Harvesting Woes

Hello, Flog!

Monday was, unfortunately, a rainy, rainy day. Well, okay, maybe it started out just a slightly rainy day. But the kind of rain that makes it just impossible to do any dampness-sensitive research.  We started off the day with the usual moist trudges through the ever-present big bluestem, and even managed to complete a few of the many field rechecks we have to do.

What are field rechecks you might ask? Sometimes, we look over the data from a summer and go, “Huh? What? How did this happen?” Our data, frankly, just doesn’t make sense. Sometimes one person will look at an area and say “There’s one plant!” and another might say “There are six plants here!” When we look at this data later, we need another opinion as to how many plants are there. And in comes field checks! (They’re particularly easy to do because they require the least walking, and therefore the least wetness.”)

Now, after lunch, picture Michael, Andy, and Lea poised to do P2 harvesting.  Imagine them with bags and clippers in hand, ready to save achenes from the cruel fate of the ground. Imagine the cars bursting with egg cartons and data sheets full of LetNos (the identifiers we use each head).

Now imagine rain.

You’re not imagining enough rain, imagine more!

Well, it rained enough to make harvesting impossible. So instead of experiencing the thrill of saving a head from dropping achenes, we did some coding in R and called it a day.

Here’s to less rain this week!

Michael