck them all into their foamy rows. 1700ish seeds later, we’re ready to plant out in the common garden! Here’s a few pictures:
helandechfinaldataset3.csvAs all of you know katie and I are leaving this weekend to go back up to CBG, and I am hoping that Echinacea will be just about done flowering at all of my sites by then. It is looking hopeful and today I had my first site that was done flowering! I still need to tag the Echinacea at some of my sites though. I finished entering most of my data this weekend, and am very excited to see what the graphs and analysis will reveal. I am posting the cvs files for Stuart below, and some pics of a very interesting bug katie found today
corandcardfinaldataset2.csv
helandechfinaldataset2.csv
 Beetles getting busy. The male was mounted on the other female shortly before this photo.
 Looking for orchids, this is in some pretty swampy area. Someone Mentha.
Swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata. Also while out looking at orchids.
Showy milkweed, Asclepias speciosa.
 Lepidopteran love.
This plant appears to not be photosynthetic
 Click to embiggen. This white fuzzy (yes, an insect!) is hanging out on an echinacea, doing whatever it is they do.
Parent’s Visit and the 4th:
On July 1st, my parents came to visit us up in MN. They joined the group for burgers at the K-town bar on Thursday night. On Friday, we explored (Mom, Dad and I) Fergus Falls, which has a surprising amount going on for such a small town. We found a great Art gallery, with some really cool pictures of MN from the air, and visited Phelps Mill, an historic site. We ate dinner a yummy Italian restaurant, recommended by Ian (thanks Ian!) and found a wonderful little cafe for dessert, Cafe 116. Sunday, the 4th was spend with the Wagenius’ at Elk Lake, which was a delight. All in all, the parents had a great visit. Below are some of the pictures Mom took:
Orchid Trip:
On Monday, July 5th Team Echinacea (or some of us at least), helped Gretel find and count the endangered Great Plains White Fringed Orchid. I did a mini-report on this plant for my Plant Evolution and Diversity class, so to find out more about the plant see Gallagher_PoW_16April2010.pdf .
It was really fun to visit to a very different type of prairie (wet vs. mesic), and spend a day doing something totally different. Unfortunately, this year the mosquitoes were especially bad, which kind of put a damper on the day. Fortunately, the team ended up have a lovely dinner at Cafe 116, and I think I can safely say that I had some of the best pulled pork in MN.
Some pictures of the orchid trip:
Planting My MS Project Sites:
On Wednesday, we finally began planting the three sites for my Masters Project. It was a huge group effort, and I can’t thank everyone enough for helping out. Here are some pictures of the effort:
All Finished! WOOT!
Bowling:
Friday night Team Echinacea went bowling. While I wouldn’t say we were horrible, I also wouldn’t recommend that any of us, except maybe Laura, join a bowling league. The rest of us were inconsistent to say the least, although I think everyone got a least one strike, so there is hope. That said, I think any bowling league would be a bit… surprised by some of the techniques Lauren employed. Bowling left handed, and pushing the ball under Hillary’s legs both seemed particularly successful strategies for her. Personally, I found left-handed bowling to be a complete disaster. Pictures of the fun:
Teamwork gets the job done:
The Under-the-Leg Technique… not so successful, but kinda fun to watch:
Sometimes the fates were against us… for looong stretches of time:
But we had fun anyway:
Et Voila! We’re back up to date. ‘Till next time!
-Kate
yesterday a group of us had fun searching for orchids in the wet land prairie, that is until the mosquitoes found us. However we quickly recovered from the attack with an excellent meal and delicious chocolate bread pudding for desert. Here are a few pics from the day.
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:
Ok, you have to enlarge this photo.
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?
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!
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.
Here are the locations of E. strigosus plants in the common garden:
32 953, 33 954, 38 960
Plants have just started to flower!
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