Greenhouse, meetings, gardens, seeds

My garden, from the patio of my house. I currently have planted cilantro, carrots, radishes, brocoli, zucchini, swiss chard, onions, lettuce, and beets. Today's job is planting spinach and garlic, and Maria Elena and I are going to try planting quinoa.

Some pictures of my greenhouse. I finished it last weekend and got the plants (tomatoes and basil) in this week.
The inside view

Me by the "door." The big feathery plant is fennel,
which grows like a weed here. It's coming up all over.

The view from outside. The wires that hold up the roof are attached to rebar that sticks out from the roof of my house. My kitchen window is to the right of the photo.

In other news, the canal is now in use over its whole length! There's a bridge up in Amapolas that carries the water across the landslide in 6 in. PVC pipes. No photos, sorry, but for sure I'll bring some next time. It's quite something. We had meetings all week (the last one is today) to form directives for each sector the canal covers, so that there's someone to keep an eye on things. We also set up the schedule--people get water once a week for gravity irrigation (i.e. opening up ports in the canal and running water down the furrows). If they're using just a hose for sprinklers, they can pull water every day, because it's using so much less. Unfortunately, for a lot of people that's not possible because the water gets to them in a dirt ditch, and a hose wouldn't have the pressure you'd need. So that's something to think about--how to build tanks, etc. so that more people can use these more efficient methods.

Other than that, I also made a quick run to Riobamba Monday to get some trichoderma. As I was walking back toward the bus stop, I realized that my "strangeness meter" is way off, because normally I would find the process of getting trichoderma really odd. Basically, I call a professor at the Politechnic University there, tell him how much I need, and he tells me when I can pick it up. Then I just go to his lab--which is basically like any bio lab at Caltech, but less well funded, and some poor grad student weighs out bags of 100g each and gives them to me. Not something I can really imagine happening at Caltech, for example.

Also, we've set up meetings with a woman from the Ministry of Agriculture here to give out free seeds, which are a donation from I don't know where, as part of an "emergency plan to reactivate agriculture in the part of Bolivar affected by ashfall from Tungurahua." Which is fine, except the ashfall was a good long while ago, and agriculture is pretty well reactivated. So I'm not sure what the emergency is, exactly. But if they want to give out seeds, including vegetables, that's fine by me.

So that's how the week flew by this time.