Busy, busy, busy. Gardeners and botanists work is never done.

Field work is underway doing vegetational analyses of an old field as part of our research into the biology of a hemiparasitic plant that appears to have a considerable impact on this plant community. It's hard, rather slow work, but you do find some little treasures. The area is dominated by tall goldenrod and warm season pasture grasses. So it doesn't look like much. But when you examine things close enough you find some nice things: a green, fringed orchids and purple twayblade orchids that are so cute buried down in knee high vegetation already.  A grape fern (Botrychium dissectum) was also found, a new record for this site, and not just once, but twice.  But then the rest was way too much Solidago.  
TPP was also using a nice to wildlife approach to discourage any woodchucks looking to relocate to our botanical buffet.  A chicken wire skirt was installed around the base of our pavilion, a not subtle message to stay out. Do not attempt to wrestle with chicken wire, juniper shrubs, and staple guns all at the same time. TPP came off the worst, but didn't loose too much blood. So far, so good. 
The kitchen garden is coming along. The lettuce and spinach is coming to an end, some broccoli is ready, all the spring onions have been eaten. The snap peas are just being so slow.  The herb garden is shaping up too.  Soon there will be enough parsley even for us. But will there be enough basil? Dill, never enough dill, and it's a bloody weed! Come on dill!  Look at the cilantro and get with the program! 

Field work season at an end - finally

Today will be our last day of field work for this season. All of our plots have been harvested, so now it's time to gather in the PVC plot markers and taller bamboo stakes added to the poles to almost make them visible in the taller vegetation. Next spring the process will be started all over again by trying to find our plots. You see prairie fires make it impossible to leave anything combustable out there, and bits and pieces of field gear lost during the year will get the spring melt down. The permanent markers are actually spikes driven into the ground, permanent yes, but hard to see. Thank goodness for metal detectors. Nobody got shot by bow hunters and that's always a good thing. In some years the last of our field work has been done with snow flurries in the air; this year TPP is still picking pole beans in his garden! That's evidence of a very mild fall so far, but temps promise to be more seasonal now. Of course the lab is still filled with bags of vegetation to sort and dry, and here's hoping that gets done before the field trip to Costa Rica. Hmm, guess the field work isn't really over, it's just shifting to the lower latitudes.

Monday morning random bits

FIELD WORK - There's a full schedule of field work this week to harvest biomass from our permanent research plots. At least the weather looks good all week, and although rain is needed, now hope it waits until the "harvest" is in. Biggest problem is a sore back; got to find some of those young student backs to do the heavy bending.
FIRST FROST - Came close to having our first frosts Friday & Saturday nights, but not quite cold enough to really frost things. Very light frost on 2nd night close to the ground so late pole beans survived.
CUCUMBERS IN OCTOBER - TPP picked a cucumber on the 18th of October!  Never, ever had them so late in the year and the reason is that the vines always die of a bacterial blight much earlier in the year. The blight is vectored by cucumber beetles so once they show up your vines days are pretty much numbered. Insect covers help, but when flowering starts you have to let pollinators in. So what happened to the beetles this year? Similarly the Japanese beetles were a near no show and June "bugs" were also near no-shows. And cicadas were not plentiful either. Was all the rain early in the season to blame either by drowning pupae or assisting fungi like milky spore? 
BEST NEW RECIPE - Apple, avocado, blue cheese, & walnut salad! 
CANNA RHIZOMES - The Phactors dug out a bed of landscape cannas, tall ones with purple foliage. Too bad these are not edible plants because the crop of rhizomes they produce is amazing. Oh, wait, maybe they are edible.  Who knew?
TRAVEL PLANS - Got our travel plans today for a rainforest field trip to Costa Rica. TPP used to do this every year with a class of students in tow. Amazing how much less stressful it is when the students become someone else's responsibility. Hope the el Niño weather does not result in a real wet field trip although having some rain is basically a given. Record for one 9 day field trip was over 400 mm.
FACULTY MEETING TO DISCUSS EVALUATION DOCUMENTS - Faculty meetings of any type are bad, but when the faculty are discussing evaluation it becomes especially dreadful. TPP stopped reading his yearly evaluations long before his retirement and became a much happier person especially when the money involved was too little to really matter. This is not recommended behavior for my younger colleagues. 

Uncrowning trees

Oh, yes, it's that time of year when having lots of big trees makes for quite a bit of work because of their uncrowning (leaf fall).  Two really large sugar maples and two really large burr oaks are the primary leaf biomass producers, and today's image shows a sculptural bird bath that weighs a couple of tons catching the first of the maple leaves. The hardest part is to keep as many leaves as possible out of the lily pond. And still the drought persists, so some new trees and shrubs must be watered, and the bird bath filled, as the xeric conditions of winter approach. It also means that the fall color season will be brief because leaf fall should be fast given a bit of water stress all around. Good to see that some of the plants that were new last year handling this dry period pretty well meaning that they are now have well established root systems. If anything were still wilting before everything else it would indicate the opposite and be worrisome. Tomorrow will be the start of field work, so research will be competing with garden work, cut it is a nice time of year to be outside. Some graduate students are just now figuring out how much time they'll be spending during this data gathering stage. It'll eat their lunch. TPP will try to be a good guy and help out. 

Fall fell, so autumn

Today really felt like the first real autumn day, cool, crisp, dry (too dry!), and cool enough over night to require a light blanket with the optional two black kitty-girl warmer, but only for Mrs. Phactor. TPP is not complaining. He picked a handful of grape tomatoes and enough small eggplant for a pasta dinner. This also means it will soon be time to harvest prairie biomass for another master's degree project, but that will probably be done next week. Time to go looking for some prairie gentians; although vividly blue they hide deep within the grassy canopy and so are seldom seen by most people. A bottle gentian grew in our gardens for a few years, but it did not sustain itself. It's a strange plant whose flowers never actually open requiring fairly substantial bees to force their way in. Now TPP is on the prowl for a couple of big, winter squashes, they type with hard, dark orange flesh.  They are around but right now shops want "Halloween" prices for them, not squash prices, so perhaps some will wait for a post October sale. Of course there may also be enough squash remaining in the freezer from last year. Inventory control is so hard, and it's a form of spelunking to find out what frozen items lurk in the depths of the freezer. Mrs. Phactor already pointed out that at least 5 packages of Andouille sausage await the urge to make some gumbo.  And cool fall weather is perfect for a pot of gumbo!  See how things just sort of work out especially as the transition continues from margarita season to NY cocktail season. 

Hot, steamy field work

Summer arrived rather quickly, as usual, and after all that rain, with some hot temperatures, all that vegetation and transpiration results in a very steamy environment, sort of a field work sauna. Not being crazy, such weather is sometimes avoided, but in this case some vegetation measuring needed to be completed as soon as possible, so there you go. As a result the work goes on and you put discomfort out of your mind as much as the nasty, annoying little gnats allow especially the ones whining in your ear. The data is now in the bank but the data gatherers are a bit worse for wear. Pass the Gaterade please. You remain thirsty for such a long time after you've gotten yourself dehydrated like that. Should have know better and had some water along, but well on the way to recovery now.

Monday morning science

It's June; where did May go?  Glad some early seed collection was done before our 2.25 inch rains came this past Friday and Saturday. Front ushered in some unseasonably cool weather, cool enough to send the kitty-girls back to our bed. Great news from the refrigerator! Seeds of yellow foxgloves (Aureolaria & Dasistoma) are germinating after several weeks of vernalization! Seed germination has sometimes been (and still is) a big problem with some of the species being studies. These are green, parasitic plants and they are going to be given different tree seedling hosts to assess the interaction from the perspective of both parties. Should be great fun. This afternoon will be more field work that now becomes even more pressing because you don't want long periods of time to pass between data gathering in plant communities during the growing season. And do they ever grow! Already marker poles are disappearing into the prairie canopy especially where the plots were nutrient enhanced. Always something to do this time of year.

Spring field work

Well, it's been a late spring, and our field work has finally begun. This sort of sounds silly, but the first job is to actually find our study plots. Yes, they are marked, and yes, we've been using these plots, a long-term study, since 2006, but the markers must be able to survive prairie burnings, so they are metal and not too big. Our numbered tags got well scorched, dirty, and buried in ash, again. At times you can be standing just inches from a tag and not be able to see it. So, the prairie was burned last week, and today we started looking for them.  Burned prairies are dirty, dusty places, but already the green shoots are appearing through the black ash. It's fun to see what else lurked on the prairie that ends up being exposed after a burn.  Hmm, we found the charred "bones" of a meter stick, and the two brass ends were still exactly 1 meter apart.  Hate to think how many of these high tech instruments we've damaged over the years.  The partially melted remains of a fairly nice compass was found still in the middle of one study plot. A couple of small snakes that did not slither fast enough were roasted, so were the eggs of a ground-nesting bird, a big one, goose or duck? Quite a few bones here and there, nice and brightly white. Fortunately a couple of students lent us their young eyes, and we set a  new record in finding all the plots. Wow! What a huge help! It's a good start to the season, but man, TPP was just about black from the elbows to hands, and from the knees down.  

Hot, humid summer field work

Humidty on our prairie study site was about 300% (based on how it felt) this morning especially down in the vegetation where we had little seedling plots to photograph.  The emergent vegetation, e.g., compass plant, is already about 6 feet tall and getting ready to flower.  The grasses will wait until later to shoot upward for flowering.  Quite different from the stunted growth of last year's heat and drought.  This area has had rain for the past few days so the plants can transpire a lot, and that makes the humity down in the vegetation as high as it can get.  And as the morning wore on, the heat rose, and you just became soaked in sweat.  Now the only complaint here is that when you're trying to see things, bending over, you keep getting sweat on the lens of your glasses, and that's really annoying.  The other problem is the prairie vegetation has lots of rough edges, and wearing short sleeves for comfort, your arms get quite scratched from pawing through the leaves searching for your well marked plots that nonetheless are hard to find.  It's not just sedges that have edges.  In compensation it's a nice meadow of flowers this time of year, fleabane asters, yarrow, wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium, shown with beetle floral

visitor), cone flowers purple and pale, pinks, black-eyed susans, sunflowers, lead plant.  Tomorrow morning will be a repeat.

Ask the professor: What do you do with yourself over the summer?

Yeah!  That just makes my morning!  What do us lazy professors do with our 3 month long summer vacation?  Well, let TPP offer a couple of answers.  First, we don't get paid.  Maybe you think we aren't working, but not to worry because we're not getting paid either.  That's an equation you can perhaps understand.  Certainly TV right now doesn't have much to offer.  Let's see both hockey and basketball are still playing and dominating the TV, and it's June, so how could anyone care?  Of course the locally favorite baseball team had already sunk to the basement of the league so we can't even be amused by their usual summer collapse.  So you know, you just sort of sit around doin' nuthin'.  Summer is when field biologists get to actually visit the field.  That's were this picture came from, and soon it will be time to revisit these plots, re-photograph them and collect some more data.  Hmm, actually haven't collected any data yet; still analyzing the images from the last time collection period.  Finished revising a journal manuscript because the author wanted us to cite a paper of his that is going to appear in the same volume so we had no way to knowing about it yet.  Bloody thanks for that bother.  Finished revising and re-formatting about 150 figures for a book manuscript, then checking all the chapters, figure captions, indexes, contents, keyword lists, and size/magnification spread sheets to make certain all the references to these figures were still all correct.  Even just assembling the entire thing (you'd think this would all be digital wouldn't you?) in hard copy (2) for submission took three days because you notice that not all of those things above were quite correct, so you fix everything on the fly.  A steady stream of recommendation requests, internship notifications, and other student-centered requests need to be done ASAP, and did TPP mention we don't get paid in the summer even though we continue to deliver the services students count on?  In his ample spare time TPP tries to keep entropy at bay with respect to his old house and his gardens.  Did a biological presentation, actually just a question and answer session, to explain to Unitarians how the biological world works (topics covered: biological magnification of heavy metal pollutants, phytoplankton productivity, bees and biodiversity, soy food products, antibiotics in food, coral reefs and global warming, nutrient cycling, and so on); received many thanks, many complements, no honorarium.  But rather than rant at him, told my dentist I was so bored with nothing to do that I was thinking of taking up golf (his game). 

No rain? Back to field work!

What?  No rain?  Well, soggy or not, there's field work to be done.  A hard thing to figure out is the life history of some plants. Out on the prairie one of our target species is a lousewort, a green parasite, and it's been tough trying to figure out how it grows and when it dies.  So a couple of years back a whole batch (sciency term) of largish (more jargon) plants were marked and measured in various ways with the idea of coming back the next year to see how they had changed.  How many seedlings were around?  How many shoots with how many leaves did it have now?  Did it produce any plantlets via short rhizomes?  Then nature intervened and over the next winter, one with plenty of snow cover, the marked plants, clearly showing a superior delectability had been almost completely eaten by some small mammalian prairie resident.  You understand that all that before data, and the time invested in getting it, was essentially useless without the after data.  But you try again.  This year, a small 10 cm x 10 cm plots with lousewort seedlings were marked.  And the seedlings are being counted and individually identified photographically.  You expect the seedling stage to have a high mortality, but is it higher when the seedling must find a host to survive?  Well, you place your bets and then spend your time and money to find out.  Here's one of the 100 square centimeter plots (3 orange nails, 1 grey nail for orientation at the corners).  The lousewort is easy to identify from the time it's first pair of true leaves appear by the scalloped margins.  So, what you think?  How many seedling do we have here?  How many will survive?  And how long before they get big enough to reproduce? 

Just a little bit busy this spring

The end of the semester, the beginning of field season, a publishing deadline, and home gardening are all colliding here in May when the days just don't have enough hours.  At the coffee shoppe this morning, at least 5 colleagues were sitting there with piles of papers.  Only one of them was in a semi-good mood.  What a terrific person she must be.  Students want to know their grades, and TPP wants to provide them as soon as possible.  However, a bit of patience is a virtue and so is a careful, thoughtful evaluation.  Same goes for the field work and gardening. This afternoon will be spent in the field looking for our permanent plots.  They are marked in the SW corner by a big spike and a inch and a half numbered aluminum tag.  It's hard enough to find them when the prairie has been burned, but this year is didn't get burned.  When the plot gets found, a 36-inch pvc pipe is shoved over the spike at the corner.  When the vegetation really gets up there, it's hard to even find the pvc.  An observant person can be within inches of a tag and not see it.  This is sure to be fun.  At home, plants are showing up faster than the Phactors can plant them, and it's always good to take time to plant things well and in the best location possible.  One particularly well-placed plant is an orange flowered azalea that sits in a nice copse among old spruces, a bald cypress, and big hostas.  In flower, it really lights up the space, which faces the street.  Yesterday a passer-by noticed it and braked their car suddenly for a better look and almost got rear-ended.  That would have been an expensive look.  People have actually stopped, parked, and come to the door to ask what variety it is (spicy lights).  Just planted a new azalea in the same series that has white and yellow flowers (highlights). TPP will try hard to get some more plant placements like this.        

Botanical field work and snakes

Mostly TPP has a laissez-faire relationship with snakes: if they don't bother me, TPP won't bother them.  For about a decade, a great deal of TPP's field work was done in Queensland, the wet tropics in the vicinity of Cairns (one of my study sites can be seen from the city's harbor, in the distance).  If there's anything you need to learn quickly in Queensland before venturing into its rainforests, it's that virtually every snake that isn't a python is poisonous and certain bushes and trees have vicious stinging hairs.  So when an Aussie field hockey player tries to remove a snake from the field and gets bitten in the process, and dies because it's one of the truly dangerously toxic venomous snakes, you have to sort of wonder about where he was brought up.  Dang, TPP had just one encounter with a taipan, and an image of this sleek snake was burned into his skull after shooing one out of the parking area behind his QLD apartment.  His study site was alive with the common brown snake, another top 10 venomous snake (see linked article for a top 10 rundown), but a rather shy and rather easily intimidated snake.  Good thing!  This makes TPP's current study site in Costa Rica relatively safe what with only fer-de-lances lurking everywhere in the leaves.  There are lots of other little vipers around: eye-lash viper, hog-nosed viper, and the not so little bushmaster, and in spite of nearly stepping on a hog-nosed viper on his first day at this field station, TPP still feels safer than when in Australia. So what was the field hockey player's big, and fatal, mistake?  Not wearing Wellington boots!  Hey, got any field work volunteers out there? 

How long does an experiment take in biology?

A potential student asked this question, a good question, but the answer isn't easy.  It takes however long it takes for the treatments to result in significant results, or until you are quite certain that nothing significant is going to happen.  In the area of community ecology, this can take years depending upon what you are recording.  This is particularly significant this Monday AM because along with a collaborator and a couple of students field work is planned, maintenance really, on an experiment that was started in 2006.  Publishable results in terms of differences in biomass were forthcoming at the end of the third year, but we remain uncertain if species composition has actually changed.  Prairie perennials are long-lived plants and while their sizes may be plastic, changeable, based on different environmental conditions and different competitions, they do not come and go quickly, except for perhaps one invasive species.  Short term experiments are like a snap shot in ecological/evolutionary time.  This is sort of like looking at one still photo and trying to understand the whole movie.  But long-term experiments eat up your time and resources.  My friends and colleagues the Clarks, Deb and David, have been running an experiment, or really monitoring rain forest tree growth for what is going on 30 years, and their data is perfectly parallel to carbon dioxide concentrations and warmer temperatures, and these are not encouraging data.  But anything of shorter duration would not have shown these trends.  They have been working with people around the world to set up similar long-term projects.  The Phactor doubts that anyone will want to inherit our project, and we remain uncertain how long it will be maintained.  The data and scholarly productivity output have been small in comparison to the labor involved, but we remain reluctant to cut and run just yet.  In part, we'd like to see is species composition is actually changing, so we will gather more data next spring and summer to find out.  Science isn't necessarily fast.  Damn those microbiologists!

Field work commences

Although a stack of exams awaits, field work begins this afternoon.  The prolonged early warmth of spring 2012 has moved up our field work schedule by at least 3 weeks.  And you cannot just decide to wait until later.  In this sense field work domineers your life; your needs and wants are subordinated to those of your research organism.  The prairie lousewort is one of the 1st plants up on the prairie, seen here emerging after a burn, next to a partially melted marker, inflorescence already formed and ready to go.  Fortunately some young backs have decided to get involved in our research, and their assistance will be most welcome.  When studying rain forest trees, one of my student field assistants was afraid of heights and would not climb a ladder.  With prairie field work operating down at ground level one of the students is a pole vaulter!  As usual our first act is to find all of our research plots, and although marked by a permanent metal tag and corner spikes, and although mapped, it's amazing how tough it is to find some of them even after a vegetation clearing burn.  In full vegetation finding the plots is next to impossible.  Every now and then something pulls a tag out making things really difficult.  However, only one plot has been totally lost, misplaced if you will, since 2006, and fortunately it was a second control so we can operate without it.  In particular my collaborator has lost many pens and several pairs of sunglasses, and some of them do get found.  Last year this was quite an experience because several large Nerodia (water snakes) were emerging from dens and sunning themselves, and giving my snake nervous colleague quite a bad startle.  This will not be brought up, as bad field episodes are best forgotten.  

Spring break - field season!

Well, one thing is pretty certain, spring break is next week and very, very few undergrads will be on campus.  As usual, spring break will be when the Phactor gears up for field season.  A couple of undergrads are involved with seed germination experiments: the effect of fire on germination of an invasive legume, allelopathic (chemical warfare) interference of germination of native prairie species by an invasive legume (notice a theme?).  Our first task, as it is every year, is to find our long-term study plots, whose locations in general are known, but in the exact specific, they can be hard to find.  Prairies are dynamic places, and things happen.  Who knows why?   Things get buried, things get dug up, especially if they mark the corner of a study plot.  And with an advance spring, the earliest suspects will be sprouting very soon, especially since the prairie was burned in the fall so nothing remains to burn this spring.  The blackened soil will also warm up a bit sooner too.  It's strange in the spring without any vegetation, when you can see the whole plot so easily, and when the 30 inch PVC pipes stick up so conspicuously, so it's hard to imagine how hard these will be to find (close to impossible) when the prairie vegetation reaches 7-8 feet in August.  And of course with all of this to do, the book looms, and the need to get it finished ASAP.  It'll be a great spring break.

Just in time field work

At about 3 pm yesterday it occurred to the Phactor that should he want a collection of winter condition twigs for a lab exercise, it would be one hell of a lot smarter to collection them while a nice 50 degrees outside. That began a concerted two and a half hours of field work, only briefly interrupted by campus police wishing to know what was going on. Officer: What is going on here? Phactor: Collecting specimens for a lab. Officer: Do you have permission? Phactor: Permission? This campus is my classroom. Any other questions? By the time the collecting was done a huge plastic bag was quite awkwardly full and reasonably heavy, but enough diversity was collected, included at least 2 species in 4 or 5 genera, so that students will be able to observe, sort, and organize twig characters, all before they get any terminology, and then use this data for construction of a dichotomous key, and then finally to figure out the species and evaluate how successful their efforts were. And this morning, awakening to a cold, windy, white winter scene, well, actually awakening to a black paw on my cheek announcing that cat breakfast time was nigh, the Phactor was congratulating himself for his emergency field work. Those fingers work so much better when well above freezing. Yes, it's good to have one of life's little triumphs every now and then.

Field Work - Late October

Done, done, done, done at last! Well, except for picking up a hundred poles and gathering some more seed. Actually field work never ends, but you do sort of decide that the season should be over. While the weather failed to cooperate last week providing some very cold and wet weather, this weekend was wonderful except my talents were much in demand. Mrs. Phactor wanted help with planting bulbs and fall yard work, but once you have the research tiger by the tail, you do not let go. This prompted a somewhat snide comment that even if the Phactor retired he still keep doing the same things. Well, yeah. So in the great spirit of compromise, the Phactor did both.
For this time in October, things are still looking pretty green, although the maples have dropped lots of leaves without much color, the dual result of having had no frost as yet and the lingering effects of drought. Some color is now developing, but if not for the Asian anemones, there would not be much flower color around at all.
Round one of leaf clean up begins this week. It should be great fun. The kitchen garden is done except for bokchoi and lettuce. Something already ate the spinach.
While it is the cocktail hour, our work is not yet done; time to take the cat for a walk.

It's not nice to mess with Mother Nature

The great mid-west dust bowl has been gently wet down overnight with some much needed rain. There is no need to thank the Phactor, but clearly this was the result of our planning essential field work with only have certain windows of opportunity to do it. It's as if Mother Nature was displeased with our research designed to figure out how she works. In this particularly dry year, the precipitation is most welcome, but the necessity of harvesting some plants that will provide our data is pressing with both seasonal limitations and hunting season looming. No smart botanist does field work in a tallgrass prairie during hunting season; that's when you must send your students. So please Mom, only one more nice afternoon is needed on a day without a laboratory or lecture, and before they turn the Bambi blasters loose.

Prairie field work - spring version

Cities and towns are nice little microhabitats, and this is never more obvious than when you drive 10 miles or so out of town to do prairie field work early in the season. Yes, this is the same place that had highs in the 80s last week, and snow flurries this week. It didn't seem too bad walking home, so out to the field we go, and what a difference! Yes, with a stiff breeze providing a pretty substantial wind chill a couple of hours on the prairie was quite bracing. This is the reason those wind turbines are sprouting up all over; the wind is always blowing. Fingers and toes still feel a bit stiff. Next up will be our annual permanent plot hunt! The fun never ends.