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.