Over the past month, the New England SOS team’s seed collections have surged from 32 collections on 8/25 to 120 on 9/25–just about everything is fruiting in the narrow growing season of America’s northeast.  A month ago we were collecting about one species per day; now, we collect about six or seven.  Consequently, all four interns are bursting at the seams trying to properly dry, de-pest, and package the seeds for cleaning following collection.  Though the weather is now cooling down and the salt marshes are a little less rife with mosquitoes, our apartments, though booby-trapped with dozens of no-pest strips, are getting buggier and looking, well, seedier:

Scene 1 – Dining room table, from left: Eutrochium maculatum, Limonium carolinianum, Carex lupulina, Asclepias syriaca, Iva frutescens (top right), and Panicum virgatum (bottom right)

Scene 2 – Living room, from top: Scirpus cyperinus, Iva frutescens

Scene 3 – Dining room round table (aka the Graminoid table), clockwise from top right: Schizachyrium scoparium, Cyperus diandrus, Echinochloa walteri, Schoenoplectus acutus, Cyperus strigosus, Schoenoplectus pungens

Since we also have to collect specimens, our plant press is also very full:

Ran out of blotting paper…newspaper will have to do.

Despite the sudden rapid pace of collection, we are working hard and I think we are much more efficient at finding all the target seeds that we need on this giant plant scavenger hunt.  The time is flying by…soon it will be November, we will have made >200 collections, and our two dozen aluminum trays will be filled with–not seeds–but turkeys and stuffing.