On this day, September 24th, 2019, Erin, Drake, and I planned to have a regular field day. The weather was nice and the motivation was present, but somehow things just didn’t go our way. Early in the morning, I went into G3 to find another mouse was trapped trying to get in the seed drier (for context, we found 4 mice in traps yesterday (Monday) and Drake was going to flog about them but forgot). Nonetheless, it was a surprising start to the day.
Then things started going downhill… and no, we didn’t measure P2 today (for those of you who are unaware of the layout of P2, it is arranged on a slight slope. Yay puns). We went to do demography at the Town Hall site, but ended up venturing through dense thicket and corn only to find ourselves in a random person’s yard. They had a dog and it was scary. Only later did we find out that those points were no longer meant to be in the stake file. Rat! Even after avoiding those points entirely, demo at Town Hall was rough. Many of the points were under a pile of lopped juniper; dry awn leaves are deadly, and my hands are still bleeding from digging through desiccated branches.
After our adventure at Town Hall, we did demo and seedling refinds at the aptly named East Town Hall site. There, we found 4 new flowering Echinacea (which is actually quite amazing considering we only visited 30 existing plants). We also found a deer skull. AND AN ENTIRE DEER VERTEBRAL COLUMN. My mind essentially imploded when I realized I stepped on what I thought was a rock but turned out to be a spine... Wow. Just wow.
After lunch, Erin and I finished harvesting heads in P1! All experimental plot harvesting is done now! Hooray! did some measuring… Except the mosquitoes were incredibly bad and I forgot water. After one row, we went back to Hjelm to get some bug spray but thing quickly got complicated. As I emerged from the kitchen of Hjelm after refilling my water, Erin pulled a honey bee out of her hair (she thought it was a Bouteloua fruit). The honey bee decided to be cool and stab her finger with its stinger. Not a great place to be stung if you need fingers to measure and use Visors. Fortunately, the cool, refreshing taste of an ice pack was able to keep Erin going, and we were able to measure more rows in P1 and collect some sideoats seed as a team before the day ended!
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