The Market, the Potato Selection, (My Sad Lack of a Weekend), and the Scavenger Hunt!

I apologize for not posting for several days! My plans of blogging Thursday night were sidelined until tonight as I got sick for several days.  It was not fun.  But enough on that.

Wednesday

At breakfast on Wednesday, I had the usual coffee and roll, but they also included some yogurt. Without a spoon.  So I ended up half slurping half drinking the yogurt that I’m fairly certain was strawberry flavored, and it tasted great!

Once I got to CIP with Liliam, I headed up to my desk.  Overall, the day was fairly uneventful. The day before, Flavio had begun to teach me how to utilize programming language to format publications and analyze data.  So, in my very basic understanding of these programs, I believe that LaTeX is a computer programming language that is used by most scientific publications for standardizing their format and communication.  So I used LaTeX along with another programming language, simply called R, to format and write different documents that (although I of course would not submit them) technically follow the specifications for various scientific journals.  It was pretty cool, and so far outside of anything I’ve done before! Also, you can use these programming languages to make those complex-looking math problems look nice on the page:

So after a day largely on the computer, I was thrilled when Liliam wanted to stop by the market on the way home!  First we went to a smaller market area that had a roof, but each vendor had their own little stall with walls up.  It was bursting with colors, sounds and smells!

On our way to the market

Liliam buying some herbs

Liliam also bought me some adorably small bananas from a vendor.

Next, we visited the nearby supermarket that was huge! It was a whole three stories with an elevator, packed with just about anything you could want. I didn’t get to wander around much because Liliam was only buying two things, but here a couple pictures:

The bread selection was incredible

Also, my absolute favorite part was that I found some Coke! I hadn't had a cold drink yet, and I was so excited to drink my soon-to-be ice cold Coca Cola.  And to make things better, I got a half a liter (about 16 oz) for just over 60 cents.  I was thrilled!

Thursday

At CIP, Thursday was much more exciting! First, Flavio, Dr. Evelyn Farfan, and I went to the diffused light greenhouse storage room to select 30 seed tubers for each of the six genotypes in our experiment.  It was a long and narrow building, and the interior walkway was flanked with stacks of boxes and crates of potatoes.

We had to match the genotype numbers to the tags on the correct potato crates, which turned out to be a bit more difficult that I expected.  Once we found the corresponding crate, we would gently, so as not to break off the sprouts, inspect and select the best 30 potatoes.  

As I learned, it is best to have a fairly consistent size of tuber for the experiments, while also looking for larger sprouts that had darker or green in color.  After selecting our potatoes, we went over to the greenhouse to help prepare the pots for our experiment. 

After lunch, and another World Cup game, I met with Ximena (pronounced he-men-a) who showed me how to take download data from and program a device that measures heat and relative humidity in the greenhouse.  The device will be placed within a solar UV shield to prevent sunlight from altering the data.

At about 4:00, I left work and walked home because Liliam had to leave without me earlier that afternoon for a family engagement.  I went the same route we take in the morning, so the scenery wasn’t much different, but it was nice to take it in at a more leisurely pace. Once I got home, we ate a dinner of fried eggs and hotdogs (I guess they eat them more like sausages here). 

The nearby agricultural university

After dinner, I began to feel ill, and I spent all of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday home sick.  It wasn’t terribly serious, and I had some medicine prescribed by the doctor at CIP, and I feel much better now! Although I did get up to watch the end of the USA vs. Portugal game, including the heartbreaking, last-second goal by Portugal that tied the game.

Monday

This morning I got to CIP and got Ximena’s help printing the labels for our experiment.  Then Dr. Farfan, Flavio, and I went out to the greenhouse to tie the labels onto stakes that were inserted into the pots we had prepared last week.  And finally it was here: planting time!

First, we carefully checked and re-checked to make sure that the order was correct and all of the potatoes were in the right spot, and then Jorge sprayed a fungicide on them, so we had to wait awhile before re-entering the greenhouse.  Then we carefully matched the seed potato genotypes with their pots and began planting. 

Planting was actually quite simple.  You pick up the potato, push your other hand into the sandy soil mixture and pull back enough to then place the potato in the hole and make sure the sprout is up and then you cover the potato so the sprout is covered in about 1 cm of soil.  One down, 239 more to go!

At lunch, I was able to talk to Lauren, a fellow American (yay!). She studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has been down to Peru multiple times to work on her ethnobotany (botany paired with the cultural context of the plant) dissertation on oca, a native tuber.  On this trip, Lauren is working on performing genetic analysis as well as helping the nutrition lab with their nutritional analysis of oca. We had a great time talking, and she had some wonderful suggestions on travel destinations within Peru.

After lunch, Flavio explained some of the root analysis that they do, but we were going to test out a new, free program that would hopefully achieve similar results as the current, costly program.  So out we went to find Jorge and begin our scavenger hunt for rogue potato plants that we could dig up.  It was such a nice break, and to make it even better, the sun came out! It was the first time I had truly seen the sun in the eight days I’ve been here, and it was such a pleasant surprise.

Corn seedlings that are used in rotational cropping

So our expedition took us from the weeded parking lot ditches, to the unused fields, to the water canals by the banana trees that separate the fields.  It was quite fun tromping through the fields, and we were fairly successful in finding small plants with decent root systems that we could practice analyzing with the new program.  We placed all the plants in water to prepare them for our efforts tomorrow. 

Little birds that nest in the unused rows (look in the center)

One of the CIP borders

Flavio and Jorge examining one of the plants

Afterwards, I had a few minutes before going home, so I went up and bought myself a coffee from the coffee machine, and sipped it while waiting for Liliam to finish her work.  When we arrived home, it was later than usual so we ate dinner right away, and I had beef! They had purchased some for me and Liliam sliced it thin and cooked it in a pan with salt and pepper.  It was very different than I’m used to, but delicious nonetheless!