Today is Taylor’s Birthday! Today she turned 19 years old. Gretel made a wonderful chocolate cake with caramel in the middle for Taylor which we got to eat at lunch when we all sang Happy Birthday to Taylor. Later Taylor made us all some delicious fish tacos for dinner (she wished to cook on her birthday) and we celebrated with another homemade cake!
Taylor and her first cake of the day!
Taylor’s birthday was the most important part of the day but we did do some work today. In the morning Will and I went out to Staffanson to collect pollen for the Q3 experiment. In the afternoon much of the team did cross pollenation of Landfill plants for the Q3 experiment. I worked on clearing P1 of any Birdsfoot Trefoil. I was able to extract nine plants from the experimental plot, each of them witha large taproot.
The newest member of Team Echinacea
Yesterday I made lots of headway on my independent project! I met with Jason Strege from the DNR to discuss mechanical methods of seed collection. Jason also brought along this beauty. It was bought by the DNR to be tested as a vaccum collection method. In the comming weeks I will be doing some testing with different nozzle sizes to attain the optimal settings for seed collection.
