While field work continues in good old Kensington, Amy and Danny have moved to their new residence in Evanston to begin work at the Garden. It’s an exciting time filled with new faces such as the many wonderful volunteers who help clean, count, weigh, and do many other things with Echinacea heads. Today, Nina, who goes to the Illinois Math and Science Academy, was in the lab and we were able to discuss what she’ll be doing for the year (more to come later). The shiny metal of the lab was quite a change from the vivid goldenrod and smooth blue aster of the prairie and Jared’s standing desk set up only partially simulates the feeling of standing in a patch big blue stem. All in all, it’s a different environment but a very welcoming one and the Garden itself is absolutely beautiful.
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Hi, I’m Nina, and I’m a student at the Illinois Math and Science Academy that will be working with the Echinacea Project through the 2015/2016 academic year. I will be conducting a competition experiment between Echinacea angustifolia and Echinacea purpurea. In the past, I’ve been an intern with Plants of Concern, volunteering at Volo Bog State Natural Area and collecting data on various threatened and endangered species. I’m very excited to start my project here! Today and yesterday Katherine and I harvested most of the heads from P1 and P2! It’s an all day affair now that it’s just the two of us, but we enjoyed seeing how much progress we’ve made- many of the rows and all of the heads for Q3 are completely harvested! Today at P2 we had a picnic lunch in the field to maximize efficiency and enjoy the beautiful and clear fall day. I also gained a deeper understanding for just how caring of a person Katherine is. As we were harvesting she carefully ensured no bugs made it into the bag declaring, “Why must I have such a respect for the sanctity of all life!” as she herded another small bug back into its home at hegg. Unfortunately as we headed home, the truck didn’t quite start! Luckily, a kind passerby helped us jump it and after at the auto body shop we got to play with Bo, the friendly and pudgy yellow lab. We started off today by receiving a post card from Ben! It’s addressed to all of Team Echinacea, so I urge everyone to return to read it in person (and so we can see you)! To say we were overjoyed would be an understatement, and it reminded us how much we miss our buddies who have returned home, to school, and to continue work in Chicago! Unfortunately as you can see from the pictures, some members were not so fortunate as to remain humans after the summer. So much time spent studying Echinacea has caused Gina to turn into an Echinacea and from eating too many cucumbers from the Wagenius’ garden, Ben has become a cucumber! We are impressed by how much this summer influenced our friends both academically, and physically.
 Katherine cuddles Bo while the car is expected!  Gina misses the project so much she’s turned herself into an Echinacea!  We miss Ben, but we like him as a cucumber too As of Tuesday, 139 out of 153 total Q3 heads have been harvested. That means there are only 14 more to go. Yay!!! With Gretel having left for Chicago after lunch today, Ali and I are officially alone here in Kensington! While holding down the fort for a week will likely be challenging due to the large amount of fieldwork left to be done, we’re confident that we’ll be able to handle it. Our newfound ability to drive stick-shift has already proved invaluable, and we’re gaining confidence with it every day. This afternoon, we drove around to harvest at the remnants, and we finished off the harvest at Steven’s approach, NW of landfill, and Hegg. Now the truck is parked safely in our driveway, which will be its home for the next month! Here are some photos from the week!  The beautiful birthday cake Gretel made me!
 Ali also made me a cake!!  Being hooligans in P1, as usual On Friday, yet another member of Team Echinacea left Kensington! 🙁 Amy moved down to Chicago this past weekend to start the lab-based portion of her internship. We’re excited for her, but we definitely miss her (and her mom-like presence) back here in Minnesota! Hope the Chicago Botanic Garden is treating you well so far, Amy! It was a quiet weekend for me here in Kensington, with Amy moving and both Danny and Ali in Northfield visiting college friends. For the first time in a long time, none of us town hall kids were together in the same place! It made me miss the days when there were 8 of us living here. Today at work, we started the day by harvesting heads in the remnants and at Hegg Lake. Only 7 heads remain to be harvested in the remnants as of today! In addition, Ali measured senescence in Gina and Abby’s aphid addition and exclusion plants, and all 3 of us collected Bouteloua seeds at Hegg to be planted in P2. At lunch, we were excited to see Gretel for the first time in weeks! She headed out with us this afternoon to do seedling refinds at the landfill, NW of landfill, and S of golf course sites. After completing these sites, we staked the focal plants at Loeffler’s corner, in case we have time for more seedling refinds tomorrow.  Ali and I did lots of driving practice in the truck! As the title suggests, today was the only day this week that we didn’t harvest. It was also the chilliest by far! With a nice cool 48 degrees to start the day, we went to one of the recruitment plots to do demography and didn’t find a single flowering plant. We tried going to the other plot nearby and realized that it was going to be wet and we didn’t have boots so we pushed it off for later.  Searching in an Echinacea barren land We then went and did seedling searches for the rest of the morning and got quite a bit done!  Amy and Katherine find a focal plant After lunch Ali and Katherine practiced driving and Amy and Danny went to another site to look for seedlings. After that we harvested a bunch of Bouteloua curtipendula to put into our one of our most recent experimental plots. Overall it was a productive day with a lot of fun and a large amount of cold wind.  A gallon of Bouteloua  Smiles to begin the day!
 See ya!
 Recruitment plot, ahoy!  Danny and Ali visible in distance  Captain K$ at the helm of USS Echinacea
 ~*~ If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail ~*~ Katherine prepares to harvest!  Sub-optimal path to P2
 “Make a face describing how you feel right now”  Rollin’  Musings from the field: “Do you think that the Vikings colors are purple and yellow because those are common prairie flower colors?”  “I like the clouds today! They’re very cloud-like!”- KGS  p2p2p2p2p2p2p2p2p2p2p2  After yesterday, we thought we were going to need all of the mini-gBags!  Ali and Danny or Team Pallida in disguise?  Yessir yessir three bags full!  Yippee done before lunch!  The Pouch-Scarf: the field-fashion trend that’s sweeping the nation!  It’s like the cover of abbey road except that there’s only two of them, it’s close up, and they’re in the prairie  Ayooooo  Pistachio!
 Today several of us learned that “LetNo” is short for “letter-number”  Teamwork making the dream work!  Paper data sheets lost today: 0!  Don’t ask Ali how she feels about the Olympics  “Wow!! Look at the subtle gradation of color in this grass! It’s so beautiful!”  Hard times  Loyal follower  K$ saves the day  Danny “Banana” Hanson drives the tractor back to Town Hall at the end of the day Today the team headed out to kjs to finish up the seedling refinds! We were happy to finish the site with the most seedlings! From kjs we went to P1 to do a harvest! On Thursday we were so proud of the progress we’d made with the harvest, and naively thoughtthat Thursday may have been the longest day! Little did we know we would spend the greater part of today ruthlessly chopping off the heads of the flowers we tended so carefully all summer. We may have lost more that just the flower’s heads out there! Happily we had a croc pot meal of chili with cornbread courtesy of Danny! Yum!
Today, Team Echinacea was the smallest it’s been so far this summer! With Stuart in Chicago for the week, and Abby and Matt starting off the school year over in Barrett, only Danny, Amy, Ali and I will be holding down the fort for the next few days. This morning, we headed to KJs to do seedling refinds. Despite the fact that it’s one of our smallest sites, KJs has far more focal plants for seedling searches than any other site, so we had our work cut out for us. Trying to find the seedlings we’re supposed to track among the hundreds of other seedlings present was pretty frustrating at times, but we persevered, and almost finished the site before lunchtime! After a quick lunch, we visited the remnants and Hegg Lake to harvest Echinacea heads. The good news is that the harvest at Staffanson was finished today! But the bad news is that all of East Riley and about half of Riley has been mowed. Tags are strewn all over the roadside, and many of the plants are gone. Luckily, only one of the plants we were planning to harvest was lost. At the end of the day, the four of us met up at Hegg to take demography data for two of the recruitment plots. We tagged quite a few new flowering plants!  A sad and lonely lunch table 🙁 Happy Labor Day from Team Echinacea! We made the most of the long weekend by doing lots of traveling. Danny went to Evanston to move things in before he moves there in a few weeks. He brought lots of the heads we harvested last week in an effort to keep up with the volunteer’s fast-paced processing of our harvest thus far! Meanwhile, Katherine, Ali, and I went up to Ely, MN to visit a friend of mine who works at a camp up there. The camp was hosting a music festival this weekend with artists like Lucy Michelle, Jeremy Messersmith, and The Pines. We were very excited to see the rocks, trees, and varied topography of the region which were all very different from what we’ve been experiencing in Douglas County. On Saturday morning we went mushroom hunting with Jeremy Messersmith, who happens to be a big mushroom enthusiast. Who knew! Later that day we went paddle-boarding and kayaking on the lake, which was really fun. Then we watched the concert! Super good. We capped off the day with some square-dancing with our fellow concert-goers. A great day. Sunday was similar, with more awesome music in the afternoon. We drove back today taking a scenic route through some good Minnesota towns I hadn’t been to before like Hibbing, Grand Rapids, and Akeley, which is the birthplace of Paul Bunyan. Danny is still on his way back from Chicago now. Stuart will be working at the Garden for the week, so it’s just us kids here in charge of getting everything done this week. There’ll be lots of harvesting to do in the experimental plots as well as plenty of refinding the seedlings that Team Echinacea has kept track of over the past 6 years in the remnants.  Us and Paul |
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