Friday August 30th

The end of another week has snuck up on us. Kory left today which means Team Echinacea is down to just Ilse and myself. We’ll be around until early to mid-October or until all the field work is done for the season. Can you believe we’ll still have a couple heads flowering on Labor Day?!

Today we harvested for the second time in CG1. The three of us didn’t expect many heads to be ready, especially since 3 days ago we harvested ~1% of the flowering heads this year (and like I just mentioned, there are still heads flowering!) but holy moly! There was a sharp increase in the heads harvested today. I would estimate we got roughly 110 heads, which would put us around 6% complete. Maybe “holy moly” was a bit dramatic, but it seemed like a lot more than earlier this week. Many of these heads were also in the qGen2 crossing experiment which is great since we’ll want to get those heads drying and dissected as soon as possible in order to plant the achenes this fall (and before it snows).

We also continued surveying and entering demography information this week. Today Ilse, Kory, and I headed to the Landfill site where we flagged all the flowering plants and took information on how many heads they have and their GPS coordinates. We’ll still need Stuart to look over that site to make sure we have found all the flowering plants (try as we might, we seem to always miss a couple) but it’s been great to make some progress with the bigger sites.

This past week we also decided things might be a bit more interesting here in Douglas county if we renamed some of the remnants to be more exciting and/or secretive. Thus far we’ve come up with:
— Treasure Islandfill (and therefore Around Treasure Islandfill, North West of Treasure Islandfill, etc)
— King’s crossing (formerly railroad crossing)
— Loeffler’s Hollow
— Staffanson Prairie Plunder
— Lost Liatris Hill

Let us know if you think of any others. Be creative! We’ll want next year’s Team Echinacea curious and intrigued by the possible mysteries at each of the remnants.

Andddd speaking of Liatris, Ilse and I found a beautiful white Liatris at Hegg Lake while we were harvesting Dayvis’ E. pallida and E. angustifolia plants. Check it out!