2024 was a relatively low-flowering year in the common gardens, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t bring plenty of Echinacea heads back to the lab for our volunteers! Here are our stats:
- TOTAL: 689 heads
- exPt01: 82 heads (11.9%)
- exPt02: 375 heads (54.4%)
- exPt07: 87 heads (12.6%)
- exPt08: 23 heads (3.3%)
- exPt09: 110 heads (16.0%)
- tplot: 12 heads (1.7%)
(rounding errors in %s abound)
Our first harvest was at p2, p7, and p9 on August 19th. Our last harvest was all the way on October 3rd at p7 and p9! Those hybrid plants really held on for awhile. Unfortunately, our first harvest was not in time to harvest some heads before they begin dispersing, and there are always a couple that lose achenes throughout the harvest season before we catch them. This year wasn’t toooo egregious, but our worst head lost an estimated 85% of its achenes before we encountered it. Yikes! Keep an eye out for seedlings around (7, 2) in p2…
One major victory from this year is that, besides a couple holes and piles of dirt, the ground squirrels were relatively well behaved in p2 this year. Typically, they enjoy ripping heads off echinacea plants and leaving stems, heads, and achenes everywhere. Based on harvest notes, in 2024 we only found two heads on the ground and only one was missing entirely. Compare this to 2022, when the team only harvested 41% of the heads they planned on harvesting due to ground squirrel activity. (Though, I suspect this may have been a blessing—they still harvested 480 heads. If they’d harvested all of them, it would have been around 1,170 heads. That’s a lot of harvesting!)
Another fun fact: The 99 south garden in p1 produced 25 heads this year, but its 99 north counterpart didn’t have a single flowering plant.
Additionally, we did visit p5 this year and found several flowering (and some basal) plants, but were instructed not to harvest them, so we didn’t.
We still have a couple of gBags from 2023 to clean, plus 10 from this year. We like keeping our volunteers stocked! We’ll send exPt01 2024 through first, just after the remnant heads. And so the cycle continues!
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