June update - Everything

Since arriving in Colorado, my life has been incredibly busy and interesting, which is why I have not updated my blog until now.  This post is a quite poor in terms of topic organization, I apologize.

Researches

One of my many research projects is to examine if Mertensia plants with different floral orientation are influenced by rain differently, and one measure of this effect is the number of nutlets (seeds) each plant produce.  To test this, I constructed and placed a rain shelter over a plot with several Mertensia plants, manipulated floral orientation (upward or pendant) of haphazardly chosen plants, supplemented pollen to these plants, and waited until the end of the flowering season to collect the nutlets.