This week was spent setting up assays in the screenhouse and finally taking one down (which actually worked as expected!).  Next week, I will be busy taking down two more assays and hopefully, setting up more assays.  Not too much else to report this week, I just have lots to do before I head back to the United States in 10 days for the APS meeting!

The lab lizard made an appearance checking out my soil test kit.

Nematodes! I love it when assays work out!

Lots of tiny tomatoes to evaluate

This week’s random information: there are tons of ants here (thankfully none in my room!) and they do things that I’ve never seen before. Here are two weird ant things I saw this week:

A river of ants

Insectivorous ants! This ant nest was surrounded by beetle carcasses.

Morogoro Town has a large market where you can buy all kinds of fresh fruits and veggies. Here are some things you can buy there:

Nyanya: tomatoes

Magonwa ya nyanya: Diseased tomatoes (bacterial spot), I love point of sale pathology.

Parachichi: Avocado

Uyoga: Mushroom

Vitunguu: Onions

Karoti: Carrots

Viazi na viazi vitamu: Potato and sweet potato

Pili pili na pili pili hoho: Peppers (spicy) and green pepper

Tangawizi: Ginger

Chungwa: Oranges

Ndizi: Bananas

Nanasi: Pineapple

Ndimu: Lime

This week, I had a pleasant surprise.  On Monday, 96 junior high girls visited Sokoine University to learn more about the university and research.  I got to talk about plant pathology, tomato diseases and my work in Morogoro.  Luckily, I had bacteria, fungi, and microscopes on hand to enliven the discussion.  The students asked a lot of great questions and many wanted to study science in the future (YAY!).

We wrapped up the first round of variety trial evaluations in the final village at the end of this. Everything is looking good and the farmers are happy to discuss what they think of the different varieties.

The hostel monkeys also came back for a visit this week and were entertaining as always.

Pics from this week below!

Learning what tomato diseases look like on the plant…

Then learning what the pathogens look like on a plate!

Check out those sclerotia!

The research team in the field: Dr. Mamiro, Babu (MS student), Dr. Mtui, Gome (village leader, he adopted me), myself and Jackson

It may look like I’m praying, but actually I’m evaluating tomato diseases.

I attempted to shimmy up a coconut tree. I made it all of 5 feet off the ground.

Anna Banana

Monkey!

The title of this week’s post is another Kiswahili proverb (there are so many good ones!).  This week’s proverb means “little by little, the container gets filled.”   I put this as this week’s title because the slow, but steady research progress of the last few months is starting to show some results!

This week we went to the field to evaluate variety trials and the plants are looking good and maturing quickly.  I also was able to do some soil analyses in the lab and work with some of my bacterial cultures.

Here are some photo highlights from this week:

Evaluating some tomato variety trials

The tomatoes are growing very well and have lots of fruits already!

Walking to a field past some giant poinsettias (at least they look like giant poinsettias)

Cardinal climber (Ipomoea sp.) is a plant I used to grow in the US, it never looked this good.

One of the farmers taught me that if you take a ripe tomato, squish it in your hands, and rub it like soap, it will remove all the soil and pesticides from the field. It worked like a wonder and here are the remnants of my tomato soap!

I was given this chair to sit in when we visited the village. The farmers thought it was pretty funny because this is the chair reserved for village elders. Everyone had a good laugh and everyone took a turn sitting on the chair.

A tango (cucumber) given to me by one of the farmers. It’s a delicious, much crispier and tastier version of a slicing cucumber.

My mini soil lab, set up for pH and EC analysis.

Time is flying by, I’ve been in Tanzania for two months.  I didn’t even realize this until I began this week’s post.

This week, I’ve begun a new phase of my research. I’ve started to work on some of the soil health aspects of my project.  That’s why I titled this post “Udongo uwahi umaji,” which is a Swahili proverb that means “Work with the clay (or soil) while it is wet.”  This proverb resonates with me a lot more than strike when the iron is hot.

As always here are some pics from this week’s research:

Grinding and sieving soil!

Got back to trekking through tomato fields this week. This village is very flat and open (like parts of the Midwest!).

The tomatoes are getting big and some have fruits already.

Sclerotium rolfsii on tomato, look at those beautiful sclerotia!