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This morning, the Little Team on the Prairie headed to Krusemark’s, a real bear of a site. We had to walk through a half mile of corn to get there, just to do demo on a measly 19 flowering plants! Stuart said walking through the corn was like the movie Aguirre: Wrath of God, although Amy and I haven’t seen that movie, so the reference went unappreciated. In addition to demography, Amy and Stuart collected a lot of Side-oats grama and Onosmodium molle (softhair marbleweed) to broadcast in p8, while I found a flowering plant with a tag from 1996 and struggled mightily to get a data connection on the GPS. In the afternoon, Amy and I did another round of remnant harvests. There are only four heads in remnants left to harvest, plus a few heads left at Staffanson. The season is truly winding down, folks. After that, Amy and I returned to Railroad Crossing to collect more Side-oats and some Little Blue Stem seeds. Amy found some of black-eyed susan at Railroad and I found some at West of Aanenson — we may try to document and map this and other competitive species around our study areas in the next week. Meanwhile, Stuart packed his bags and left for Chicago, making today his last field day this summer. I hope he had as much fun as I did.
 Amy checks off another thing on our very long to-do list. What a whirlwind week!
After a slow start, Amy and I did demography at some of the recruitment plots near Hegg Lake and p2. The flowers in plots HE and HS, near P2, were doing especially well; we counted a total of 34 flowering plants combined in those two plots, with several having multiple heads, and were able to find nearly all of the plants there. We also returned to a stand of Cirsium hillii near p2 that we measure each year, and found that at least three of our study plants flowered recently. Whether they flowered this year or last year is not yet clear — the leaves definitely looked gray and crispy. Stuart made the long trek back from Chicago today and harvested some Astragalus canadensis for broadcasting and corralled an escaped goat.
The highlight of today was finding a flowering (second day!) Echinacea near the Cirsium study area. We finished phenology in all of the remnants and plots several weeks ago, and have even harvested a good number of heads that are ready to drop their achenes. How this one is flowering so late in the season is a mystery — it may have to do with some recent mowing. We look forward to revisiting this plant to see if, by some miracles, it gets lucky and some of its styles shrivel.
 Flowering (second day!) Echinacea found today near P2. Outrageous! Amy and Chek look for Echinacea from the car.
Hi, loving readers,
Today was another day off for us. We decided to enjoy the day and pursue some of our own interests. Amy’s making great progress on the socks she’s knitting. I made a loaf of bread and got the dough ready to make pretzels tomorrow. The major excitement of the day is that we’re trying to use up surplus food items left over from earlier this summer so that we don’t have to go to the grocery store any time soon. We’re doing well on tomatoes, peppers and other odds and ends, but running dangerously low on coffee and are out of ice cream. For dinner, we made scrambled eggs and eggplant fritters (using a recipe which, unlike what the authors of Joy of Cooking want you to believe, absolutely does not make six servings. What is this — a meal for ants?). We then ate a dessert of watermelon from our CSA while talking about how much we miss the rest of the team. It’s early to bed, early to rise as we get ready for work tomorrow. While the rest of the country takes Labor Day off, we’ll be at Staffanson and the Hjelm House, since the prairies don’t observe national holidays.
Scott
Well, it’s been a quiet week in Kensington, Minnesota, my hometown for the summer, out there on the edge of the prairie. It was my last day along with Will’s today. We harvested sideoats grama grass throughout the roadside along p2 along with p1. This was a rather meditative activity, since the temperature and wind speed was about the most pleasant we experienced all summer. We had an analytical lunch, discussing the analysis of my independent project and best way to harvest sideoats grama in p1. Due to lack of data, we could not decide whether it was best to walk along rows or pick an optimal path to best harvest. We continued harvesting p2 and remnants during the afternoon. After work we ate some great chocolate cake, compliments of Stuart, and discussed the optimal size and shape of a goat fence along with optimal herd size for eating buckthorn. Stuart is headed back to Chicago tomorrow, and he left Scott and Amy with a parting blessing to flush the toilet as much as they want. What a gift.
All jokes aside, it was, after all, my last day, so I’ll leave you with some of my reminiscing about the summer. Throughout the summer, I had the opportunity to get to know some of the inhabitants of Kensington and the surrounding area. If any of you have listened to Prairie Home Companion, you’ll be familiar with Lake Wobegon. Kensington could be this town. It has a baseball team, a Lutheran and Catholic church, a bar, a cafe and lots of good people. The people I got to know were kind and always ready to offer me spare bike parts or food. They were excited to give me the history of town hall and the surrounding countryside. If I could give advice to future team members, I would suggest that they seek to make friends with the residents of Kensington. Who knows, they might get to become vikings for a day too. I’ll miss the town, the people, the prairie and Team Echinacea.
Post Script: If you’re wondering where the title comes from, it’s another great one liner from Scott. I can’t quite remember its context, but it is a wise proverb.
I’m a turtle? Team Echinacea
As we gazed upon an apple in the eye of a dying bonfire, Stuart tried to recall an old tale from Laura Ingalls Wilder, about a boy who left a whole apple in a fire in an effort to cook it. Or was it a potato…?
Today, Amy, Jame and Will first did total demography at KJs (where you can’t shift your weight without accidentally crushing another tag), hitting 99 points, then did demography at the flowering plants on the North side of Aanenson. This task kept them busy until lunch time. Meanwhile, I went to Staffanson to collect data for Lea’s aster phenology experiment. There are still two flowering Liatris plants on the East transect, with Solidago plants in all stages of flowering. At lunch, we discussed the ways that time travel can, will, and probably has already, impacted and improved research by the Echinacea Project.
Now, was that potato story the tale of Almanzo…?
We saved harvesting in experimental plots for the afternoon. Lots of plunder was taken from P1, but it seems like something is consistently beating us to the punch in P2. Today, as well as the last few times we’ve gone, rodents (or somebody else) have eaten off parts of the Echinacea heads and left them, with broken achenes, strewn about the plot. We’re trying to recover these heads so we can accurately assess the seed sets of these experimental plants as a proxy for their reproductive fitnesses, but alas, they are no longer of this world. But don’t worry too much, because the interns will think of something clever to get around this (gulp). Meanwhile, I went back to the Dermatology clinic in Alexandria (my third time this summer — a hat trick), where the doctor and I assessed phenology on my worts.
But wait, I’m still not sure if it was apples, or potatoes in that story…
After work, we went to Elk Lake and grilled some vegetables while watching high schoolers dive (fall off) the diving platform there. In what is either a testament to or indictment of our cooking, the vegetables actually turned out a lot better than anybody expected. The fare included marinated eggplant, zucchini, cauliflower, tomato, corn, leeks, onions, watermelon, cheetos, and for those who love the taste of living creature, burgers. After this, we returned to the Hjelm house, where we lit bonfires in the backyard with some remaining buckthorn and two thirds of a bottle of lighter fluid. In a fashion almost as circular as this flog post, Stuart began to tell us the story of Almanzo —
Ah, yes, there was also the tale of the milk-fed pumpkin…
Other highlights:
- Talking to the four-wheel man at KJs
- Stuart’s watermelon-seed spitting
- Finally learning whence the wind comes. It comes from Wind Cave. In fact, that’s why it’s called wind — it’s named after the cave.
Other lowlights:
- Amy’s potty-mouth at P2
- Grilled watermelon
- Tomorrow is Will and Jame’s last day of the field season. Next week they begin classes, although they’ll still try to skype in to help with seedling searches.
Candid shot of Jame enjoying Kendrick Lamar’s masterpiece album Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. Stuart, mid-spit Jame is now the third-tallest team member, after Will, and bonfire.
An inevitable deterioration toward uniformity. Echinacea and tags becoming one with the soil. This may be stretching the meaning of entropy, but there were a surprising number of Echinacea heads gone and many tags were nowhere to be seen. So many heads were gone in Staffanson that we began to wonder if there had been some busy rodents, deer or humans. Anyway, you may be accustomed to hearing that we did demo at Staffanson, and today was no different. We spent the entire day as demographers, but at last we finished with all 1200 some plants (500 today)! Like soldiers coming home from a war, we were both joyous and perplexed as to what more there was to be done. We had spent the coldest day of the summer, the buggiest day, one of the warmest and some of the longest days doing demo at Staffanson. We soon realized there was much more to be done. In a world without entropy, we could hope to harvest, recheck p7 and do demo at Aanenson, KJ’s and North West of Landfill. We’ll try, but stand by for updates on what we can accomplish in the next two days. After work we finished both the root beer and the ice cream, so no more floats for us. They were pretty musty (scrumptious).
We march out of battle, victorious
Today started off with Amy and Scott going to collect phenological data on Lea’s plants at Staffanson. Jame and I went to Hegg Lake to check on some discrepancies between a list of GPS points and observed points in Amy Dykstra’s plot. After we finished at Hegg lake and Staffanson we met at Loeffler’s corner for some demo. While Sulu (one of the GRS-1 units) was being uncooperative and had to take a timeout we made it by with just Chekov (the other GRS-1 unit) for awhile. Stuart returned from his trip home to Illinois today, and he arrived just in time to help us do total demo at Loeffler’s Corner. We focused on the west side of the site because it has a history of being burned and can give us an idea of how burning affects flowering in remnant populations! We completed total demo at Loeffler’s corner which involved visiting exactly 500 locations. It felt good to finish demo at a big site, especially after spending so much time doing demo at Staffanson, which is where we will be tomorrow, so stay tuned!
P.S. if you are curious about the title it is a quote from Scott after crossing a barbed wire fence with just millimeters to spare, for more great quotes from Scott stop by tomorrow!
Jame waits for Sulu to start working Jame planned an Echinacea themed party, he even decorated with lots of colored flags! But no one came : ( (Just kidding he is doing demo)
We had the smallest crew of the season yet today with Lea’s departure and Stuart still being in Chicago. Nevertheless, James, Scott, Will, and I managed to get a few things done today. We had a late start after flash flood warnings in Douglas County until 9:30. We made the best of the wet conditions and did some weeding of thistle and bird’s foot trefoil in p1. After things had dried out a little, we split up and harvested heads in the remnants. We reconvened for lunch. In the afternoon, Will and I went to Staffanson to harvest the ‘sppBonus’ plants, which are a sample of plants that have flowered in both burn and non-burn years that we harvest in addition to our regular remnant harvest. We found all of our target plants, which was a little trickier than anticipated because so many of the heads on the west unit had been toppled by weevils or grazed. Meanwhile, Scott and Jame went to Landfill and On27 to finish up harvest there. Once they finished, they met Will and I at Staffanson to work on total demo. We estimate that we are about halfway done with all demo at Staffanson. It is a big job! Fortunately, by now we are all experts and, also fortunately, the mosquitoes were not quite as bad as they were on Friday. That’s good because between the rest of demo and Lea’s phenology project we’ll be spending plenty more time there in the coming days!
Jame and friends
Amy and Scott started our Sunday off by continuing to monitor Lea’s transect at Staffanson. Thankfully, the mosquitoes failed to carry them away. Donnelly, a town near Morris, was having a threshing bee and parade this weekend, and I was invited by the Kensington Lions Club to become a viking for afternoon. I quickly accepted, since, given my non-Scandinavian heritage I might not have this opportunity many times. After learning much about the history of the local farms and farmers during the drive, I embarked upon the knarr for our passage through the streets of Donnelly. For those of you who may not be vikings or have not used a knarr for seafaring purposes, it is a cargo vessel used by the Norse for cross-Atlantic travel. I believe the specific knarr I was on may have been used to carry the runestone to its resting place in the true home of the runestone, Kensington. Anyway, our voyage safely completed and the candy handed out, I returned to K-town, my viking duties over. Scott, Amy and I then went swimming in Elk Lake where we met Abby and all her new college buddies. We stocked up on food and are now preparing for some of Scott’s signature Spanish omelets. Stay tuned for more musty news about death by mosquitoes at Staffanson tomorrow.
A fierce, clearly Norse, Viking warrior. Update: Can you count the number of ice creams in the fridge? We think there aren’t enough. Leave your guesses, comments, suggestions or concerns below.
I wrote this after boarding a train in St. Cloud, MN late Friday evening. Little did I know the route I was on had no wifi, so this is a belated post about my last day in Kensington.
Today was the last day of my time with Team Echinacea 2016- a second amazing summer out in Douglas County, MN. While I’m sad to be ending my field work, I’m looking forward to my impending move to Evanston, IL where I’ll be starting graduate school at Northwestern’s Plant Biology and Conservation program. Regardless, I was looking forward to my last day in the field. In the morning, I immediately left the Hjelm house for Staffanson to assess the flowering phenology of the Liatris and Solidago plants in my transect. Meanwhile, the rest of the team went to Hegg Lake for a morning of demo and harvesting in p2. Almost as soon as I arrived at Staffanson I noticed the mosquitoes were swarming worse than I had ever experienced! Luckily, Hegg wasn’t as bad, and we were able to finish harvesting at p2 before lunch. After lunch, harvest continued in p1. With just a couple remaining hours in the afternoon we headed out to Staffanson to work some more on Total Demo. Sulu and Chekhov were feeling a bit finicky, taking a good while to make an adequate data connection. By the time we actually started working, the mosquitoes were swarming again and after Amy had 20 bites on just one of her arms, we decided to call it a day and admit we had been “mosquitoed” out of field work. After tidying up the Hjelm house, my last day of 2016 field work came to a close. Back at town hall, Amy made us what might be my new favorite cake, oatmeal cake with cream cheese frosting, and James made some delicious baked mac and cheese. We enjoyed a game of Catan, took an evening walk around Kensington, then drove to St. Cloud where I boarded my Midnight Train to Spokane and settled in for a 27 hour ride.
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