For the past few days, I have been doing some work on oyster mushrooms. The more I research on this topic, the more frustrated I get. Robin and I would like to carry out our research excellently, and we plan to concentrate mainly on different substrates for growing oyster mushrooms that will be best for mushroom growth and yield. However, the frustrating part is that we do not have an access to a large portion of materials that are required to carry out an accurate and reliable research experiment. For example, recently Robin and I made mushroom bags with a mix of different types of soil substrates and different ratios in each bag, vermicast and soil from the herbal garden. Right now, Billy, the social entrepreneur in charge of Kabutehan, is using cotton seed hull, and this is working fine in terms of growth and production. We are simply experimenting on alternative substrates that might be cheaper and more profitable. So, we made the soil bags and filled each one of them with about 250g of soil. However, the scale we used was not a scientific scale. So we cannot strictly control the amount of soil we put in the bags. The next step is to sterilize the mushroom bags. The way that they have done it previously is to borrow a Tita’s kitchen and stove top water in a pot and steam the bags for five hours. This certainly is not the best and scientific way to do this process, but resources and options are very limited here. Robin and I tried to create a fire underneath a large tin can outside, but we do not have an access to hard wood. The only thing available for us was rice straw, bamboo and small sticks on the ground. But, again, this is not an efficient way of doing this process. Although I have a biology background and some knowledge of carrying out research experiments, this process will have many errors and variable that we will not be able to control. It’s frustrating. I wish we had an access to a laboratory where we could do our experiments and research more efficiently. Anyways, I will try to do the best that I can, and I hope that our results will not be useless.
In other news, we saved a kitten, and I feel very happy about this. We were walking to the Bamboo Villa for Max’s (a French intern) birthday bash when we heard a small but distressed cat from the jungle. It was night time. We shined a flashlight into the woods, and out crawled a tiny kitten. He was shivering from the rain and was obviously lost. We debated whether to just leave him in hopes that his mother would find him or bring him to Bamboo Villa with us. In the end, we couldn’t just leave him alone but brought him with us. For the past few days, he has been sleeping in the guys’ dorm upstairs. He is one of the most adorable cats, and people around love him so much. There was also a debate on what his name should be. I named him Dexter, but the others named him Luna. I simply did not like that name and stubbornly kept calling him Dexter. The rest of the group then decided to compromise and started calling him Lexter. Nonetheless, he will forever be named Dexter in my mind.
Today, about thirty students from Raya School arrived at the farm. They are about fourteen years old and have come to get a more hands-on experience about the work done in the farm. I was the team leader of a group of these students and today we weeded out a bed for about three hours and planted seeds. I was, however, very surprised to see that there was not much dissatisfaction and complaining amongst the young students. Instead, they kept on working diligently while the farmers looked on how they were faring. It was a job well done, I should say, and it inspired me that one should keep on doing one’s work despite some problems along the way. It also gave me some strength and optimism that persistent work is what should count more in such prolonged experiential research than any frustration I recounted earlier in this narrative!
gksummer2016 