The Echinacea Project

Mega-Update

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

fl pla in CG

Four plants are flowering in Andrea’s garden this year. Andrea Southgate planted this experiment (aka inb2) in 2006 as part of her Master’s research project. Andrea and Jennifer made a photo essay about their plantings that year. These are the first plants to flower in this experiment–about 4/1500 in their fifth growing season!

Topcon GPS data

I dumped the topcon’s gps data into a csv. this data hasn’t been cleaned and contains a couple errors that have yet to be fixed, but it should be enough to flesh out some R magic to help parse the output. The point number, lat, long, and {all the entered data for the points} are comma seperated, the least being one big glob of stuff.

The first couple values are proper points but the wrong dictionary, so those will have to be done seperately.

stipa.csv

Bags Please?

Not sure how many are needed, between the common garden and next to Hjelm house, could someone bag coreopsis palmata tops for me? My goal is to get 20 plants with two heads covered. That way I can self-pollinate one head and cross-pollinate another head.
Additionally, if Laura and Katie could check nice island across hwy 27 to see how far along the bagged psoralea is to flowering, that would be great also.
Attached is a picture of each plant.

hlh worksheets

allSpotsForPlugs_7July.xls

Plug Datasheet_Verification_07July2010_a.xls

files for planting plugs

plugPlantingInfoForKate.csv

emptySpotsForPlugs.csv

A/D data

Plug Datasheet_Verification_04July2010_a.csv

KG_site&trays.csv

orchids

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.